PHILADELPHIA – September 14, 2026 – The Middle East Forum today launched the MEF Geospatial Intelligence Unit, a standing program that uses satellite data to check official accounts of attacks and other conflict events in the Middle East against the physical record. The unit’s first report, “Where the East-West Pipeline Actually Burned,” by MEF executive director Gregg Roman, is published today at meforum.org.
The report examines the September 10 drone attack on Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline, the 1,200-kilometer (~746 miles) line from Abqaiq to Yanbu on the Red Sea that the kingdom built in 1981 to move crude around the Strait of Hormuz. Brent crude crossed $100 that day. Baghdad traced the launches to Maysan province on the Iranian border and dismissed the commander of its Maysan Operations Command. Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Energy placed the attacks in the Medina and Riyadh regions and shut the line as a precautionary measure. The first 24 hours of open-source commentary counted every hot pixel near the pipeline as damage.
Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Energy placed the attacks in the Medina and Riyadh regions and shut the line as a precautionary measure.
The satellite record is narrower. MEF found seven new fire sites, all on one 110-kilometer (~68 miles) segment of the line southeast of Medina, and no new fire anywhere on the eastern half of the line, including the Riyadh region. The worst damage is at a pump station in a fenced compound about 700 meters (~ 2,300 feet) across. Satellites first detected it burning at 13:09 local time on September 10, at 61 megawatts of radiative power, and it burned for at least 13 hours. A 10-meter (~33 feet) optical frame acquired on September 12 shows a soot and burn scar of about 12 hectares (~ 30 acres) across the compound. Two of the other fires are at installations east of the station that read as relief pits, consistent with emergency burn-offs; the four to the west burned at low power and only on night passes.
From Amarah, the capital of Maysan, to the burning pump station is about 1,100 kilometers (~684 miles) in a straight line, roughly 800 (~497 miles) of them inside Saudi airspace. Among the Iranian-designed one-way attack drones in regional use, the report finds that the Shahed 136 covers that distance with margin and the smaller Shahed 131 does not.
The unit works from three sources: thermal detections from the VIIRS instruments on the Suomi NPP and NOAA-20 satellites, which record any 375-meter (~1,230 feet) pixel hotter than its surroundings on every pass; 10-meter (~33 feet) optical imagery to confirm what the thermal data shows; and commercial imagery for higher-resolution work. MEF processes the thermal records in-house against a baseline. For the pipeline report, it pulled every detection in the corridor from August 12 to September 12 and compared the two attack days against the 29 days before them. That baseline separated the seven new fires from nine sites along the corridor that flare routinely.
“Every hot pixel near a pipeline gets counted as a strike, and every ministry statement gets repeated as fact,” said Roman. “We built this unit so that MEF measures what happened before it says what it means. The record here shows a serious hit on one pump station, relief pits burning off crude, and nothing on the eastern half of the line. That is a smaller picture than the first accounts gave, and a more dangerous one, because the drones that did it flew 1,100 kilometers (~684 miles) from Iraq. The unit exists so that Riyadh, Baghdad, and Washington argue from the same measurements.”
“Every hot pixel near a pipeline gets counted as a strike, and every ministry statement gets repeated as fact.”
“The launch point matters as much as the damage,” said Jonathan Spyer, director of research at the Middle East Forum. “A drone that flies 1,100 kilometers (~684 miles) from Maysan to a pump station southeast of Medina tells you who controls that stretch of Iraq and how far Iran’s proxies can now reach into Saudi Arabia. Governments see this imagery. The people arguing about policy in public mostly do not. The unit puts the same physical record in front of them, with the sources and timestamps attached.”
The unit will monitor attacks on energy and transport infrastructure, military strikes, and other conflict events across the region. MEF will publish its own analysis, and journalists, researchers, congressional offices, and allied partners can request analysis of specific events. Each report states its data sources, timestamps, and methods so that others can check the work. All figures are unaudited MEF measurements offered alongside, not instead of, official statements.
The report closes with four things to watch: whether higher-resolution imagery shows tankage missing at the pump station; whether Baghdad makes arrests in Maysan or stops at a dismissal; whether Saudi aircraft return to Iraqi airspace; and whether the July model of joint Saudi and American strikes on Iran-aligned groups in Iraq returns after the U.S.-led coalition’s mission there ends on September 30.
Read the full report. To request analysis of a specific event from the MEF Geospatial Intelligence Unit, contact the Middle East Forum at the address below.
About the Middle East Forum
The Middle East Forum, founded in 1994, promotes American interests in the Middle East and protects Western values from Islamist threats through research, activism, and support for allies.
For immediate release
For more information, contact:
Gregg Roman
Roman@MEForum.org
+1 (215) 546 5406
