DUBAI, March 9, (AP): As missiles and drones curtail energy production across the Arabian Gulf, analysts warn that water, not oil, may be the resource most at risk in the energy-rich but arid region. On Sunday, Bahrain accused Iran of damaging one of its desalination plants. Earlier, Iran said a US airstrike had damaged an Iranian plant. Hundreds of desalination plants sit along the Arabian Gulf coast, putting individual systems that supply water to millions within range of Iranian missile or drone strikes.

Without them, major cities could not sustain their current populations. In Kuwait, about 90% of drinking water comes from desalination, along with roughly 86% in Oman and about 70% in Saudi Arabia. The technology removes salt from seawater - most commonly by pushing it through ultrafine membranes in a process known as reverse osmosis - to produce the freshwater that sustains cities, hotels, industry and some agriculture across one of the world’s driest regions.

For people living outside the Middle East, the main concern of the Iran war has been the impact on energy prices. The Gulf produces about a third of the world’s crude exports and energy revenues underpin national economies. Fighting has already halted tanker traffic through key shipping routes and disrupted port activity, forcing some producers to curb exports as storage tanks fill. But the infrastructure that keeps Gulf cities supplied with drinking water may be equally vulnerable. “Everyone thinks of Saudi Arabia and their neighbors as petrostates. But I call them saltwater kingdoms. They’re human-made fossil-fueled water superpowers,” said Michael Christopher Low, director of the Middle East Center at the University of Utah. “It’s both a monumental achievement of the 20th century and a certain kind of vulnerability.”

The war that began Feb. 28 with US and Israeli attacks on Iran has already brought fighting close to key desalination infrastructure. On March 2, Iranian strikes on Dubai’s Jebel Ali port landed some 12 miles from one of the world’s largest desalination plants, which produces much of the city’s drinking water.

Damage also was reported at the Fujairah F1 power and water complex in the United Arab Emirates, and at Kuwait’s Doha West desalination plant. The damage at the two facilities appeared to have resulted from nearby port attacks or debris from intercepted drones. On Sunday, Bahrain accused Iran of indiscriminately attacking civilian targets and damaging one of its desalination plants, though it didn’t say supplies have gone offline. The island nation, home to the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet, has been among the countries targeted by Iranian drones and missiles.

Earlier, Iran said a US airstrike damaged an Iranian desalination plant. Abbas Araghchi, the country’s foreign minister, said the strike on Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz had cut into the water supply for 30 villages. He warned that in doing so “the US set this precedent, not Iran.” Many Gulf desalination plants are physically integrated with power stations as co-generation facilities, meaning attacks on electrical infrastructure could also hinder water production. Even where plants are connected to national grids with backup supply routes, disruptions can cascade across interconnected systems, said David Michel, senior fellow for water security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It’s an asymmetrical tactic,” he said. “Iran doesn’t have the same capacity to strike back at the United States and Israel. But it does have this possibility to impose costs on the Gulf countries to push them to intervene or call for a cessation of hostilities.”

Desalination plants have multiple stages - intake systems, treatment facilities, energy supplies - and damage to any part of that chain can interrupt production, according to Ed Cullinane, Middle East editor at Global Water Intelligence, a publisher serving the water industry. “None of these assets are any more protected than any of the municipal areas that are currently being hit by ballistic missiles or drones,” Cullinane said. Gulf governments and US officials have long recognized the risks these systems pose for regional stability: if major desalination plants were knocked offline, some cities could lose most of their drinking water within days. A 2010 CIA analysis warned attacks on desalination facilities could trigger national crises in several Gulf states, and prolonged outages could last months if critical equipment were destroyed. More than 90% of the Gulf’s desalinated water comes from just 56 plants, the report stated, and “each of these critical plants is extremely vulnerable to sabotage or military action.”

A leaked 2008 US diplomatic cable warned the Saudi capital of Riyadh “would have to evacuate within a week” if either the Jubail desalination plant on the Gulf coast or its pipelines or associated power infrastructure were seriously damaged. Saudi Arabia has since invested in pipeline networks, storage reservoirs and other redundancies designed to cushion short-term disruptions, as has the UAE.