For four months, one of Europe’s larger air forces was fighting a quiet air-defence campaign over the Arabian Peninsula — and almost nobody noticed. Since the second half of March 2026, Italy has kept Eurofighter Typhoons, an early-warning aircraft and a web of radars and missile batteries deployed across Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain, helping shield the Gulf monarchies from Iranian drones and ballistic missiles.

The mission is called Task Force Air – Arabia. It was never formally secret — the Italian Ministry of Defence even maintains a page describing it — but it stayed comfortably out of the headlines until Italian journalist Fausto Biloslavo laid out its full scope in Il Giornale at the end of July, and open-source trackers pieced together months of Italian aircraft movements over the Red Sea.

A task force hidden in plain sight

The reveal came not from a leak but from patient plane-spotting. The open-source monitoring group itamilradar had logged Italian Air Force flights shuttling in and out of western Saudi Arabia for months before Rome’s political opposition forced the deployment into the open and drew a public defence from the government.

According to the Ministry of Defence, the contingent numbers roughly 400 Italian Air Force personnel spread across the three host nations, commanded by an Air Force Colonel. Biloslavo’s reporting puts the total Italian footprint — air and land — at more than 700.

Five task groups, one mission

Task Force Air – Arabia is built from five specialised task groups, each doing a distinct job in the layered defence of Gulf airspace. Task Group Argo flies the E-550A CAEW, the Gulfstream-based airborne early-warning and command aircraft that stitches the whole air picture together. Task Group Typhoon fields four Eurofighter F-2000A Typhoons to police the assigned airspace.

Behind the jets sit the enablers: Task Group Medal with C-130J and KC-130J transports for tactical airlift and medevac; Task Group Kuwait, running an AN/TPS-77 air-defence radar and propping up the Kuwait Air Force; and Task Group C-UAS, armed with the ACUS-E system built to swat down the small one-way attack drones that have become the signature weapon of this conflict.

The Italian Army adds a second layer under the banner Task Force Land – Arabia — around 300 soldiers, half of them in Saudi Arabia. Biloslavo reports it brings a SAMP/T battery for ballistic and air defence, a KRONOS radar in Saudi Arabia and another in Bahrain, and a Skynex gun system positioned in the UAE.

Why Al Taif

The Italian jets fly from Al Taif, officially King Fahd Air Base, in the mountains of western Saudi Arabia near the Red Sea coast. The location is deliberate. It sits far beyond the reach of most Iranian one-way attack drones launched from the east, yet remains close enough for the Typhoons to surge toward threatened airspace. It is also home to Royal Saudi Air Force Eurofighters — a natural fit for an Italian F-2000 detachment that already shares the type, the spares and the tactics.

A price already paid

The deployment has not been bloodless. When Iran struck Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait on Mar. 15, 2026, four Italian F-2000s were on the ramp. The attack destroyed an Italian Air Force MQ-9A Reaper and damaged one of the Typhoons. Three of the fighters were flown back to Italy in the days that followed; the fate of the fourth has never been publicly clarified.

That single night is the reason Rome pushed its jets west to Taif and thickened the missile shield behind them. Italy’s Gulf war has been quiet — but for the crews flying presence patrols over the desert, it has been very real.

Sources: Italian Ministry of Defence; Fausto Biloslavo / Il Giornale; itamilradar; Reuters; The Aviationist; Militarnyi.