Iran war: Saudi Arabia, UAE and Kuwait report attacks
Newshour
BBC
4.2 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 15 March 2026
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait all reported attacks overnight, with air defences working to intercept them, though the frequency is much less than in the early days of the conflict. Earlier the Iranians urged the UAE to evacuate the port zones of Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Fujairah. We hear about Iran's strategy. Also in the programme: Pakistan accuses the Afghan Taliban of crossing a red line by launching drones into its airspace; and how an Oscar-nominee picked a fight with the worlds of ballet and opera. (Photo: Smoke rises in the Fujairah oil industry zone, caused by debris after interception of a drone by air defences, according to the Fujairah media office, during the US/Israel conflict with Iran. Fujairah, United Arab Emirates, March 14, 2026. Credit: Reuters)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:08.5 | Hello and welcome to NewsHour from the World Service of the BBC, live from London. |
| 0:14.3 | This is Owen Bennett Jones, the Oscar-nominated actor. Timotei Shalamey has created a bit of a stir by saying that audiences don't |
| 0:22.1 | care about ballet or opera. So later in the program, we'll put that to a former principal dancer |
| 0:28.0 | of the Royal Ballet here in London. And we'll hear from a very rich energy company boss about what |
| 0:34.2 | his friend, Donald Trump's war, means for him and the US economy. |
| 0:39.3 | But first, while many Iranians are worrying about the attacks coming into the country, |
| 0:44.5 | and there have been many more today from Israel, |
| 0:47.1 | others around the world are focused on Iran's closure of that vital stretch of water, |
| 0:52.1 | the strait of Hormuz. |
| 0:53.9 | The problem gets bigger day by day. |
| 0:56.7 | Around a thousand tankers are now stuck, and the Americans seem unable to deal with this themselves. |
| 1:03.1 | They have asked for help from other countries to open the straits. So, when will it be opened? |
| 1:09.3 | And even if some tankers get through, how sustainable will that be? |
| 1:13.9 | I'm joined now by Alessio Patalano, Professor of War and Strategy in East Asia at King's College, London University. |
| 1:22.6 | Thank you, Professor, for being with us. |
| 1:25.1 | Just tell us, first of all, I'm a bit unclear. Have the Iranians got mines in the |
| 1:30.7 | strait now? Good afternoon. That's an excellent question to begin with, because yes, we know that |
| 1:37.3 | in terms of stockpile of mines, they have anything in between 5,000 to 6,000 mines, which for the shape, the size of the Strait of |
| 1:47.6 | Ramos, it's a lot of minds. It could be creating a very substantive problem. But at the moment, |
| 1:53.9 | what we know is also that there's about less than a dozen that are currently already deployed. |
| 2:00.1 | And the only sort of type of mind that we don't know about is sea floor mines, |
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