By MATTHEW LEE, AP Diplomatic Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — The largest U.S. diplomatic drawdown in the Middle East since the Iraq War began more than two decades ago is creating an apparently unplanned-for crisis for the Trump administration as the United States and Israel strike Iran in a widening conflict.

Related Articles

Trump threatens to cut off trade with Spain after it disallowed US use of joint bases in Iran war

Iranian strikes on Amazon data centers highlight industry’s vulnerability to physical disasters

From Karachi to Beirut, Khamenei’s death sends shockwaves across the Shiite world

Iran attacks threaten US economy with more uncertainty around inflation, growth

Some travelers stranded in Dubai are paying huge sums for private charter flights out

The State Department has been forced to close several embassies to the public, shut down at least one consulate, order the departure of embassy staff and families from at least six nations and advise Americans in 14 countries to leave the region immediately despite the war closing major airports and causing widespread flight cancellations.

The State Department said Tuesday that it was “securing military aircraft and charter flights for American citizens who wish to leave the Middle East.” But it was not clear if any flights had yet been arranged.

The department has been in contact with nearly 3,000 Americans wanting to leave the region or seeking information about how to depart, Dylan Johnson, assistant secretary of state for public affairs, said on X.

Emergency reductions in embassy staffing and post closures since the strikes on Iran began on the weekend have put severe strains on the ability to help U.S. citizens in need of assistance that might usually be considered routine.

In addition, the reductions have limited crucial official engagements with allied and partner governments during the war, including in Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Pakistan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Biggest US drawdown in region since Iraq War

The scale of the American drawdown in the region rivals if not exceeds what was done in the run up to and the immediate aftermath of the Iraq invasion in 2003. Back then, the State Department reduced its staffing in more than a dozen countries and advised U.S. citizens to leave or seriously consider leaving countries throughout the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia from Morocco to Pakistan.

On Monday, Americans were told in a hastily drafted announcement posted on X to leave Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen even though commercial flights and other transportation have been disrupted.

Americans had been advised early Tuesday that the State Department had ordered nonessential diplomats and embassy families to leave Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE.

The embassies in Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia also were closed to the public Tuesday. A drone attack on the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh caused a “limited fire,” Saudi Arabia’s Defense Ministry said. But only one diplomatic mission — the U.S. consulate in Karachi, Pakistan — had completely suspended operations.

In Israel, where Americans were told they should leave as soon as possible as Iranian retaliation intensified, the Trump administration had no plans in place to assist people. Instead, the embassy in Jerusalem advised U.S. citizens to take an Israeli tourist bus to Egypt.

“The U.S. Embassy is not in a position at this time to evacuate or directly assist Americans in departing Israel,” U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee tweeted Tuesday, adding that information about bus service was being offered as a courtesy “as you make your own security plans.”

However, a second State Department official, who not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, said the department had been in touch with nearly 500 Americans in Israel who want to leave and that it had helped more than 130 in departing so far — with 100 more expected to leave Tuesday.

Confusion leads to questions about preparations

Confusion, though, was playing out around the region, raising questions about the preparations for possible military action and its impact on travel and the safety of Americans overseas, which is the State Department’s primary responsibility.

“If Americans are being instructed to leave but are given no viable pathway, that suggests one of two things: The system is not being activated, or the system has atrophied,” said Shawn VanDiver, president of AfghanEvac, a group that supports Afghan nationals seeking to come to the United States after having served with U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

He noted that during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, the Biden administration had organized the evacuation of 121,000 people in a matter of days.

“Crisis response cannot be partisan,” he said. “It has to survive transitions. It has to be staffed, exercised, and protected. The oversight question is straightforward: Was the post-Afghanistan crisis response architecture sustained, or has it been weakened?”

The State Department did not immediately respond to a query about its planning for embassy and consulate staffing or providing assistance to American citizens in the event of a conflict with Iran.

The U.S. government cannot compel American citizens to leave any country. In rare circumstances, it can make it illegal for U.S. passports to be used for travel to a specific destination. The only such restriction is on North Korea. But before the strikes began, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Friday that the restriction might also be applied to Iran.

Travel advice from the State Department, including admonitions not to visit a country or to leave it, often is not respected. Many people reside in or have close family living there and either ignore or decline to heed the advice.

