Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on Saturday fired long-range ballistic missiles at simulated targets in the Indian Ocean. The missiles landed “roughly 100 miles from the Nimitz aircraft carrier, hitting close to a commercial ship in the Indian Ocean,” UK’s Daily Mail reported.
Iran launched ballistic missiles of “various classes” aimed at “the enemy’s battleships and destroyed them from 1,800 kilometers (1,125 miles) away,” the IRGC-affiliated media claimed. The test-firing was part of a two-day naval exercise by the IRGC, the Iranian regime’s military arm and a U.S.-designate terrorist organization.
As part of the military drill, Iran also simulated a terrorist drone attack similar to one that devastated Saudi oil fields. In September 2019, at least 18 drones swarmed Saudi airspace, destroying kingdom’s two main oil facilities and disrupted world’s oil supply. The IRGC “conducted a drill Friday that saw suicide drones crash into targets and explode — triangle-shaped aircraft that strongly resembled those used in a 2019 attack in Saudi Arabia that temporarily cut the kingdom’s oil production by half,” the U.S.-based weekly Defense News reported.
Iran’s display of terrorist and military capabilities come as the United States under the incoming Joe Biden presidency may be rejoining the 2015 nuclear agreement. The return to the nuclear deal will restore Obama-era appeasement policies towards the regime. Undoing President Donald Trump’s legacy of sanctions and ‘Maximum Pressure’ on Iran will inevitably strengthen and enrich the regime, the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism.
Reuters reported Iran’s long-rang missile drill:
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards on Saturday fired long-range ballistic missiles into the Indian Ocean on the second day of a military exercise, state media reported.The drill, which comes in the waning days of high tensions with U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, was conducted in the country’s central desert region.It followed Friday’s testing of surface-to-surface ballistic missiles and locally manufactured new drones in the same area.“One of our most important defence policy goals is to use long-range ballistic missiles against enemy warships, including aircraft carriers and warships,” state media quoted Guards commander Major General Hossein Salami as saying.With these missiles, which have a range of 1,800 kilometres, he said, “we can now strike moving targets in the ocean,” instead of the usual low-speed cruise missiles.Saturday’s drill targets were in the Gulf of Oman and the northern Indian Ocean.
While Iran is advancing and testing a ballistic missile program, which can potentially carry nuclear warheads, it is also working towards a nuclear weapons arsenal. Last week, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog IAEA confirmed Iran’s advancements in uranium metal production, a key component for building a nuclear bomb. On Saturday, The E3 group of European power, namely France, Germany, and the UK, raised alarm about the Iran’s production of the nuclear metal which according to them can only have military implications with “no credible civilian use.”
The UK daily Guardian reported the European reaction:
“The production of uranium metal has potentially grave military implications,” the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany said in a joint statement on Saturday.Iran had signed up to a 15-year ban on “producing or acquiring plutonium or uranium metals or their alloys” under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) signed in 2015 with world powers.“We strongly urge Iran to halt this activity, and return to compliance with its JCPOA commitments without further delay if it is serious about preserving the deal,” said the ministers.Their call came after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said Iran had notified the nuclear watchdog it was advancing research on uranium metal production, aiming to provide advanced fuel for a research reactor in Tehran.
While the Europeans have been quick at raising alarms over the Iranian nuclear program, they have done everything to sabotage the president’s policy to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear arsenal. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government has been at the forefront of the European efforts to bypass U.S. sanctions on Iran. Germany, under the framework of the EU, has been the main architect of the Iran-European payment mechanism created to circumvent U.S. sanctions.
With Biden set to enter the White House, the EU countries and China are pressuring the incoming U.S. administration to reenter the nuclear deal, which President Trump abandoned in May 2018.
Last month, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi ‘demanded’ the U.S. to return to the Obama-sponsored deal once Biden takes office. “The US shall return to the Iran nuclear deal as soon as possible and without any preconditions, and the US should also scrap all sanctions imposed on Iran,” Wang Yi declared.
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