When Iran blasted a U.S. drone flying over the Gulf out of the sky on Wednesday, it marked the third time this month Iranian forces had taken a shot at American unmanned vehicles and only the latest chapter in a long-running, low-level robot war that spans a decade and several countries.
For at least a decade, Iran and the militants its backs in Yemen, Iraq, and Syria have hacked, shot down, and nearly rammed American drones to evade America’s prying eyes in the sky and register their displeasure with the U.S. without the risk of starting a war. And late Wednesday, Iran claimed to have shot down an American RQ-4 drone flying over Iranian territory. So when did the drone jousting start?
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Last week, U.S. Central Command announced that, on June 13, Iranian-backed Houthi forces had fired a missile at an American drone flying over burning tankers—and missed. However, it added that the Houthis did manage to knock an American Reaper drone out of the sky in Yemen on June 6, which came as a surprise to many. It shouldn’t have. If you’d been following the myriad Houthi media outlets on Twitter, Telegram, and YouTube, a week before Centcom admitted it lost the Reaper, Houthi propaganda outlets like Ansar Allah Media Center tweeted out pictures of the wreckage and some grainy footage of the nighttime shootdown. According to the Houthis, the drone’s wreckage landed in the village of Zafran, near the coast in Yemen’s Hodeidah governorate.
Nor was it even the first time that Houthis had taken down a U.S. Reaper. In October 2017, the same Houthi propaganda outlet released footage of a surface-to-air missile knocking an MQ-9 out of the skies over Sana’a as well as the wreckage—complete with U.S. part markings—left below.
What would you say you do here? So why was a multimillion-dollar American MQ-9 Reaper drone flying over Houthi-held areas in the first place? Since 2002, the U.S. has flown drone missions over Yemen to assassinate members of the Yemen-based al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. But Sana’a and Hodeidah aren’t exactly al Qaeda strongholds. Far from it. Hodeidah, where the most recent shootdown took place, is the scene of intense recent fighting between the Saudi-led coalition and the Iranian-backed Houthi fighters.
The U.S. swears up and down that it’s not a party to the Saudi-led coalition’s war against the Houthi movement, but that’s not entirely true. Particularly (but not exclusively) under the Trump administration, the U.S. has provided arms, fuel, and intelligence to the Saudi-led coalition to help it prosecute the war. Central Command hasn’t said what its Reaper drones were doing over Hodeidah, but The New York Times reported a year ago that the Trump administration deployed American special operations forces and surveillance planes to Yemen in order to help the Saudi-led coalition disrupt ballistic missile launches.
Get by with a little help from my friends: How are Houthi shots at American drones related to Iran? Iran is the Houthi movement’s most powerful backer and supplies it with ballistic missiles, drones, and other weapons in order to put pressure on its rivals Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
And that support has allegedly helped the Houthis in knocking out American drones in Yemen. In acknowledging the downing last week, U.S. military officials said the relatively higher altitude reached by the Houthi SA-6 surface-to-air-missile “indicated an improvement over previous Houthi capability, which we assess was enabled by Iranian assistance.” In other words, the Houthis’ Iranian backers had helped them improve their air defense missiles to reach higher, where they could knock out Reapers.
Robot body count: That’s consistent with the kind of Iranian support to Houthi air defenses we’ve seen in the Yemen conflict. In November, the Trump administration showed off Iranian surface-to-air weapons seized while being smuggled into Yemen as part of its attempts to highlight Iran’s violation of the U.N. arms embargo. U.S. officials showed off a Sayyad-2C missile—an updated and improved version of a missile the U.S. exported to Iran before the revolution—allegedly seized by the Saudi-led coalition
It’s unclear whether Iranian-provided weapons have featured in other Houthi drone shootdowns, but we do know that the Houthis have gotten better at racking up drone kills from the Saudi-led coalition over the past year or so. The downed drones have included Chinese-made drones that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates bought, like the CH-4B armed drones—a knockoff of the Predator—in August and December of last year. In May, Houthis showed their forces shooting down what they said was an MQ-1 Predator drone. The U.S. retired the Predator in 2018 but the UAE purchased an unarmed export version of the drone, the Predator XP, in 2017.
Iraq: Of course, the U.S.-Iran robot wars aren’t confined just to proxy conflicts in Yemen. During the mid-2000s, U.S. forces captured Iranian-backed Shia militiamen and discovered that the militants had videos ripped straight from U.S. drone feeds. As it turned out, Iranian-backed groups had been using commercial software to intercept American drone footage in Iraq with a trick that many suspected had been taught by their backers in Tehran.
More recently, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force claimed responsibility for hacking a U.S. drone and crashing it in Iraq. In February, Hajizdeh released footage of what appeared to be a U.S. drone feed in Iraq and claimed Iranian forces had hacked it “to tell [the U.S.] that ‘not only you failed to reach your goals, but we have infiltrated your systems.’”
Analysis of the footage by researchers at Bellingcat showed the video was recorded in the Haditha area of Iraq, likely a few years ago, but there was insufficient evidence to determine whether Iran’s claims of hacking were true. Hajizadeh said the hacked drone was an MQ-9 Reaper, but some features on the aircraft seen in the footage appear more consistent with the Gray Eagle, an Army version of the Reaper used by Joint Special Operations Command.
For its part, the Defense Department wouldn’t say whether the footage was authentic or if it was missing a drone in Iraq lately.
Syria: In Syria, Iranian forces tried something a little different to mess with America’s drones: close calls with their own drones. During the summer of 2017, as U.S. and Iranian forces clamored to take back parts of eastern Syria from ISIS before the other side could, the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah released footage on its TV channel showing drone footage of American Predator flying over Syria filmed from an uncomfortably close distance. The formatting on the drone feed indicated that it was recorded by an Iranian Shahed-129, a Predator-like drone that Iran had developed and sent to the Assad regime’s T4 airbase in the Syrian desert to help its allies in Damascus.
Less than a day later, an Iranian Shahed-129 flying over eastern Syria dropped a munition dangerously close to U.S. special operations forces. In response, the U.S. decided to turn the tables on the drone harassment campaign and used an F-15 fighter jet to blast the Iranian drone out of the sky with an air-to-air missile.
Unmanned is the reason: So why do drones feature so prominently in Iran’s covert tit-for-tat with the U.S.? Whether targeting America’s drones or sending in some of their own, unmanned aircraft hit an escalatory sweet spot. By shooting them down, you can do something warlike and threaten an adversary without the risk of killing an American service member—an act that would risk lethal retaliation from the U.S. military.
