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Iran is showing off its drones after the White House suddenly ratcheted up the pressure on Tehran by rushing an aircraft carrier and bomber task force next door. While U.S. officials are leaking word of a 120,000-troop invasion force should Team Trump and Team Khamenei do something catastrophically dumb, new satellite imagery shows the Islamic Republic has an unusually large number of drones at its bases in the Persian Gulf. It’s not only a hint that Iran is happy to thump its chest, too; it’s the latest sign of tensions rising in the Gulf following a suicide drone attack, a tanker sabotage mystery, and reports of Iranian ballistic missiles hidden inside Iraq. Oh yeah, and a British general dissing the Trump administration—from the Pentagon podium.
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See me now? Satellite imagery provided to The Daily Beast by Planet Labs shows half a dozen drones parked at a UAV airfield in the Iranian island of Qeshm in the Persian Gulf on May 7, a few days after National Security Adviser John Bolton’s announcement that the U.S. would deploy a carrier strike group and bomber task force to the region. The drones visible in the imagery include two of Iran’s miniature knockoffs of the American stealth drones used to spy on Osama bin Laden and Iran’s nuclear program, and three of Iran’s larger armed drones capable of firing missiles.
Qeshm is a base that Iran has publicly used before to brag about its drones. But such a large number of drones parked out so openly in view of satellites is on the unusual side. It’s unclear what’s behind the display—half a dozen drones is hardly a checkmate for a U.S. bomber task force and carrier strike group. But it’s part of a larger propaganda pushback by Iran in the face of mounting U.S. pressure that has seen top Iranian commanders boast an American aircraft carrier is a “target” and not a “threat.” And Iran has used drones on Qeshm for propaganda and messaging purposes before.
In late April, before the current spike in U.S.-Iran tensions, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-linked Tasnim news outlet released footage of an unarmed drone taking off from Qeshm and surveilling what appeared to be a U.S. carrier strike group in the Gulf. The footage of the drone takeoff, at least, was recycled from a 2016 video. U.S. Central Command’s Persian-language Twitter account issued a statement saying that the footage appeared to be of the USS Eisenhower, which hadn’t been in the Gulf since 2016.
Tanker mystery: On Monday, authorities in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia claimed that four vessels, including Saudi oil tankers, were victims of “sabotage” off the port of al-Fujairah. No one has yet confirmed who was behind the attack, but U.S. intelligence reportedly suspects Iran.
Before this week’s incident, we saw a similar attack in the same place back in 2010. In that case, a small and little-known jihadi faction calling itself the Abdullah Azzam Brigades used al Qaeda’s media-distribution network to claim responsibility for an attack against a tanker sailing near al-Fujairah. The group used an explosives-filled dinghy in a suicide attack on a Japanese oil tanker, the M Star. The explosion dented the tanker’s hull, but produced no injuries to the crew or neighboring vessels.
Statements from officials in the UAE and Japan differed on whether investigators were able to conclusively prove that a suicide attack was responsible for the incident. Investigators at one point explored the possibility that the tanker could have accidentally hit one of the sea mines left over from the Iran-Iraq War or collided with another, unidentified vessel, but Japanese authorities ruled out both possibilities. The U.S. government subsequently designated the Abdullah Azzam Brigades as a foreign terrorist organization and concluded that it had carried out the tanker attack.
Suicide drones: Both Saudi authorities and Houthi media reported Tuesday that Iranian-backed Houthi forces sent kamikaze drones to attack a Saudi oil pipeline pump station outside Riyadh. Al Masirah, a propaganda arm for the Houthi movement, claimed that it used seven drones to carry out the attack.
The context for the attack—increased tension between Saudi Arabia’s backers in Washington and the Houthis in Tehran—echoes some of the points in the U.S. intelligence assessment warning that Iran was preparing to have allied militants in Iraq and the Middle East attack U.S. forces. While the increased tensions may color how the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia respond, it’s not a new step on the escalatory ladder.
Houthis have been using Iranian drones to attack targets in Saudi Arabia for a while now. In 2017, Houthi forces showed off a drone they called Qasef, which bore a strong resemblance to Iran’s Ababil II family of target drones. Houthi forces have loaded the drones with explosives and used them as crude cruise missiles to target the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen and targets within Saudi Arabia.
In April 2018, Houthi forces flew an Iranian Ababil II variant drone stuffed with explosives and ball bearings into an airport in Abha, Saudi Arabia, around 100 kilometers from its launch point in Yemen. Like the attack on Tuesday, the Houthis claimed to have attacked an Aramco oil facility in Jizan, Saudi Arabia at the same time. Saudi authorities claimed at the time that “an unidentified body towards a civilian landmark in Jazan was monitored and destroyed by air defense with no losses.”
Mystery plane: If you measure the distance between Yemen and Riyadh, where the Houthi drone attacks reportedly struck, it’s about 800-900 kilometers, depending on where you measure—far outside the approximately 150-kilometer reach of the humble “Qasef” drone. But the Qasef may not be the only Iranian drone in the Houthi arsenal. In January, the U.N.’s Panel of Experts on Yemen released a report that revealed Saudi authorities had found an unidentified, larger, and more capable drone they called “UAV-X” that could fly as far as 1,200 kilometers and carry a larger explosive warhead.
U.N. experts wrote that the Saudi-led coalition showed them five of the drones and that coalition officials had said they’d been used by Houthi forces in Yemen. But there are hints that the mystery drone may have been used in an attack similar to the one reported Tuesday. The U.N. Panel said it has received information that a “UAV-X” crashed within 30 kilometers of Riyadh after having “run out of fuel,” but that Saudi officials denied the attack.
Unlike the Qasef drones used by the Houthis, U.N. officials haven’t been able to trace the aircraft to Iran. The Saudis have claimed the drone in question is the Iranian Shahed-129. It’s not, but you could be forgiven for thinking that. The Shahed-129 is a much larger and more advanced Predator-size drone capable of carrying guided bombs and missiles. But UAV-X’s V-tail design makes it looks similar, though not identical, to other aircraft in the Shahed family of drones, which look like smaller versions of the Shahed-129.
Not-so-special relationship: The White House’s claims that there’s an increased risk to American forces in the Middle East from Iran may not be shared by its allies. Major General Chris Ghika, the British deputy commander of the anti-ISIS coalition, told reporters “No, there’s been no increased threat from Iranian-backed forces in Iraq and Syria.” In a bizarre and nearly unprecedented move, Central Command then put out a statement effectively throwing Ghika under the bus. “Recent comments from OIR's Deputy Commander run counter to the identified credible threats available to intelligence from U.S. and allies regarding Iranian backed forces in the region.”
That echoes a move from Spain, which pulled its frigate out of the U.S. carrier strike group headed to the Gulf because it said “The U.S. government has taken a decision outside of the framework of what had been agreed with the Spanish Navy.”
Hidden missiles: But the biggest revelation since the recent flare-up in the Gulf is that Iran may have hidden ballistic missiles among Iranian-backed militias in Iraq. Reuters reported that Iran smuggled a small number of short-range ballistic missiles into Iraq and set up a factory outside of Baghdad to produce more, with production ramping up recently. The goal, intelligence officials told the wire service, was to afford Iran the ability to strike out at the U.S., Israel, or Saudi Arabia in the event that missile arsenals within Iran came under attack.