There are large numbers of U.S. citizens living in or traveling throughout the Middle East. The State Department, however, refuses to offer an estimate because Americans are not required to report their presence in any country abroad. It says any estimate would be inaccurate.

Tens of thousands of U.S. citizens, many of them dual nationals, are believed to live in Israel, Lebanon, Egypt and Iran.

By ERIC TUCKER

WASHINGTON (AP) — A day after abandoning its efforts to enforce executive orders that targeted some of the world’s most elite law firms, President Donald Trump’s administration abruptly reversed course on Tuesday and said it would proceed with the court fight.

Related Articles

War with Iran strains the US-UK relationship as Starmer and Trump disagree

It’s election season again. This is why and how AP calls races across the country

Iranian Americans fear for relatives in their homeland as war continues

Noem blames ‘violent protesters’ for Minneapolis chaos under tough questioning in a Senate hearing

North Carolina primary could mean Roy Cooper vs Michael Whatley in pivotal fall Senate race

The unexplained about-face represents the latest development in a yearlong effort by the Republican administration to impose sanctions against major law firms whose attorneys had done legal work Trump opposed or had been associated with prosecutors who investigated him.

Judges who received challenges to the executive orders from targeted firms uniformly ruled against the government, prompting an appeal from the Justice Department. In a brief filing Monday in the federal appeals court in Washington, the Justice Department withdrew its appeal, ending efforts to enforce executive orders against the firms of Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, Susman Godfrey and WilmerHale.

Then, on Tuesday, the Justice Department, without any explanation, submitted a new court filing saying that it was withdrawing its earlier one and was no longer giving up its appeal. It said that because the appeals court had not yet granted its motion to dismiss, the firms were not harmed by the department’s change in position. The department said that it had advised lawyers for the four firms of its change in position and that they objected.

The White House referred questions about the change in position to the Justice Department, where a spokesperson declined to comment.

In a statement, Perkins Coie said the Justice Department had “offered no explanation to either the parties or the court for its reversal.”

“We remain committed to defending our firm, our people, and our clients,” the firm said.

Susman Godfrey said in a statement that it “will defend itself and the rule of law — without equivocation.”

The succession of edicts, part of a broader Trump administration campaign of retribution, have ordered that the security clearances of attorneys at the targeted firms be suspended, that federal contracts be terminated and that their employees be barred from federal buildings. The punished firms have called the orders an unconstitutional affront to the legal system.

Other major firms sought to avert orders by preemptively reaching settlements that require them, among other things, to collectively dedicate hundreds of millions of dollars in free legal services in support of causes the Trump administration says it supports.

Associated Press writer Michelle L. Price in Washington contributed to this report.

By KELVIN CHAN, AP Business Writer

LONDON (AP) — Damage to three Amazon Web Services facilities in the Middle East from Iranian drone strikes highlights the rapid growth of data centers in the region, as well as the industry’s vulnerability to conflict.

Related Articles

From Karachi to Beirut, Khamenei’s death sends shockwaves across the Shiite world

Iran attacks threaten US economy with more uncertainty around inflation, growth

Some travelers stranded in Dubai are paying huge sums for private charter flights out

War with Iran strains the US-UK relationship as Starmer and Trump disagree

Iranian Americans fear for relatives in their homeland as war continues

The company’s cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, said late Monday that two data centers in the United Arab Emirates were “directly struck” and another facility in Bahrain was also damaged after a drone landed nearby.

“These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage,” AWS said in an update on its online dashboard.

It said by late Tuesday that recovery efforts at the UAE data centers were making progress.

Unlike previous AWS disruptions involving software that resulted in widespread global outages, these attacks involving physical damage appear to have resulted only in localized and limited disruption.

Amazon Web Services hosts many of the world’s most-used online services, providing behind-the-scenes cloud computing infrastructure to many government departments, universities and businesses.

The company advised customers using servers in the Middle East to migrate to other regions, and direct online traffic away from the UAE and Bahrain.

“Amazon has generally configured its services so that the loss of a single data center would be relatively unimportant to its operations,” said Mike Chapple, an IT professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business.

