The vessel was on its way to India through the Strait of Hormuz when it was diverted off course.
Ir us detained in the vicinity of Bandar Abbas on Iran’s coast, directly north of the Strait.
[April 15 2024 ]
Petrochemicals, plastic polymers, and steel products were most significant product types on the vessel when it was seized. Companies named in the shipments include Saudi Basic Industries Corp, Exxon Mobil, and Dow Chemical. Cargo totalling 2,153 teu with a combined value of $93.6 million.
[April 13 2024 ]
Iran’s state-run IRNA said a special forces unit of the Guard’s navy carried out the attack on the vessel, the Portuguese-flagged MSC Aries, a container ship associated with London-based Zodiac Maritime.
Zodiac Maritime is part of Israeli billionaire Eyal Ofer’s Zodiac Group. Zodiac declined to comment and referred questions to MSC. Geneva-based MSC later acknowledged the seizure and said 25 crew had been aboard the vessel. IRNA said the Guard would take the vessel into Iranian territorial waters.
[October 31 2021 B-1 flies over Straits of Hormuz ]
The B-1B Lancer bomber flew Saturday over the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf through which 20% of all oil traded passes. It also flew over the Red Sea, its narrow Bab el-Mandeb Strait and Egypt’s Suez Canal.
[July 23 2019 Amphibious warship USS Boxer {LKD-4} v. drone
The buggy [front]uses highly sensitive radar to detect small incoming targets and then deploys signal blocking technology to sever the link between the drone and its control tower, causing it to fall from the sky.
“We showed the body of the (U.S.) drone that we brought down,” Defense Minister Amir Hatami said. “If anyone claims they brought down our drone, show it. No drone from the Islamic Republic of Iran has been brought down.”
“We observed one UAS crash into the water but did not observe a ‘splash’ for the other,” Brown added. He added that they were two separate incidents but during the same transit through the Strait of Hormuz.
[July 19 2018]
The Marine Corps’ Light Marine Air Defense Integrated System, or LMADIS for short, jammed and brought down the unmanned aircraft.
“All drones belonging to Iran in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz … returned safely to their bases after their mission of identification and control,” Abolfazl Shekarchi, a senior armed forces spokesman, was quoted as saying by the semi-official Tasnim news agency.
“And there is no report of any operational response by USS Boxer.”
The Pentagon said the drone was destroyed by a sophisticated electronic jammer.
A Sea Sparrow missile is launched from the amphibious assault ship USS Boxer (LHD 4) during a missile firing exercise of the coast of California.
Amphibious warship USS Boxer (LHD-4) took down an Iranian drone that U.S. officials say threatened the ship as it entered the Persian Gulf on July 18 2019.
At about 10 a.m. local time, Boxer was transiting Strait of Hormuz when an Iranian fixed-wing drone approached the ship, a defense official told USNI News.
The crew of the ship took “defensive action against the unmanned aerial system to ensure the safety of the ship and the crew,” the official said.
The official would not detail the method in which Boxer downed the drone. The ship is armed with RIM-7 Sea Sparrow short-range anti-ship missiles, and the RIM-116 Rolling Airframe Missile (RAM) and Phalanx CIWS point defense weapons systems. Additionally, the Navy and the Marine Corps have begun to field a wide variety of non-kinetic systems capable of downing a drone by other means.
Boxer ARG is comprised of amphibious assault ship USS Boxer (LHD 4), San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock USS John P Murtha (LPD 26), and Harpers Ferry-class amphibious dock landing ship USS Harpers Ferry (LSD 49). Embarked together with the 11th MEU, commands include “Blackjacks” of Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron (HSC) 21, Assault Craft Unit 5, Naval Beach Group 1, Beachmaster Unit 1, Fleet Surgical Team 5, and Tactical Air Control Squadron 11.
On 5 December 2011, an American Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) was captured by Iranian forces near the city of Kashmar in northeastern Iran. … Obama asked Iran to return the drone. Iran is said to have produced drones based on the captured RQ-170.
Shahed 129
[June 25 2019 Trump blinked, sanctions distract ]
in a shocking twist it subsequently emerged that the same image – albeit in a wider crop – was previously used on a report of a drone being shot down over Yemen two year’s ago.
[July 7 2019] Britain’s ambassador to the United States Kim Darroch said the reason he had changed his mind “didn’t stand up”.
