Naval drama(s) off Arabia (catch all)

[davidbfpo]

I have merged the two recent threads on possible naval confrontations off Yemen or in the Persian Gulf - into this one. One thread was in the OEF Horn of Africa forum and was moved to the more appropriate Middle East forum.

[AdamG]

Tehran (AFP) - A senior Iranian commander warned the United States that a "fire might start" over an aid ship bound for Yemen on Wednesday after the Pentagon urged it to change course.

Brigadier General Masoud Jazayeri said it was Iran's right to deliver relief supplies to Yemen as a humanitarian ceasefire takes hold and rejected Washington's request that aid be taken instead to a United Nations hub to allay worries the cargo might be military.

"I should say frankly that Iran's restraint has a limit," Jazayeri, a deputy chief of staff, told Iran's Arab-language Al-Alam television late on Tuesday.

http://news.yahoo.com/iran-warns-us-...110906555.html

[CrowBat]

Tensions are indeed slowly increasing in the area south-east of the Gulf of Aden, where a group of Egyptian and Saudi warships is maintaining a naval blockade of local ports, while a USN task force is monitoring the approach of an Iranian ship loaded with medical supplies - plus activity of several warships of the Iranian Navy nearby.

One of the latter had an 'interesting encounter', two days ago, as cited in Iranian report below.

Note: while some of formulations might appear outright dilletantic, more important is that it airs a similar concern of possible attacks by suicide boats, like that experienced by the USN in Yemen at earlier times (mind USS Cole, back in October 2000):

Iranian Warship's Missile System Locks on Invading Target in Gulf of Aden

Iranian destroyer, Alborz, locked its missile systems on an invading vessel in the Gulf of Aden after a high-speed boat left Yemen's coasts and rushed to attack it.

The Iranian destroyer's missile systems locked on the target after an invading high-speed boat appeared on the monitor screens of the radar systems in Alborz operations room.

According to reports, the invading vessel changed course and returned to the coast after the Iranian destroyer warned it would target the vessel in seconds.

"If the terrorists ignored our warning, they would be killed with the first bullets of Alborz," Commodore Hassan Maqsoudlou, the captain of Alborz destroyer, said.

He underlined that the Iranian Naval forces are prepared at any moment to defend the Islamic Iran's interests.

The incident took place as Iran's 34th fleet of warships is in the Gulf of Aden on an anti-piracy mission, and as an Iranian cargo ships carrying humanitarian aid is on its way to Yemen and as the naval fleets of the US and some other western countries have several times reduced their distance from the Iranian fleet in violation of the international rules.

In a last such case, the US and French warships and military aircraft changed their direction in the Gulf of Aden on Saturday night after being warned by an Iranian flotilla to keep distant.

The US and French reconnaissance planes, helicopters and warships approached the Iranian warships in a provocative move, ignoring the internationally set 5-mile standard distance from Iran's 34th fleet of warships deployed in the Gulf of Aden on Saturday night.

The vessels and aircraft then received a warning from Alborz destroyer, apologized and rapidly changed direction.

Also on May 4, a US warship and military planes changed their direction as they were patrolling in the Gulf of Aden after they came close to an Iranian naval fleet and were warned to move away.

2 US reconnaissance planes named P3C (Papa 3 Charlie) and US Navy destroyer, DDG81, approached several Iranian warships in the Gulf of Aden.

The US Navy vessel and planes then received a warning from 'Alborz' and changed direction.

The Navy's 34th Fleet, comprising Alborz destroyer and Bushehr helicopter-carrier warship, is conducting anti-piracy patrols in the high seas and Gulf of Aden.
...

[CrowBat]

A good summary of all the confusion and PRBS related to SS Nejat aka SS Iran Shahed - that Iranian ship with aid for Yemen, movements of which are meanwhile better covered by the media than those of USN's supercarriers:

Iranian cargo ship to dock directly at Houthi-held port in Yemen

...In the case of the Iranian cargo ship, Iran Shahed, some sources claim that the ship is being escorted by Iranian naval vessels. Iran claims the ship contains aid for Yemen including 2,500 tons of flour, rice, canned food, medical supplies, and bottled water, all badly needed in the country. The Military Times says that the Iranian ship is "flanked by two warships". An Iranian source, Fars ,said that the ship was under escort by a foreign frigate that is part of international piracy efforts. Several accounts suggest that whatever ships are escorting the cargo ship were already in the area. The Pentagon talks of two Iranian warships "linking up". Pentagon spokesperson Colonel Steve Warren said that the warships "linked up" with the cargo ship as it passed through an area where the Iranian warships were engaged in counter-piracy operations according to Iran:

It was not immediately clear whether the warships were now in close proximity of the cargo vessel. A U.S. defence official said the warships were accompanying the cargo ship, broad language that would allow for the ships to simply be in the same general area.

On the ship there are a number of foreign activists. Two of them told Reuters that the ship was not being escorted by Iranian warships. Christoph Horstel, a German political activist maintained: ""It is a purely humanitarian mission. There is no ship accompanying us - let alone any Iranian warships. As I look at the horizon, there is no ship at all and during the whole trip there was never any warship,"

" Horstel said that an unidentified plane had circled the ship three times last Monday. The ship is expected to reach the port of Hodeida on Thursday. Iranian news agency Tasmin reports the ship's own captain as claiming that the ship is being escorted now by two Iranian warships. Probably, there are two Iranian naval vessels doing the escorting since both the Pentagon and Iran report this to be the case. The escorting vessels however must be a considerable distance from the ship as those on board report not seeing them. One article even names the Iranian ships as the "Vosper" and "Bandar Abbas".

A US warship has now begun to "shadow" the Iranian cargo ship. The US is supposedly worried that the ship is carrying arms to the Houthi rebels. The US and perhaps the UN have demanded that the ship dock in Djibouti just across a narrow strait from Hodeida, while the Iranians say they will sail directly to the port. The UN has already delivered aid through the port so there surely would be no problem with a UN inspection team monitoring the cargo as it was unloaded. Indeed the Iranian deputy foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said: "The required coordination has been done with relevant authorities in the U.N. for docking of the ship carrying Iran's humanitarian aid for Yemen."

This whole drama is completely unnecessary. The US and the Saudis want to show who is boss. They simply do not want to allow an Iranian ship to dock in Yemen. Even though it would be much more efficient for the ship to land in Hodeida and unload the aid, showing who is boss is more important and hence the ship must go to Djibouti and then presumably the goods would need to be loaded on another ship. If the ship is just to be inspected in Djibouti and then allowed to go to Hodeida, this would also be quite unnecessary since the inspection by the UN could be done equally as well in Hodeida.
...