UK’s Cyprus military base comes under attack amid Middle East war

2026-03-02 - 15:03

Britain’s foreign minister said the strike on the Royal Air Force base at Akrotiri hit the airport runway. (AFP pic) AKROTIRI: A British military base on Cyprus came under attack by an unmanned drone today amid the US-Israeli war with Iran, as authorities issued evacuation orders for the surrounding area. An Iranian drone hit the runway of the UK’s Akrotiri air force base just hours after UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Britain would not join the offensive against Iran. “The area around the Mediterranean island base and an airport in western Cyprus were evacuated,” the Cypriot interior ministry said. “Following information received from the National Guard, instructions were issued for the evacuation of the Akrotiri Municipal District and Paphos Airport,” the ministry said on X. It came after two drones headed towards the Akrotiri base were also intercepted earlier today. Families of air force personnel there were evacuated, the UK defence ministry told AFP, although the base continued to operate as normal. The damage had been “minimal” and there were no casualties, officials added. Runway hit Greece, meanwhile, said it was sending two frigates and two F-16 fighter jets to Cyprus. Greece would assist Cyprus in “countering threats and illegal actions on its territory”, its defence ministry said. Defence minister Nikos Dendias also indicated he would travel to Cyprus on Tuesday Britain’s foreign minister Yvette Cooper said the strike on the Royal Air Force base at Akrotiri, a British overseas territory near the southern coastal city of Limassol, hit the “airport runway”. Cyprus President Nikos Christodoulides said the incident just after midnight (10pm) involved “a Shahed unmanned aerial vehicle”. UK ‘not at war’ Cooper said the government was “working on every possible option” to help its nationals in the region return home if needed. “There’s an estimated 300,000 British citizens in Gulf countries that have now been targeted by Iran, including countries where now airspace is closed,” she told Sky News. More than 100,000 UK nationals had so far registered their presence in the region, she said. UK Middle East minister Hamish Falconer insisted the nation was “not at war”. “Let me be really clear: the UK took a deliberate decision not to be part of the first wave of strikes conducted by the US and Israeli governments. “But in the face of reckless attacks from Iran... we took the decision, as the Prime Minister announced last night, to support the US’s request to use our bases in order to conduct defensive actions,” he added. Iraq mistakes Starmer announced late on Sunday that he had agreed to a US request to use British bases for “specific and limited defensive purpose” having previously taken a “deliberate” decision not to be involved. He said that the mistakes of the Iraq war had been “learned”. The initial decision not to back the US attracted the ire of US President Donald Trump who said he had been “very disappointed” in Starmer’s reaction. Trump, in an exclusive interview with The Daily Telegraph described the prime minister’s later decision to allow the use of bases on specific grounds as “useful” but said it “too far too much time”. Any potential military action in the Middle East is politically sensitive in the UK following former prime minister Tony Blair’s disastrous support for the US-led invasion of Iraq. Rosa Freedman, an expert on international law and conflicts at the University of Reading, however, told AFP the current situation was “materially different” from the war in Iraq in 2003. Evie Aspinall, director of the British Foreign Policy Group think-tank added that the UK would not want to be “seen as a key party in this conflict”. “Hence allowing defensive not offensive strikes, although the difference between the two is, in practice, often very minimal,” she said.