MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
On this sixth day of war between Iran and Israel and the United States - in that time, thousands of bombs have been dropped on Iran, and the conflict has begun to widen. Iran has struck back at Israel, also at targets in Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Azerbaijan, Dubai. That last one, Dubai, is where I found NPR international correspondent Aya Batrawy. She joined me and NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman on our weekly national security podcast, Sources & Methods. And Aya is not just covering a conflict that seems to grow with each passing day, she's living in the middle of it.
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KELLY: Has it changed your daily life in any way, Aya?
AYA BATRAWY, BYLINE: Yeah. I mean, schools are canceled. That's for one. I mean, there's been all-remote learning, and then they've moved up spring break, so all kids are home now. But the government has been really keen to try to get things back to feeling normal - has sent out messages that we should resume normal activities because they have been very, very successful at intercepting the vast majority of those missiles and drones. That said, people are still deciding to shelter in place. A lot of people have been reaching out to me - 'cause they know I'm a journalist, they know I'm across a lot of information - to ask me what they should do. A lot of people are thinking about leaving.
And I want to bring your attention, Mary Louise, to one particular attack in the midst of all these attacks that have happened, which hit an Amazon data center, and it didn't get a lot of attention. But it actually disrupted life. Like, I can't pay my phone bill. I can't pay my internet bill. You know, there's real concern about water desalination plants, electricity grids and also e-banking. Because if any of those are hit, this place will come to a complete standstill. It is not equipped for that kind of thing.
KELLY: I wonder - I mean, part of the thinking of hosting U.S. bases in the region is that it's supposed to make the region safer to have a U.S. footprint - U.S. troops, U.S. facilities. Are any conversation starting about, should the Gulf rethink this?
BATRAWY: Yeah. The idea of having, let's say, the Al Udeid air base hosts 10,000-plus U.S. troops in Qatar, for example, or the U.S. Navy's fifth fleet in Bahrain, was - it was supposed to, yes, provide protection and be a counterweight or a counterbalance to those threats from Iran or potentially other, you know, countries and actors in the region. But what we've seen is a lot of radars being hit. We've seen already six, you know, service members killed in Kuwait, where there are U.S. troops.
So we're seeing these attacks on these countries because they host U.S. troops and because they host U.S. forces that are actively now at war with Iran and have made very clear from the assassination of Khamenei that this is about regime change. This is not about diplomacy or trying to bring Iran back to the negotiating table when you take out its supreme leader. This is about regime change and fomenting the kind of chaos that really is going to ricochet across the region as we're seeing.
TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: And could I just quickly - we're not getting a lot of information about the strikes on U.S. facilities in Bahrain and Qatar. We're getting information from commercial satellite photos, not from the Pentagon, not from the State Department. And I think that's a real concern. They're giving a lot of detail about what targets are hitting in Iran but not what is being hit in Bahrain, Qatar and also the Emirates.
KELLY: Well, and we know that a lot of the incoming Iranian missiles are being intercepted. Can the U.S. and U.S. allies keep that up forever?
BOWMAN: They cannot, despite what the president said and what officials have said. I'm told - by talking to U.S. officials - that there's a real concern in the coming weeks, maybe even sooner, you may have to dip into inventories in the Pacific command to get more of these interceptor missiles. It's a huge, huge concern. And they think that maybe the Iranians are holding back on shooting some of their missiles because they know that the U.S. is running low on interceptors. The other thing, Mary Louise, is this. Another major concern right now are the Shahed drones...
KELLY: Yeah.
BOWMAN: ...That hit that facility in Kuwait, that Aya was just talking about, killing six U.S. service members, and I'm told wounding as many as 18 more. So they expect that death toll, unfortunately, to rise. They're very hard to detect. They're small. They're fast. They can evade radar. So that's a continued threat that people are really worried about. And get this - Ukraine is now reaching out to the U.S. and saying, you know, we can help you with those Shahed drones because we've been fighting them for the past four years. So keep an eye on that.
KELLY: One more facet to talk through, Aya, and it's the economic one. We know that global oil markets are being hugely disrupted. Gas markets - a lot of the world's oil and gas comes from the Middle East, transits through the Middle East, through the Strait of Hormuz. What is the latest?
BATRAWY: You're right. And not only is the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed because shipping companies don't want to take the risk of sending their ships, their crew members and all their cargo through that, regardless of Trump suggesting, you know, there could be some insurance covered for that or that, you know, U.S. Naval ships could escort through that strait.
We're also seeing - you know, already Qatar's gas production has been halted now for most of the week because of attacks from those drones and missiles, as well as Saudi Arabia's largest oil refinery also has suspended production now for most of the week because of those strikes. And even though they haven't hit, they've caused fires - the debris - so they've had to shut down. And this is even ricocheting all the way to Iraq because Iraq had to suspend oil production on its biggest oil field because it doesn't have ships to put the oil on because those ships are stuck in the Strait of Hormuz.
But what I want to tell you also is don't forget these Arab Gulf countries - they have invested billions of dollars in Trump's family, whether that's cryptocurrency fund, whether that is Trump real estate projects or whether that is in Jared Kushner's private equity fund. There have been billions of dollars from these Gulf Arab leaders and their sovereign wealth funds that they oversee into Trump's family businesses. And interestingly, today, a very senior Emirati real estate developer - a very well-known one named Al Habtoor, Khalaf Ahmad Al Habtoor - he wrote a direct message to President Trump on X, in which he said, a direct question - who gave you the authority to drag our region into a war with Iran? And on what basis did you make this dangerous escalation? He says, did you consider how this would create suffering in the countries of the region? So what I want to tell you is that there's a real feeling here that the region is stuck between Prime Minister Netanyahu and his far-right government in Israel, and the Iranian clerical regime, you know, across the Persian Gulf waters.
KELLY: That's NPR's Aya Batrawy and Tom Bowman. They joined me for Sources & Methods, NPR's national security podcast. You can listen to the entire episode wherever you find your podcasts. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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