ByNews Desk- The Cradle
Iran has repeatedly condemned the dangerous and provocative behavior of US drones and aircraft operating in international waters
“On Sunday afternoon … an EP-3E airplane of the US Navy was about to intrude into Iran’s airspace over the Sea of Oman … Iranian naval forces gave the plane a warning and blocked its unauthorized entry into the Iranian airspace,” Iran’s navy was quoted as saying by the semi-official Tasnim News Agency.
The US aircraft “heeded the warning, stayed away from the Iranian aerial border, and returned to international routes,” Tasnim added.
So far, Washington has not made any comments regarding the incident.
The US has regularly used drones and spy planes in its attempts to infiltrate and surveil the Islamic Republic. In 2019, Tehran shot down a US RQ-4 Global Hawk surveillance drone over the Strait of Hormuz – which it alleged was violating its airspace.
Washington denied the airspace violation, and the US president at the time, Donald Trump, was close to ordering a retaliatory missile attack against Iran. He stepped back from doing so, instead imposing sanctions on Iran and authorizing cyber attacks against it.
However, a year later, Trump ordered the assassination of the chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force – Qassem Soleimani, who was killed by a US airstrike in Iraq alongside the leader of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Unit (PMU), Abu Mahdi al-Mohandis.
Tensions immediately exploded, and Tehran responded by showering Washington’s Ain al-Assad base in Iraq with missiles.
Since then, the US has illegally seized Iranian oil shipments in the Persian Gulf and let loose scores of unmanned drones across international waters – aimed at serving as an anti-Iran drone fleet in collaboration with Israel and allied Gulf states.
As a result of these tensions, along with blatant US interference in Iran’s internal affairs throughout the anti-government protests in the country last year, attempts to reinstate a nuclear agreement between Tehran and Washington have mostly fallen apart.
As the US intensifies its illegal military occupation and resource-looting campaign in Syria, resistance groups affiliated with Iran have stepped up missile attacks and drone operations against US bases in the country.
According to Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar, “there is undeclared Russian-Iranian coordination to escalate against the US presence in Syria, with the aim of pressuring the US and forcing it to make a decision to withdraw from its bases in the north and east of the country.”
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