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The U.S.-Israeli army marketing campaign in opposition to Iran took a harmful activate March 18, 2026, with tit-for-tat strikes on crucial power infrastructure that quantity to probably the most severe regional escalation for the reason that battle started.
First, an Israeli drone strike focused services at Iran’s Asaluyeh advanced, damaging 4 vegetation that deal with gasoline from the offshore South Pars discipline, which straddles the maritime boundary between Iran and Qatar.
Tehran vowed to retaliate by hitting 5 key power targets in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Hours later, Iranian missiles brought on “in depth injury” to Ras Laffan, the center of Qatar’s power sector. Qatar’s state-owned petroleum firm stated further assaults on March 19 had focused liquefied pure gasoline services.
Separate suspected Iranian aerial assaults additionally brought on injury to grease refineries in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and led to the closure of gasoline services within the United Arab Emirates.
A lot consideration has been targeted on the seemingly unanticipated penalties of the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran and the de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz to worldwide transport. However as a scholar of the Gulf, I consider that the concentrating on of power services is near a worst-case consequence for regional states. Export revenues from oil and, in Qatar’s case, pure gasoline have remodeled the Gulf states into regional powers with international attain over the previous three many years, and that’s now in danger.
Power turns into a battlefield
The offshore gasoline discipline that lies on each side of the maritime boundary between Qatar and Iran is the world’s largest reserve of so-called nonassociated gasoline. Because of this the gasoline shouldn’t be linked to the manufacturing of crude oil and is unaffected by selections to lift or decrease output in accordance with, for instance, OPEC quotas.
The sector, generally known as the North Area on the Qatari aspect and South Pars on the Iranian aspect, was found in 1971. Growth of its huge sources started in earnest within the Nineteen Eighties. Largely due to the sector, Iran and Qatar have the second- and third-largest confirmed gasoline reserves on the planet, respectively.
Whereas Israel attacked gasoline services in southern Iran on the second day of the 12-day struggle in June 2025, oil and gasoline infrastructure was largely spared throughout that earlier battle. The opening two weeks of the present combating, nonetheless, have seen a major loosening of the restraints on concentrating on crucial infrastructure.
On March 8, Israel struck oil storage services in Tehran, beginning massive fires and blanketing the capital in plumes of smoke and poisonous, so-called black rain. For his or her half, Iranian officers signaled that power services have been on the desk as swarms of its drones focused the Shaybah oil discipline in Saudi Arabia, the Shah gasoline discipline southwest of Abu Dhabi and oil services in Fujairah.
One of many seven emirates of the United Arab Emirates together with Abu Dhabi, Fujairah is strategically positioned on the Gulf of Oman, exterior the Strait of Hormuz, with direct entry to the Indian Ocean. Because of this, it has grown into an necessary oil-loading and ship fuel-supplying hub and is the terminus for the Abu Dhabi crude oil pipeline.
Opened in 2012, that pipeline has a capability of 1.5 million barrels per day, masking greater than half of the UAE’s oil exports. Its repeated concentrating on through the struggle signifies Iranian intent to disrupt one of many two pipelines that bypass Hormuz. So far, the opposite pipeline, the East-West pipeline from the jap Saudi oil fields to the Pink Sea port of Yanbu, has not been focused.
However that would rapidly change, as early on March 19 Saudi authorities reported {that a} drone had struck a refinery at Yanbu, whereas a ballistic missile that focused the port had been intercepted.
Cascading dangers of additional power assaults
On not less than 4 events over the previous decade, most just lately in 2022, Houthi forces in Yemen – who’re allied with Iran– struck targets across the East-West pipeline.
And in 2024 and 2025, in defiance of U.S. and Israeli coverage within the area, the Houthis led a marketing campaign in opposition to transport within the Pink Sea.
To this point, the Houthis have kept away from becoming a member of the most recent struggle, however they’ve threatened to take action. Any such actions would trigger monumental further disruption to grease markets.
Nonetheless, the assault on Ras Laffan in Qatar and the broader threats to different power infrastructure within the Gulf have the potential on their very own to be catastrophic for quite a few causes.
Developed within the Nineties, the commercial metropolis of Ras Laffan is probably the most crucial cog in Qatar’s financial and power panorama and the epicenter of the most important facility for the manufacturing and export of LNG on the planet. Fourteen big LNG “trains” course of the gasoline from the North Area, which is then transported by vessels from the accompanying port to locations worldwide.
Ras Laffan additionally homes gas-to-liquids services – these convert pure gasoline into liquid petroleum merchandise – together with a refinery and water and energy vegetation that produce desalinated water and generate electrical energy. Ras Laffan is sort of merely the engine that has powered Qatar’s meteoric progress and rise as a worldwide energy dealer.
Early stories recommend that the world’s largest gas-to-liquids plant, Pearl GTL, which is operated by Shell, was broken through the first assault on Ras Laffan, and that the second assault broken 17% of Qatar’s LNG capability, with repairs projected to take three to 5 years. A 3-phased enlargement to the LNG services, which might add an additional six LNG trains by 2027, can also be prone to be delayed.
The burning Gulf state dilemma
What is obvious is that Iranian officers view the Israeli — or American — concentrating on of services of their territorial waters within the South Pars discipline as enough to justify hitting services on the Qatari aspect. That’s regardless that Qatar forcefully condemned the Israeli strike on Asaluyeh as a harmful escalation, for causes which have grow to be all too actual.
There lies the nub of the dilemma for Qatar and the 5 different Gulf states dealing with the brunt of the backlash from a struggle they tried to avert by way of diplomacy.
On my visits to the area in fall 2025, it grew to become clear that many officers within the Gulf considered the ceasefire that ended the 12-day struggle as, at greatest, a short lived cessation of hostilities and feared that the subsequent spherical of combating could be much more damaging, for Iran and for the area.
This has now come to cross. An embattled authorities in Tehran that sees itself in an existential combat for survival has unfold the price of struggle as far and as huge as it will probably.
Officers statements from Gulf capitals which have persistently – and appropriately – emphasised their direct noninvolvement within the U.S.-Israeli army marketing campaign have fallen on deaf ears in Tehran.
An incident on March 2 that noticed Qatar down two Iranian Soviet-era fighters was a defensive measure. The jets had entered Qatari airspace with the obvious intent to strike Al Udeid, the air base that homes the ahead headquarters of U.S. Central Command.
Nonetheless, the scope of Iran’s assaults has gone far past army services utilized by U.S. forces and have hit the sectors – journey, tourism and sporting occasions – that put the area so firmly on the worldwide map.
Nowhere is that this extra the case than the power sector that has underwritten and made attainable the transformation of the Gulf states over the previous half-century, and whose well being stays important to the worldwide economic system and provide chains in oil, gasoline and lots of spinoff merchandise.
If that sector stays firmly within the crosshairs, there’s no telling how intense the regional and international penalties of the continuing struggle in Iran could show to be.
By Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, Fellow for the Center East on the Baker Institute, Rice College
This text is republished from The Dialog below a Artistic Commons license. Learn the authentic article.
Featured picture by محمدعلی برنو | Avash Media (Artistic Commons Attribution 4.0 license)
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