Iran Guards hold war games as US carrier enters Gulf

Iran Guards hold war games as US carrier enters Gulf

Iran Guards hold war games as US carrier enters Gulf

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has launched war games in the Persian Gulf, a day after a USA aircraft carrier entered the waterway amid rising tensions between Tehran and Washington.

 

 

 

Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari labelled the USA decision to send its USS John C. Stennis carrier strike group to the Persian Gulf as “deceiving” regional states, Fars News reported on 23 December.

The military exercise is held on Qeshm Island, located off the coast of Iran’s Hormozgan province and near the Strait of Hormuz, where about one-third of the global oil shipments passes through.

Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, a senior Iranian cleric and a former chief justice, died in Tehran on Monday after a long.

The annual war games, dubbed The Great Prophet, come after the USS John C. Stennis sailed into the Persian Gulf on December 21 amid repeated threats by Iranian officials to close off the Strait of Hormuz. Reuters witnesses also saw an Iranian drone flying nearby.

“We believe it was part of their naval exercise”, Lieutenant Chloe Morgan, a spokeswoman for the Bahrain-based US Fifth Fleet, said.

At one point, a missile was launched away from the United States carrier, The Associated Press reported, in an apparent show of force.

“The Iranian craft drove in front of our ship and stopped and tried to capture their own sort of picture of what was going on”, said Navy Captain Randy Peck, commanding officer of Stennis, told the AP.

In remarks in 2016, Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei underlined that security of the Persian Gulf region comes within the purview of the regional countries alone, and dismissed the USA claim of seeking security in the region.

 

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