Iran fires at, detains and boards U.S. ship in Gulf

B00Mer

B00Mer

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Iran fires at, detains and boards U.S. ship in Gulf



Iran has opened fire at a U.S. cargo ship and directed it to Bandar Abbas port on the southern coast of Iran, Al Arabiya News Channel has reported on Tuesday.

A Pentagon spokesman confirmed to Reuters that Iranian forces had boarded a Marshall Island-flagged vessel, the MV Maersk Tigris, in the Gulf.

The Pentagon spokesman said the incident occurred when the Maersk Tigris was passing through the Strait of Hormuz. A U.S. government official said the ship was intercepted by the Naval force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) at 0905 GMT.

U.S. planes and a destroyer were monitoring the situation after the vessel, the MV Maersk Tigris, made a distress call in the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most important oil shipping channels.

The ship had no U.S. citizens aboard, the spokesman said, contradicting earlier reports which said there were 34 U.S. sailors on board. The company managing the vessel told a Danish news channel there were 24 crew members, mostly from Eastern Europe and Asia.

Reuters tracking data showed the Maersk, a 65,000-tonne container ship, off the Iranian coast between the islands of Qeshm and Hormuz. It was listed as sailing from the Saudi port of Jeddah, bound for the United Arab Emirates port of Jebel Ali.

The incident came as the United States and five other global powers aim to secure a final nuclear deal with Iran by the end of June.

Under the accord Tehran, which denies seeking to build nuclear weapons, would win sanctions relief in return for slashing the number of its uranium enrichment centrifuges and accepting intrusive international inspections.

Court Order

Iran’s Tasnim news agency quoted an unidentified source who sought to play down the incident, saying it was a civil matter with no military or political dimension. But the Pentagon described it as an apparent provocation.

Iran’s Fars news agency said the ship was seized at the request of Iran’s ports authority under a court order.

But a spokesman for the Singapore-based company that manages the vessel, which usually includes hiring the crew, Rickmers Shipmanagement, said he did not know why Iran had taken action.

Spokesman Cor Radings confirmed to Danish TV2 news channel that Iranian forces fired warning shots at the container ship and boarded it, and said the company was concerned for the crew.

The vessel had been following a normal commercial route between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, he said.

A U.S. government official said the ship was intercepted by the Naval force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) at 0905 GMT.

Another U.S. official said that when the warning shots were fired, the Maersk Tigris issued a distress call which was received by U.S. forces operating in the region.

The closest U.S. warship was more than 60 miles away, he said, and the U.S. military instructed destroyer USS Farragut to head towards the cargo ship, which was passing through the Strait of Hormuz at the time.



Some 17 million barrels per day (bpd), or about 30 percent of all seaborne-traded oil, passed through the channel in 2013, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Iran has in the past sometimes threatened to block the strait to advance its opposition to sanctions imposed over its nuclear program.

The channel is a narrow strip of water separating Oman and Iran. It connects the biggest Gulf oil producers, such as Saudi Arabia, with the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea.

At its narrowest point, the strait is 33 km (21 miles) across and consists of 2-mile wide navigable channels for inbound and outbound shipping and a 2-mile-wide buffer zone.

source: http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2015/04/28/Iran-holds-U-S-ship-34-sailors-.html
 
Mahan

Mahan

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Iranian forces have boarded a ship carrying Marshall Islands flag in Persian Gulf, the US Defense Ministry says.
The incident took place in the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday after the ship, a Marshall Islands-flagged cargo vessel with 34 crew aboard, reportedly trespassed on Iranian waters.
Reports say that Iranian naval forces fired warning shots across the bow of the vessels.
According to Colonel SteveWarren, a Pentagon spokesman, the captain of the vessel had to comply with the orders of the Iranian forces after the warning shots.
The cargo ship "complied with the Iranian demand and proceeded into Iranian waters in the vicinity of Larak Island," Warren said.
He further noted that there have been no US nationals in the vessel and nobody has suffered injuries in the incident.
Following the incident, the Marshall Islands-flagged ship sent distress call to USS Farragut, but the destroyerleft after Iranian forces told it not to intervene.
The destroyer was directed "to proceed at best speed to the nearest location of the Maersk Tigris," he said.
According to Press TV, the cargo ship was seized due to legal issues, with an Iranian Foreign Ministry source telling Press TV that the ship has been seized over financial violations.
PressTV-Iran forces board ship in Persian Gulf

