Kuwait Downs Drones as US Weighs Strikes on Iranian Oil

Kuwaiti air defences shot down hostile drones over the north of the country and over the island of Bubiyan in the early hours of Saturday, the Kuwait Defence Ministry announced. Hours later the White House said President Donald Trump was weighing a new round of strikes on Iran, this time against its energy infrastructure. Serbia buys crude at world prices and imports it through the Adriatic pipeline, so every new turn around the Strait of Hormuz reaches the domestic pump too, with a lag of a few weeks.

What was actually hit in Kuwait

The ministry spokesman, Colonel Saud Al Atwan, said the drones targeted state facilities in northern Kuwait and vehicles belonging to a private company on Bubiyan island. Falling debris caused material damage. Nobody was hurt.

Bubiyan is an uninhabited island at the far north of Kuwaiti waters, next to the Iraqi border and the approach to Basra. This is the second confirmed episode in a short span: we reported earlier on Iranian drones over American bases in Kuwait, and that time the targets were military installations rather than state facilities and civilian vehicles.

Refineries on the target list this weekend

The White House said the president was considering fresh strikes, while the Wall Street Journal and CBS reported that attacks on Iranian energy infrastructure were being prepared as early as this weekend, possibly alongside Israel. Officials cautioned that the scope and the target set had not been settled and that the operation could still be called off, the standard hedge when a decision is still being weighed.

Trump told reporters:

We’ll be hitting him very hard and, you know, at some point they’re going to say, “We just can’t take it anymore.”

On the Iranian side of the talks he was blunter: “They do lie, and they do misrepresent. They always want to talk, but they break their word.” He named his negotiating team as Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, adviser Jared Kushner, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The line-up is political rather than diplomatic: not one member is a career non-proliferation negotiator.

Why the Strait of Hormuz is a risk point again

Off the coast of Oman, at the approach to the strait, two separate tanker incidents were reported, with no attacker officially established.

• The first vessel took engine room damage some 11 nautical miles northeast of Limah after being struck by an unidentified projectile, and was left unable to manoeuvre.
• The second reported a loud explosion and a splash in the water about 21 nautical miles northeast of Khasab.
• The British maritime agency UKMTO advised ships in that corridor to exercise caution.

US Central Command published a tally of the naval blockade imposed in mid-July: 30 commercial vessels rerouted, two ships disabled, two boarded for compliance checks, and roughly 30 vessels cleared for humanitarian passage. The figures show the blockade has stopped being an announcement and become a routine, with cargo screened before it enters the strait.

What Tehran is preparing

A senior Iranian security official told the Tasnim agency that Tehran has retaliation plans ready covering Israeli infrastructure and American energy installations across the region. If Washington does hit refineries and power plants, that logic points to an Iranian response aimed at production in the Gulf states, not only at American bases.

Kuwait has its own calculation to make. It has held the position of a host to American forces that does not fight its own war, yet two waves of drones over its territory within days narrow that ground. The next step that can be named is the decision on the scale of the strikes, and it falls this weekend.