Dhahran was the first big American military construction project in Saudi Arabia. Wikipedia records that the US was authorised in 1944 to build an air base here and that the work, begun in 1945, was finished only in 1946 — too late for the Second World War logistics that had justified it. The agreement used the words “air field” because Washington knew how sensitive Riyadh was to anything that looked like a foreign base. Dhahran had already felt the war once: on 19 October 1940 Italian bombers raiding Bahrain also struck Dhahran, causing minimal damage.

The Cold War gave the field its real value. By 1949, according to Wikipedia, Dhahran was the only airfield in the region that could take the US Air Force’s B-29s. The original three-year agreement was renegotiated in 1948, renewed on 18 June 1951 and renewed again on 2 April 1957, when Washington also pledged construction support and military training, the origin of the United States Military Training Mission. The US Army’s official construction history lists a large building programme at the Dhahran airfield by September 1951. The United States gave up control in 1962.

For almost four decades Dhahran was mainly a civil airport. Minoru Yamasaki designed its terminal in 1959; it opened in 1961, and the airport took the name Dhahran International. Aramco’s newspaper reported in 1979 that a new international terminal, built for more than two million passengers a year, opened on 21 November that year and that work had begun to lengthen the two main runways for wide-bodied jets.

In 1999 King Fahd International Airport opened near Dammam and all scheduled flights left Dhahran. The field was renamed King Abdulaziz Air Base and became a purely military aerodrome of the Royal Saudi Air Force. Wikipedia’s infobox lists two parallel runways of 3,660 m and 3,600 m and a cross runway of 2,150 m. Which RSAF squadrons fly here today is not published by the air force; Wikipedia’s lists draw on an enthusiast database and are not repeated.

When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Dhahran was the obvious place to put fighters: close to the border, with long runways and a port nearby. The US 1st Tactical Fighter Wing began deploying its 27th and 71st Squadrons on 7 August; Wikipedia counts 48 F-15s and 4,207 sorties patrolling the Kuwaiti and Iraqi border before the air war started on 17 January 1991, and 2,564 more during Desert Storm. An RAF Tornado GR1 detachment from No. 31 Squadron arrived in January 1991.

The base also drew Iraqi Scuds. On the evening of 25 February 1991 a Patriot battery at Dhahran failed to track an incoming missile, which hit a US Army barracks and killed 28 Americans. The General Accounting Office found the cause a year later: a timing error that grew the longer the system ran; the battery had been operating continuously for over 100 hours. Wikipedia identifies the dead as soldiers of the 14th Quartermaster Detachment, a Pennsylvania reserve unit; it was the coalition’s largest single loss of life in the war.

After 1991 American aircraft stayed for Operation Southern Watch over southern Iraq, and their crews lived in Khobar Towers, a housing complex near the base. On the night of 25 June 1996 a truck bomb exploded outside it, killing 19 US Air Force personnel and wounding 498 people of many nationalities. A US federal indictment of 2001 charged 13 members of Saudi Hizballah; a US court ruled in 2006 that Iran and Hezbollah were responsible; Iran denied it. Wikipedia also records claims of al-Qaeda involvement. Dhahran handled the evacuation of more than 6,000 Americans, and US operations moved inland to Prince Sultan Air Base.

The base came back into the news in 2026. In April, during the war with Iran, Riyadh confirmed the arrival at King Abdulaziz airbase of a Pakistani military force including fighter and support aircraft, deployed under the Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement of September 2025, according to Al Jazeera. Neither government published numbers or types.