Other data centers in the same zone can take over, and most of the time this happens seamlessly every day to balance workloads, he said.

“That said, the loss of multiple data centers within an availability zone could cause serious issues, as things could reach a point where there simply isn’t enough remaining capacity to handle all the work.”

A plume of smoke rises following a U.S.-Israeli military strike in Tehran, Iran, Tuesday, March 3, 2026. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)

Amazon doesn’t typically disclose the exact number of data centers it operates around the world.

It says only that its data centers are clustered in 39 geographic regions, with three such regions in the Middle East, covering the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Israel.

Each AWS region is split up into at least three data center availability zones, with each zone isolated and physically separated “by a meaningful distance,” although they are all within 100 kilometers (60 miles) of each other and connected by “ultra-low-latency networks” that reduce the time lag for data transmission.

AWS says its data centers have redundant water, power, telecom, and internet connections “so we can maintain continuous operations in an emergency.”

They also have physical security, but those measures, including security guards, fences, video surveillance and alarm systems, are designed to keep out intruders rather than defend against missile attacks.

Chapple said the attacks are a reminder that cloud computing isn’t “magical” and “still requires physical facilities on the ground, which are vulnerable to all sorts of disaster scenarios.”

Data centers run by AWS and other operators are massive facilities that are hard to hide, he added.

“Organizations using services from any cloud provider in the Middle East should immediately take steps to shift their computing to other regions,” Chapple said.

By STEVE KARNOWSKI and TIM SULLIVAN

A federal judge clashed Tuesday with Minnesota’s top federal prosecutor in what he called a series of “testy and frosty” exchanges, in an unusual contempt hearing that highlights a growing wave of confrontations across the U.S. between increasingly frustrated judges and Department of Justice officials.

U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota Daniel N. Rosen at one point accused the judge of smearing him.

There has been a surge in recent weeks of judges issuing critical and sometimes scathing statements and rulings over fallout from the administration’s attempts at mass immigrant deportations, with the Department of Justice sometimes appearing unable to keep up with the flood of cases from the crackdown.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Bryan called Tuesday’s hearing to decide whether Rosen, one of his top deputies and a top local ICE official should be held in contempt for failing to return the personal property of dozens of immigrants who had been detained and then ordered freed, as they had been ordered. The property ranges from cash to identity documents to clothing.

“The court cannot ignore the respondents’ unlawful conduct,” Bryan said when he ordered the hearing, noting there had been “numerous unlawful violations of court orders”

Bryan started the hearing by calling it “an extraordinary measure,” and said it would be a “historic low point” for the U.S. attorneys office if he held anyone in contempt.

“Your honor has made a remark smearing myself,” Rosen shot back.

Later, as the judge called a break, he acknowledged the two had “been a little testy and frosty with each other.”

The hearing was set to resume Tuesday afternoon.

Among other cases across the country, a district judge in Minnesota took the rare step last month of finding an administration lawyer in contempt for failing to return identification documents to an immigrant, and a judge in West Virginia chastised U.S. and state officials for jailing noncitizens indefinitely, saying it violates their constitutional right to due process.

“Continued detention without individualized custody determinations, after this court’s repeated holdings that such detention violates the Fifth Amendment, will result in legal consequences,” U.S. District Judge Joseph Goodwin said in his order.

But the chief federal judge for Minnesota has repeatedly grabbed national attention with his warnings. Last week, Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz said Rosen and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials must comply with court orders or risk criminal contempt charges.

“The Court is not aware of another occasion in the history of the United States in which a federal court has had to threaten contempt — again and again and again — to force the United States government to comply with court orders,” wrote Schiltz, who was appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush and is seen as a conservative.

The administration has blamed judges for the crisis, accusing them of failing to follow the law and rushing cases.

___

Sullivan contributed from Minneapolis.

Related Articles

Noem blames ‘violent protesters’ for Minneapolis chaos under tough questioning in Senate hearing

Hennepin County Attorney’s Office launches online portal to report misconduct by federal agents

Letters: I have 2 handguns, 3 shotguns, 2 rifles, and I support a ban on some weaponry

Judge nixes latest policy requiring 7 days’ notice for Congress members to visit ICE facilities

40 arrested at Whipple Federal Building during ICE protest