RAF Akrotiri began on 1 July 1955, when 30 personnel were posted to what the station’s own history calls flat, dry, rocky scrubland on the windswept Akrotiri Peninsula. It grew faster than anyone had planned. By the end of August 1956 the station strength stood at 260 officers and 2,864 other ranks, which the RAF describes as a massive increase in twelve months. From caravans and mud tracks the station was laid out, roads were made, and hangars and some permanent buildings went up. Building lagged so far behind demand that 1,430 personnel were on the daily sick parade, mainly from over-crowding and insanitary conditions.

Operation Musketeer followed within months. The Imperial War Museum records that the RAF and the Fleet Air Arm began bombing Egypt on 31 October 1956, with Valiants and Canberras from Cyprus and Malta attacking airfields and Venoms striking troops, aircraft and vehicles. No. 8 Squadron’s Venoms went in at dawn on 1 November against Canal Zone airfields and the tank park at Huckstep near Cairo, and the squadron claimed 43 aircraft destroyed on the ground in two days. A ceasefire ended operational flying on 7 November.

The base was also a target at home. During the EOKA campaign a bomb in a hangar on 27 November 1957 started a fire that destroyed Canberras of Nos. 6, 13 and 73 Squadrons. The UK Serials loss register lists four Canberras by serial; the No. 6 Squadron Association records a hangar burned down and five aircraft lost. This page therefore gives 4–5 aircraft destroyed. Neither source records any casualties.

Cyprus became independent from the United Kingdom on 16 August 1960, but not all of it. Under the treaty that created the Republic, the UK kept sovereignty over two Sovereign Base Areas, Akrotiri in the west and Dhekelia in the east. The House of Commons Library puts their combined area at 98 square miles, about 3 per cent of the island. A companion treaty obliged Greece, Turkey and the UK to guarantee the independence, territorial integrity and security of Cyprus.

The bases are British territory, but they are not British towns. The UK undertook not to develop them other than for military purposes and not to create colonies, new settlements, unrelated commercial enterprises, or civilian seaports and airports. Around 10,000 Cypriots live inside the Sovereign Base Areas alongside about 3,800 military and UK-based personnel and dependants. Roughly 60 per cent of the land is privately owned, with the Ministry of Defence and the SBA Administration holding about 20 per cent each.

Those arrangements shape daily life at the station. When Cyprus joined the European Union, a protocol to its 2003 accession treaty set out how EU law applies in the bases. A separate 2003 understanding makes the Cypriot authorities responsible for migrants who arrive on base territory, and it was tested in October 2015 when boats carrying more than a hundred people landed on Akrotiri’s shore. After the drone strike of March 2026, the Cypriot government spokesman said of the bases’ status: “in this context, we are not ruling anything out.”

Through the 1960s Akrotiri was the RAF’s strike base in the eastern Mediterranean. The Near East Air Force Strike Wing flew Canberras in support of the Central Treaty Organization until the wing and No. 6 Squadron were disestablished at midnight on 10 January 1969. The station history lists Lightning, Vulcan, Hercules, Argosy and Canberra aircraft, with Whirlwind and Wessex helicopters, among the units that made the 1960s and 1970s its peak years.

The Turkish invasion of July 1974 turned the bases into a refuge. On 22 July the Foreign Secretary, James Callaghan, told the Commons that a large proportion of the British citizens on the island, with many other foreign nationals, were now concentrated in the sovereign base areas. On 30 July the Defence Secretary, Roy Mason, reported that 8,000 people, British residents and tourists of 49 nationalities, had been brought home, and that about 1,200 dependants of servicemen living outside the bases were being evacuated.

The permanent strike force did not outlast the crisis. In the Defence Review statement of 3 December 1974 Mason said: “In Cyprus we propose to make some early reductions, particularly in our air forces stationed there.” By the end of the 1980s, the station history says, only the helicopters of No. 84 Squadron remained, and Akrotiri began its life as a training, forward operating and forward mounting base. A 1990 parliamentary answer adds that a USAF U-2 had been permanently stationed there since 1974 in support of Middle East peacekeeping arrangements.

