Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps released footage purporting to show fast attack craft harassing U.S. Navy vessels in the volatile Strait of Hormuz, but the U.S. Defense Department says no such intercept occurred and the Iranian claim is "untrue".
“Dozens of Iranian drones and speedboats swarming two U.S. Navy ships near the Persian Gulf after Washington sent them in to deal with Iran's renewed threat against one of the world's most important waterways, dramatic new footage has revealed.
Iran's navy sent the small vessels to confront the USS Bataan and the USS Carter Hall in the fraught Strait of Hormuz, which sits between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman.
The speedboats were manned with armed soldiers from Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and came within inches of the ships, while drones also taunted the ships and managed to snap pictures right above them.
Chopped-up footage taken from several of the drones and speedboats showed Iranian soldiers speaking in a mix of English and Farsi, while a U.S. soldier can be heard through garbled radio responding to the swarm of vessels, though it is unclear exactly what was said.
Iranian media outlets claimed that the confrontation forced helicopters to land back on the American ships.
The ships, a helicopter carrier and a support vessel that were carrying more than 4,000 American troops between them were sent to the Gulf in response to Iran's continued threats of seizing commercial ships in the region.
The Strait of Hormuz is hugely important to the world economy, as one-fifth of the world's oil passes through its waters, but Washington has still not commented on the tense situation.
The strait lies in the territorial waters of both Iran and Oman. At its narrowest point, it is just 21 miles wide, and the width of the shipping lane in either direction is only two miles.
The standoff comes just weeks after the U.S. warned vessels to avoid the Persian Gulf following a threat that Iran made that it would seize oil tankers in the region.
The threat followed a spate of attempted and successful seizures in the region, with the U.S. claiming that Iran has gone after nearly twenty internationally flagged ships in the region over the past two years.
Iran has butted heads with its neighbors in recent years over its behavior in the Gulf.
In mid-July, the U.S. and the Arab League, a bloc of two dozen countries in the Middle East, appeared to condemn Iran's actions in the important waterway.
'Any threats, armed seizures and attacks against commercial ships that interfere with navigational rights and freedoms in the strategic waterways of the region’, the joint statement read.
'We resolve to increase our commitment to pursue collective efforts to address threats to the security of vessels traveling through the region’s waterways that are critical to international trade and the global economy’.
A day later, the U.S. and Bahrain published a similar declaration, which outlined their ‘commitment to freedom of navigation in international waters, noting especially the importance of ensuring safe passage for commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and condemned acts that put free navigation in jeopardy’”. -Perkin Amalaraj, Daily Mail
In its attempt to expand its footprint in the strategic strip of water between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, the United States military has seemingly set the stage for a major conflict to erupt should Iran decide to close the international waterway to shipping.
It stands to reason that Tehran wasn’t too keen on the Pentagon’s deployment of soldiers on commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz to try to prevent the American vessels from being intercepted or possibly seized by Iranian forces in perhaps the oil chokepoint of most import in the entire world.