strike on the US Embassy<\/a> early on Tuesday also caused \u201cminor material damage\u201d to the compound, the Defence Ministry said in a statement, while there were reports later that more drones were targeting the site amid Iran\u2019s retaliation across the Gulf to US-Israeli attacks.<\/p>\nRecommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of list<\/p>\n
US President \u2060Donald Trump \u2060told the NewsNation media outlet that the US response to the embassy attack and the killing of several American service members would soon be made clear. \u201cYou\u2019ll find out soon,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Black smoke was \u2060seen rising over Riyadh\u2019s Diplomatic Quarter, which houses foreign missions, after the attack, the Reuters news agency reported .<\/p>\n
Three people told Reuters that a loud blast was heard and flames were seen at the embassy, though the Saudi Defence Ministry and one of the sources told the news agency that the fire in the aftermath of the drone attack was small in scale.<\/p>\n
The embassy building was empty at the time of the attack, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters, and there were no reports of casualties.<\/p>\n
A source close to the Saudi military, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the AFP news agency that air defences had intercepted four drones targeting Riyadh\u2019s Diplomatic Quarter in the attack.<\/p>\n
\u2018Utterly unprecedented\u2019<\/p>\n
Al Jazeera\u2019s Mike Hanna, reporting from Washington, DC, said the US president\u2019s behaviour \u2013 providing only snippets of commentary to individual news organisations, as in the case of the embassy attack \u2013 was \u201cunprecedented\u201d at a time when the country was engaged in a major conflict.<\/p>\n
\u201cSince this conflict began, he\u2019s been phoning up individual reporters, dropping little nuggets of information,\u201d Hanna said, adding that the US public has received very little information from the president about the conflict.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is utterly unprecedented in terms of how a president conducts himself in a time of conflict, and that is a question that the American public \u2013 a large degree of the American public \u2013 are going to be pondering in the days and weeks and, indeed, months ahead,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Earlier on Tuesday, the US Embassy issued \u2060a \u201cshelter in place\u201d notice to US citizens in the Saudi Arabian cities of Riyadh, Jeddah and Dhahran amid the attacks.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe recommend American citizens in the Kingdom shelter in place immediately and avoid the Embassy until further notice due to an attack on the facility. The US Mission to Saudi Arabia continues to monitor the regional situation,\u201d the embassy said.<\/p>\n
Attacks on Bahrain<\/p>\n
Separately on Tuesday, Iran\u2019s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) targeted a United States air base in Bahrain, the Islamic republic\u2019s elite force said in a statement carried on Tuesday by the official IRNA news agency.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe IRGC announced that\u2026 its naval forces carried out a large-scale drone and missile attack at dawn on the US air base in the Sheikh Isa area of Bahrain,\u201d IRNA posted on Telegram, using the acronym for Iran\u2019s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.<\/p>\n
The force said in its statement that 20 drones and three missiles were launched, \u201cdestroying the base\u2019s main command headquarters,\u201d without providing evidence.<\/p>\n
Tehran\u2019s latest claimed attack came after its military launched salvos across the Gulf region in retaliation for US and Israeli strikes on Iran that began on Saturday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Saudi Defence Ministry says fire broke out at the embassy, but the diplomatic compound sustained only \u2018minor\u2019 damage.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":510976,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[8721,43,5897,163627,1259,14207,44,13341,41,39,42,40,772,1690,8725],"class_list":["post-510975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-conflict","tag-headlines","tag-iran","tag-israel-iran-conflict","tag-middle-east","tag-military","tag-news","tag-saudi-arabia","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-united-states","tag-us-canada","tag-weapons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=510975"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510975\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/510976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=510975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=510975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=510975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}