“It’s more likely that he was never fully on board and that he was worried about how this apparent reversal of his 2016 campaign promises would look come 2020,” Darroch wrote, adding that Trump could still trigger a conflict with Iran.
“It’s in the realm of the symbolic.” The sanctions are “a sideshow to a threat of military escalation and all-out conflict,” . They fuel a narrative focussed on Iran rather than the United States—and the fact that Trump blinked when he called off a retaliatory military strike June 20 2019.
Elizabeth Rosenberg, Center for a New American Security
Sanctions are applied to Ali Khamenei directly and three IRGC officers: Alireza Tangsiri, head of the IRGC Navy, Amir Ali Hajizadeh, Commander of the IRGC’s Aerospace Force, and Mohammed Pakpour, head of the IRGC’s Ground Forces.
[June 21 2019 Chris Wallace “Cost to inaction” ||George Conway “resign” ]
Trump thinks he can avoid the quagmire of another Middle East war, but he may already be in too deep. Patrick Cockburn
“Fox and Friends,” Brian Kilmeade: “ in the Middle East, no action looks like weakness. And weakness begets more attacks,”
Wallace said that while there is a “cost to action” there is also a “cost to inaction” if the president threatens to do something and not go forward, specifically referencing former President Obama’s “red line” threat in 2012 to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad over the use of chemical weapons
White House counselor Kellyanne Conway’s husband George …called on him to resign after, at the last minute, he backed away from strikes on Iran.
Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, said June 19 2019 that President Trump must retaliate quickly against Iran to deter other hostile nations like North Korea and Russia from taking “provocative” acts toward the U.S.
“Speaker Nancy Pelosi said June 21 2019 that she was not informed of President Trump’s plans to strike Iran Thursday night, a military action that he said he called off minutes before it was to occur,” the Washington Post reports.
“Traditionally, House and Senate leadership, and chair and ranking members on the national security-related and other key committees are told about an imminent U.S. military action.”
ABC News confirmed Trump called off the attack abruptly, reportedly against the advice of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton.
[june 21 2019] Brent futures were up 72 cents, or 1.1%, to $65.17 a barrel by 1:20 p.m. EDT (1720 GMT), while the most active U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude contract was up 47 cents, or 0.8%, at $57.54.
That put Brent on track to gain about 5% for the week, its first weekly gain in five weeks, and WTI to jump about 10%, which would be its biggest weekly percentage gain since December 2016.
The July WTI contract price added $2.89 Thursday, settling at $56.65 per barrel. The benchmark traded within a range from $54.11 to $57.02.
Brent crude oil for August delivery also rose sharply, gaining $2.63 to end the day at $64.45 per barrel.
Trump said he could not imagine the missile attack on the drone was intentional and he had a feeling “a general or somebody” mistakenly ordered the attack.
Centcom General says it was flying at high altitude in international airspace over the Strait of Hormuz, approximately 34 km from the nearest point of land on the Iranian coast.
[June 20 2018 Navy RQ-4a down, Oil up ]
The debris field is in international waters in the Strait of Hormuz, and if the location of the debris field is confirmed, it would appear to provide physical evidence casting doubt on Iran’s account that it shot down the drone over the southern Iranian province of Hormozgan,
LONDON, June 20 (Reuters) – Oil rose more than 3% towards $64 a barrel on Thursday after Iran shot down a U.S. military drone, raising fears of a military confrontation between Tehran and Washington. London’s Brent North Sea crude up 2.78 percent to $63.54 per barrel in midday trading and New York’s West Texas Intermediate up 3.42 percent to $55.60.
TAMPA, Fla., June 20, 2019 —
“U.S. Central Command can confirm that a U.S. Navy Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (or BAMS-D) ISR aircraft was shot down by an Iranian surface-to-air missile system while operating in international airspace over the Strait of Hormuz at approximately 11:35 p.m. GMT on June 19, 2019.Iranian reports that the aircraft was over Iran are false.
This was an unprovoked attack on a U.S. surveillance asset in international airspace.
The Revolutionary Guard shot down an Air Force RQ-4 drone. U.S. Officials told The Associated Press the downing happened over international airspace in the Strait of Hormuz which at its narrowest point is about 3 kilometers (2 miles) wide. Different accounts could not be immediately reconciled. A new surface-to-air missile battery called Khordad 15 using the Sayyad-3 missile was used. RQ-4 can reach altitudes of 60,000 feet (18.3 km), costs $222.7 million.
Crescent Shift 