LONDON — British police evacuated homes and arrested several men on suspicion of explosives offenses on Sunday near an air base which the United States Air Force had been using to facilitate strikes on Iran.
Page A13From§Eachthe sunrise edition — 27 September 2026
Men arrested for explosives near base flying Iran strikes, weeks after Washington cleared 20,000 more bombs
As it ran on the front
Sunday morning, Gloucestershire. Bomb disposal units roll up to an air base that has spent since February flying American strikes on Iran, and British police start arresting men on suspicion of explosives offences. Properties get evacuated — a street here, another there, the specifics still coming in as of filing. Vehicles get searched. The wire calls it a "major incident." That is the whole of what happened Sunday. What it rhymes with is the part worth sitting with.
In 2019, it was a base at Baledogle, Somalia — the one U.S. forces used to stage against al-Shabaab — stormed with two car bombs and gunfire while, the same day, an Italian peacekeeping convoy in Mogadishu took a suicide bombing that leveled a vehicle and cracked open the buildings around it. No injuries, the press releases said, which is its own kind of headline. Different countries, different targets, same shape: the places where Western militaries keep their planes and ships draw this kind of attention, on a schedule nobody in a position to stop it seems able to read in advance.…
…(cont) Also in 2015, an Iraqi Air Force jet came back from a bombing run against ISIL and dropped one of its own bombs on Baghdad by accident, killing at least seven civilians in the homes underneath it. American officials, asked about it, noted that something like 65 percent of Iraqi bombers weren't finding targets to drop on at all. That's the ledger on the other side of this business: sometimes the ordnance lands on the wrong people because someone missed, and sometimes it's sold on purpose in quantities that guarantee it'll land on somebody.
Which gets us to September 15th, twelve days before Sunday's arrests: the Trump administration moving on a $2.8 billion sale to Israel, tens of thousands of 2,000-pound bombs, the MK-84 and the BLU-117 and the I-2000 penetrator among them — the same weight class already logged in some of the deadliest strikes the U.S.-backed campaigns have run on Gaza and Lebanon. A base gets evacuated for explosives someone else brought. The invoice for a great many more of them clears the same month. Nobody at the fence line gets to see both documents at once. We just did.
“You arrest a guy for having explosives near the airfield, and three weeks earlier your own government signed off on twenty thousand more of them for somebody else's airfield — that's not two stories, that's the same warehouse with two doors. Nobody's asking why the stuff that gets a man in handcuffs on a Sunday is the same stuff we ship by the pallet on a Tuesday. The base doesn't care whose hands are on it; it just keeps being the place where this ends up.”
“Look, these are unrelated matters — a domestic security incident and a foreign military sale, apples and, and munitions, whatever the fruit is for bombs. The base has robust protocols, that's why they caught it, that's a success story if you think about it. Did I just call an evacuation a success story? That's not — let's move on.”
The receipts
The Gloucestershire Police force says “a number of properties” are being evacuated.
British police announced on Sunday morning that several people were arrested "on suspicion of offenses under the explosives act" close to an air base hosting U.S. forces.
The air base has been used by U.S. forces involved in targeting Iran since the start of the war in February.
· Islamist militants launch two attacks against foreign forces in Somalia. A U.S. military base in Baledogle, Lower Shabelle, is stormed by attackers using two car bombs and guns, and an Italian peaceke from the morgue, 30 Sep 2019
· Australian police in Sydney arrest two men who, police say, were planning attacks on locations such as naval bases and police headquarters. New South Wales Deputy Police Commissioner Catherine Burn sa from the morgue, 23 Dec 2015
· An Iraqi Air Force Sukhoi Su-25 jet, returning from a bombing raid against ISIL militants in the north, accidentally drops a bomb on Baghdad destroying several homes and killing at least 7 civilians. from the morgue, 6 Jul 2015
· Trump Plans Massive Sale of 2,000-Pound Bombs to Israel, Which Keeps Using Them to Massacre Gazans from the morgue, 15 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.