Eurasia Press & News
From US intervention in Iraq to Israel’s war in Gaza, an American base in Greece has facilitated conflict for decades.
On the Greek island of Crete, the demonstration approached the American military base at Souda Bay from the nearby village of Mouzouras, winding its way through small roads surrounded by olive groves. Wearing keffiyehs or motorcycle helmets, hoisting Palestinian flags, the crowd of around 3,000 chanted “Free Palestine” in Greek. A little less than two miles away from the base, the demonstration was stopped on a small road, blockaded by two rows of riot police and anvil-shaped concrete traffic barriers. Several demonstrators put down effigies of shrouded corpses and threw red paint over them, splashing the traffic barriers and the boots of the police officers.
Hundreds of these protestors had traveled to Crete days prior via the overnight boat from Athens or via bus and boat from the northern city of Thessaloniki. The night before they had held a demonstration in the nearby city of Chania, the front row carrying a black banner painted with white letters: “Since ‘90 nothing has changed, the bases sow malady, blood, [and] death.”
On Oct. 17 and 18, these thousands of Greeks gathered in Crete to protest the US military bases in Souda and their reported involvement Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. It is not the first time the US bases have been a target of popular ire — the complete removal of the US military’s presence in Greece, particularly that in Souda, was a central promise of the center-left PASOK party platform in the late 1970s and early 1980s. And though at several points in the past decades the Greek streets and newspaper pages have been filled with calls for their removal, the bases have remained.
“These bases have played a role in wars for many years,” said one of the organizers of the Target Souda Base for Palestine gathering, who wished to remain anonymous. He discussed not just the ships docking at the Souda Naval Base, but also frequent US and NATO training exercises hosted at the bases. “Obviously these bases are a vital part of the war machine. As much as Greece says we don’t have a position, we don’t participate in this war, we have these bases, and that makes us guilty.”
Souda hosts both a naval bay and an airport base, and the US military has access to Greek military facilities across the country. The Souda naval port is particularly strategic — it is the only base in the Mediterranean large enough to host aircraft carriers pierside, and it provides a convenient refueling stop for ships going to or leaving from ports further east. “Souda emerges as the most strategic point in the wider region,” stated Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis during a 2020 meeting with then US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. “This is where the interests of our two countries converge with those of security and peace.”
Tracking logs indicate that since the current war began in Gaza, ships have frequently used the port as a stop to or from ports in Israel. Between October 2023 and October 2025 four ships contracted by the US Maritime Administration to transport weapons and military supplies for the US Department of Defense have stopped at Souda Bay a total of 40 times.
For example, the Intercept reported in December 2024 that the US-flagged container ship, the MV Sagamor, transported hundreds of tons of munitions from the US to Israel. Tracking logs show the MV Sagamore started at a US military port which offloads munitions in October 2024, traveled east, and docked at Souda Bay, Greece, on Nov. 6, 2024. It appeared to have turned its tracker off and then reappeared off the coast of the port of Ashdod, Israel, four days later, en route out of the Mediterranean. Similarly, the ship the Ocean Grand left from the same US military port in January 2024, entered the Mediterranean in February, and turned off its trackers for four days, only to reappear and dock at Souda on Feb. 6 — activists believe it likely unloaded at an Israeli port in that time.
“These bases have played a role in wars for many years.”It was also reported in Greek media this summer that American warplanes that engaged in the US bombings of Iranian nuclear sites stopped and refueled in Souda. Neither the US Fleet Forces Command nor the Souda Bay Public Affairs Office responded to requests for comment.
“We wanted to reignite this movement in the hearts and awareness of people in Crete and beyond,” said the organizer from Crete. “We wanted to protest the genocide, but also to bring the issue of Souda to the fore, to not forget what has happen before.”
Construction on the first American military base in Greece began in 1953, the year after the country joined NATO. Though they were later removed in the early 2000s, US nuclear weapons were housed in Greece following a 1959 agreement. But the big protests against American bases truly started boiling in 1974, after the fall of the ruthless military dictatorship and the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. “After the collapse of the dictatorship, there was a nodal point in the rise of Greek anti-Americanism,” said George Giannakopoulos, a lecturer at the University of London, who is currently writing a book about the history of international interventions in Greece. “There was this perception that essentially, the Americans were very close to the military dictatorship in Athens, and let the invasion scenario play out.”
On Aug. 15, 1974, the Greek newspaper Athinaiki’s frontpage declared: “America Betrayed Us.” Hundreds of protesters gathered in Athens’s central Syntagma Square, calling for the Americans and their bases to leave.
This sentiment simmered throughout the 1970s, particularly in leftist spaces. In posters, speeches, and at protests, Greeks railed against the bases, arguing that it was an issue of national independence. By the 1980s there were yearly peace festivals that urged “Foreign bases and nuclear weapons out.”
In 1981, economist Andreas Papandreou rode this wave of frustration, campaigning on a platform that, in part, centered on removing the American military presence. “Part and parcel of Andreas Papandreou’s rhetoric were references to what we would call today national self-determination, references to democracy, references to proper national independence, and a very clear anti-American line,” said Giannakopoulos.
That Oct. 18, Papandreou’s Panhellenic Socialist Movement, or PASOK, swept the elections. In the days after his electoral victory, Papandreou told an American Sunday morning talk show, “We are against bases, against nuclear arms,” but quickly clarified: “We recognize also that it would be foolish to move toward confrontation between Greece and the United States. So, I think the first thing to clarify is that we do not act unilaterally.”
This foreshadowed the beginning of his about-face.
The Papandreou government started talks with the Americans to negotiate the future of the bases in the autumn of 1982, proposing a plan to phase them out. But soon it became clear that this phaseout would be slow if not entirely semantic. The Greek Left protested bitterly. The following March, 80,000 people rallied in Athens’s central square chanting, “Out with the Bases of Death.” The Greek leftwing paper Ethnos ran the frontpage headline: “The People Against The Bases.”
In the summer of 1983, Papandreou’s government signed an agreement to extend the presence of the American bases for five years. The term expired, Papandreou’s government lost power, and in 1990, the newly elected right-wing New Democracy signed another agreement for the bases to stay, this time for an eight-year extension, with the promise of over a billion dollars’ worth of arms and military support.
“Those are some of the reasons why often both government officials and local people generally see there being benefits from having US bases on their soil,” said David Vine, an anthropologist and author of the book Base Nation: How US Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World. “The promise of security, the economic benefits that can come with them, although they’re dramatically exaggerated.”
Vine called it a myth that US bases are necessary for security in the US and elsewhere. “[T]he fact is that US bases around the world have wasted tens of billions of US taxpayer dollars while actually undermining US national security, damaging local environments of host nations, the lives of many people in host nations, and all the while serving as launch pads for offensive wars of choice.”
The Souda Bay bases were used to coordinate “reconnaissance efforts” and for refueling during the 1991 Gulf War, the US war in Afghanistan, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, among other conflicts. Protests against the bases in all of these instances swelled up across Greece, and particularly in Crete, though never with the fervor or numbers of the 1980s.
Still, the organizer in Crete said he believed the mobilization against the Souda base this October was the biggest he’s seen in at least 15 years. He explained that as the Saturday demonstration wove its way through the olive grove, he heard the same slogans he’s heard for decades. On the banners protestors painted and held aloft was the same rallying cry: “Out with the bases of death.”
