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Iranian Naval units have successfully launched domestically-manufactured anti-ship cruise missiles.
They hit a number of naval targets during “massive military exercises” in an area stretching from the eastern sector of the strategic Strait of Hormuz to the northern tip of the Indian Ocean.
“The exercise of the army of the Islamic Republic of Iran on an area of more than one million square kilometres (386,000 square miles) east of the Strait of Hormuz and the Sea of Oman and north of the Indian Ocean has begun,” state television said.
“This exercise is a serious warning to our enemies and those who have ill intentions towards Iran,” the spokesman for the drills, Admiral Mahmoud Moussavi, was quoted as saying by Irib News Agency.
Rear Admiral Mousavi said on Iranian naval forces fired domestically-manufactured Qader (Able), Nasr (Victory) and Qadir missiles on the second day of the war game to practice hitting hostile watercraft of the mock enemy.
Mousavi went on to say that a Nasr anti-ship cruise missile was fired from a guided-missile cruiser of the Islamic Republic of Iran Navy to successfully hit surface targets.
The senior Iranian military official added that a long-range Qadir missile, also shot from a guided-missile cruiser, struck its surface target from a distance of 300 kilometers away.
Tareq Kilo-class attack submarine launched a domestically-manufactured Valfajr torpedo to hit a predetermined target successfully. The submarine also planted DM-1 naval mines during the exercise.
In another operation, the Iranian Navy’s offshore units flew homegrown and radar-evading Omid drones to jam the radars of the mock enemy stationed on the coast.
According to Iran itself, the unmanned aerial vehicle is fairly effective in electronic warfare.
Mousavi said Iranian naval forces are able to destroy faraway targets, using indigenous surface-to-sea missile systems as well as surface and underwater units that are equipped with a variety of indigenous missiles.
The elite Revolutionary Guard Corps announced on November 3rd it had thwarted an attempt by the US Navy to seize a vessel carrying its oil in the Sea of Oman the previous week.
But US defense officials offered a contrasting version of events, saying the Iranians had seized the tanker, while US forces “monitored” the incident without engaging.
The latest tanker incident took place amid protracted efforts to revive a 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers that the US unilaterally pulled out of in 2018 under then-President Donald Trump. The deal would offer Iran vital relief from debilitating sanctions in return for severe limits in its nuclear activities.
In 2019, a series of attacks on tankers in the Gulf threatened to further drive US-Iran tensions.
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