The forward mounting role was tested in July 2006, when the war in Lebanon forced the evacuation of British nationals. Warships carried evacuees from Beirut to Cyprus to be processed and flown to the UK; a government lessons-learned report puts the total at about 4,500 British nationals between 18 and 24 July. The station’s own history records more than 2,000 UK evacuees through Akrotiri on 18 and 19 July alone.

Operation Shader made Akrotiri the main operating base for British air power against the Islamic State group. On 30 September 2014 two Tornado GR4s on armed reconnaissance from the station made the first strikes of the Iraq campaign, a Paveway IV bomb on a heavy weapon position and a Brimstone missile on an armed pick-up truck. After the Commons voted 397 to 223 on 2 December 2015 to extend strikes to Syria, Tornados flew the first offensive mission there the next day.

On 14 April 2018, after the chemical attack on Douma, four Tornado GR4s took off from Akrotiri, about 315 miles from Syria, and launched eight Storm Shadow cruise missiles at a former missile base some 15 miles west of Homs, assessed to be storing chemical weapon precursors. In June 2019 the station launched the first operational F-35B Lightning sorties flown by the UK, when No. 617 Squadron jets deployed for training moved on to Shader patrols over Syria.

The station’s reach runs well beyond the Levant. On the night of 11–12 January 2024 four Typhoon FGR4s, supported by Voyager tankers, struck a drone site at Bani and the airfield at Abbs in Yemen with Paveway IV bombs, and the House of Commons Library confirms the bases were used for UK strikes on Houthi targets in January and February 2024. Those raids, and several hundred unarmed UK surveillance flights over Gaza from October 2023, brought protesters to the base gates.

The station shares its peninsula with the Akrotiri salt lake, designated a Wetland of International Importance under the Ramsar Convention on 20 March 2003. The site covers 2,171 hectares, with RAF Akrotiri on its southern edge. The JNCC information sheet calls the lake one of the very few major salt lakes in the eastern Mediterranean in semi-natural condition, and records a peak average of 6,000 greater flamingos between 1998 and 2002, about 2 per cent of the regional population.

Birds and masts have been the long-running argument. The Pluto project put up two antennas on the peninsula: Pluto I, 58 metres tall, in 1999, and Pluto II, 96 metres, in 2003. An independent international panel reporting to the Bern Convention’s Standing Committee found gaps in the original 1997 environmental assessment for Demoiselle cranes and greater flamingos. It concluded that Pluto II would have a minimal impact on the main species of concern but might increase mortality, and asked for night lighting, guy-wire markers and monitoring.

The dispute revived in 2026. In May the Kourion municipality appointed lawyers to examine an injunction against a British plan for more antennas, which the Cyprus Mail reported as 32 masts needing about 340 acres of compulsory acquisition in a protected area. In September residents protested again, and the same paper described three phases of 68, 68 and 31–34 antennas, with 18 existing ones removed. Published figures for the expansion therefore run from 32 to about 170 antennas. Residents cite cancer fears, though independent testing of the Pluto installation found emissions well below EU limits.

The first attack on the station since 1986 came a day after the US and Israel began striking Iran on 28 February 2026. At 00:03 local time on 2 March, which was 22:03 GMT on 1 March, an Iranian-made Shahed-type drone hit a hangar at RAF Akrotiri; that time difference is why British sources date the strike 1 March and Cypriot ones 2 March. Middle East Eye reported that the hangar, used by American U-2 aircraft, caught fire; the Ministry of Defence said equipment inside was undamaged. Nobody was hurt.

Cypriot officials said the drones were fired by the Iran-backed Hezbollah group in Lebanon. UK Defence Intelligence assessed from the drone’s type, range and performance that it was not launched from Iran; the Ministry of Defence pointed to a pro-Iran militia in Lebanon or western Iraq but said an investigation could not establish the launch point conclusively. The Cypriot government said two more drones heading for the base were intercepted on 2 March.

Reinforcement followed. On 3 March the Defence Secretary, John Healey, announced the Type 45 destroyer HMS Dragon and Wildcat helicopters armed with Martlet missiles for the eastern Mediterranean, with extra air defence radars and counter-drone systems. France and Greece sent ships and aircraft to help protect Cyprus. HMS Dragon was held back about a week to load ammunition, and Cyprus’s High Commissioner in London, Kyriacos Kouros, said “the people are disappointed, the people are scared”.