Wajeed Lion, on May 12th Substack, explained the Israeli covert “Third Circle” strategy. Here are some extracts:

Satellite imagery, ground battle reports, and electronic signals confirm that Israel built a secret military base in Iraq’s western Nukhayb desert at coordinates 31.66697°N, 42.44864°E. The base was designed to support Israel’s “Third Circle” strategy—a plan to fight distant enemies directly. During the February 2026 air campaign against Iran, this secret facility served as a vital refueling and rescue hub, allowing Israeli jets and helicopters to reach Iranian targets much faster. For a brief period, an unwritten truce kept the base hidden, as all countries involved quietly ignored it to avoid a larger war. This silence shattered on March 4, when Israeli forces guarding the site clashed with an Iraqi army patrol. The battle killed one Iraqi soldier, injured two, and sparked a major political crisis in Baghdad.

Operation Rising Lion:

Israel tested this theory during the “12-Day War” of June 2025, codenamed “Operation Rising Lion.” Israeli jets successfully destroyed roughly 80 Iranian air defense batteries. However, the operation exposed a major weakness: the extreme danger posed to Israeli pilots flying far beyond the reach of rescue helicopters. When operations flared up again in late February 2026 with “Operation Epic Fury,” Israel realized that hunting mobile Iranian missile launchers required a staging ground much closer to the target. The empty western Iraqi desert offered the perfect, if dangerous, solution.

Use of radar jamming:

Satellite photos from the area, a dry lakebed 70 kilometers from the Saudi Arabian border, show exactly how Israel built this site.

Israel quickly graded a 1.7-kilometer dirt runway. This specific length is the exact requirement for heavy military transport planes, like the C-130J Super Hercules, to land in rough conditions. These heavy planes brought in specialized rescue personnel from the Israeli Air Force’s Unit 669. They also dropped off collapsible fuel bladders to create a Forward Area Refueling Point (FARP). This allowed Israeli helicopters to land, refuel, and wait closer to Iran without relying on vulnerable mid-air refueling tankers. Finally, the transport planes brought in the massive electronic jamming systems needed to hide the base from the outside world.

The Electronic Shield and Blinding Iraqi Radar

To remain undetected by the Iraqi government, Israel had to hijack the local electromagnetic spectrum. In the days leading up to the conflict, commercial aviation networks detected massive interference over Baghdad. Civil aviation groups, including the Italian aviation authority and the ICAO, warned pilots to expect severe GPS jamming, fake GPS signals (spoofing), and forced radar changes in western Iraq.

This interference matched the exact flight path Israeli jets and rescue helicopters used to cross into Iran. The GPS spoofing was so intense that local delivery apps failed and civilian drones refused to fly. While Iraqi media blamed temporary election security measures, the sheer scale of the blackout points directly to military-grade jamming equipment.

Israel likely deployed the Scorpius-G, a powerful ground-based radar jammer built by Israel Aerospace Industries. This system shoots invisible, targeted beams of energy to blind enemy communications, drones, and radars. This electronic shield explains why Iraqi military radar failed to spot the base. Some Iraqi politicians later claimed the United States ordered the radars shut down, but the truth is that Israeli jamming equipment blinded them.

A shepherd spotted the military base and would seem to have reported what he saw:

Before the shepherd spotted the base, the situation functioned smoothly because everyone benefited from pretending it did not exist. Israel got a secure rescue hub. The Iraqi government kept up the illusion that it fully controlled its borders, which kept radical militias from attempting to overthrow the Prime Minister. The U.S. avoided a fight between its ally (Israel) and its host (Iraq). Iran avoided having to launch a direct, costly attack into the Iraqi desert.

The shepherd’s discovery broke this silence, forcing everyone into a dangerous political game. To survive domestic anger, the Iraqi government filed UN complaints against generic foreign forces—a cheap political move that avoided an unwinnable war with Israel. Israel used deadly force to secure its escape, a costly move that exposed the base to the world and turned the Iraqi army permanently hostile. Iran escalated by pushing proxy militias to bomb U.S. bases. The U.S. scrambled to contain the damage, publicly denying involvement while issuing severe warnings to Baghdad to stay out of the area.

https://wajeehlion.substack.com/p/clandestine-israeli-infrastructure