Khobar Towers Bombing

Nineteen U.S. service members were killed when a truck bomb destroyed their high-rise Air Force barracks in Dhahran, eastern Saudi Arabia, on June 25, 1996. Bombers pulled a tanker truck stuffed with explosives up next to the dormitory, and then jumped into waiting vehicles, escaping just before the detonation. About 500 people were injured in the explosion.

The towers housed the 2,000 U.S. military personnel assigned to the King Abdul Aziz Airbase in Saudi Arabia. The service members were at the airbase near Dhahran in order to mount patrols over the no-flight zone in southern Iraq that was declared after the Persian Gulf War.

The tanker truck that pulled up to Khobar Towers just before 10 P.M. on the evening of the attack carried 5,000 pounds of explosives—an even larger cache than that used by Timothy McVeigh to blow up Oklahoma City's federal ...