type: timeline_event
On March 20, 2026, Iranian drones struck Kuwait's Mina al-Ahmadi refinery — the country's largest oil processing facility with a capacity of 730,000 barrels per day — for the second consecutive day. Multiple processing units caught fire during the attacks, which coincided with Eid al-Fitr celebrations across the Muslim world. The timing of the strikes during the holiest period of the Islamic calendar drew particular condemnation from Gulf Arab states.
The attacks on Mina al-Ahmadi were part of Iran's broader retaliatory campaign against Gulf energy infrastructure that had escalated dramatically following Israel's strike on the South Pars gas field on March 18. Iran's strategy of targeting the oil and gas infrastructure of Gulf states that hosted U.S. military bases was designed to impose cascading economic costs and pressure regional governments to distance themselves from the American-led campaign.
Kuwait's position was particularly sensitive. The country had attempted to maintain a lower profile in the conflict than the UAE or Bahrain, and did not host the same concentration of U.S. military assets. But its geography — sitting directly between Iraq and Saudi Arabia on the Persian Gulf's western shore — made its energy infrastructure vulnerable to Iranian strikes, and the IRGC appeared to be systematically expanding the scope of its targeting to encompass all Gulf producers.
The refinery fires burned for hours before emergency crews brought them under partial control. Kuwait Petroleum Corporation declared force majeure on certain export contracts, joining Qatar and the UAE in a growing list of Gulf energy producers whose output had been materially disrupted by Iranian attacks. The cumulative effect of strikes across the Gulf was removing millions of barrels per day of processing and export capacity from the global market at a time when alternative supply routes were already strained by the Hormuz closure.