WHY YOU DONT SPEAK ABOUT THIS ?? :
An Iranian cargo plane carrying medical aid and foodstuff for crisis-hit people in Yemen has been forced to return as Riyadh pushes ahead with its deadly airstrikes against the Arab state

Press TV has learned that the Iranian aircraft, which had earlier received permits from Omani and Yemeni aviation officials to cross into Yemen’s airspace, could not land at the international airport in the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, as Saudi warplanes were violently striking the runway of the civil airport.
The development comes days after Saudi fighter jets intercepted an Iranian airplane, carrying humanitarian aid to Yemen, and prevented it from entering the Yemeni airspace on April 22.
Following Riyadh’s interception of the Iranian aid flight, Iran’s Foreign Ministry summoned Saudi Arabia’s chargé d'affaires in Tehran to express its protest over the move.
An Iranian Foreign Ministry official said the Saudi move came after the Iranian Red Crescent Society (IRCS) had obtained the necessary permission to fly in the Oman-Yemen route and send a plane in coordination with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in order to fly Yemeni patients back to Iran and distribute medical aid to the injured in the war-wracked country.
Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister for Arab and African Affairs Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said on Sunday that Saudi Arabia’s blockade of Yemen and its prevention of the delivery of the Islamic Republic’s humanitarian aid to the country will not go unanswered.
“We consider all options for helping the Yemeni people and immediate dispatch of humanitarian aid and transfer of the injured,” he noted.
Houthi Ansarullah fighters stand in the rubble after a Saudi airstrike in the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, on April 28, 2015. © AFPSaudi Arabia launched its air campaign against Yemen on March 26 - without a United Nations mandate - in a bid to undermine the Houthi Ansarullah movement and to restore power to the country’s fugitive former president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, who is a staunch ally of Riyadh.
On April 21, Riyadh announced the end of the first phase of its unlawful military operation, which has claimed the lives of nearly 1,000 people so far, but airstrikes have continued with Saudi bombers targeting different areas across the country in a new phase.
According to Yemen’s Health Ministry, the month-long Saudi aggression has killed nearly 150 children and around 100 women.

 
EagleSmack

EagleSmack

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Of course!

"The US navy patrolling the area have on a number of occasions rescued Iranian ships. The latest incident was in January when a US warship secured the release of 13 Iranian fishermen near the entrance to the Gulf who had been held captive by pirates for 45 days"

Now quit acting like Pirates!
 
C

Curious Cdn

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Maybe, the mighty Persian Navy should try detaining and boarding a Nimitz Class Carrier. That ought to teach the Great Satan a lesson!
 
gopher

gopher

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Mahan said:
yes of course !!!!


Iran navy saves US cargo ship from pirates - Telegraph
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Overstretching the Specter of Iranian Imperialism



Overstretching the Specter of Iranian Imperialism | The National Interest Blog




Opponents of the nuclear agreement (really, of any agreement) with Iran continue, in an effort to divert attention from the relative advantages of having versus not having negotiated restrictions on Iran's nuclear program, to present an image of Iran as a ruthless and relentless imperialist intent on gaining control of the entire Middle East. Iran is repeatedly portrayed as being “on the march” toward regional domination or as “gobbling up” other countries. It never gets explained how this picture, even if it were true, would constitute a reason not to complete a nuclear agreement to ensure that this supposedly relentless imperialist power never gets the most powerful weapon mankind has ever invented. But logic is not what is being exercised here; instead it is more of an emotion-based effort to foster distaste for doing any business with such an ogre-like regime.

An additional twist to this line of anti-agreement agitation is found in an opinion piece by Soner Cagaptay, James Jeffrey, and Mehdi Khalaji, all of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The WINEP authors state that Iran is “a revolutionary power with hegemonic aspirations” and liken it to “hegemonic powers in the past”: Russia, France, Germany, Japan, and Britain—powers that “pushed the world into war” in 1914 and 1939.

Let us recall what those hegemonic powers did. The Russians used their armies to build an empire that encompassed much of the Eurasian land mass and whose successor state still spans eleven time zones. Britain dominated the oceans with the Royal Navy and used its power to build an empire on which the sun never set. France also captured and colonized vast parts of Africa and Asia and, when it had an emperor with sufficient talent, overran most of Europe as well. Japan used military force to seize control of huge parts of the eastern hemisphere. And as for Germany, the WINEP authors themselves—as part of the near-obligatory reference to Nazis in any anti-agreement writing about Iran—remind us that “Nazi Germany sought to dominate Europe from the Atlantic Ocean to the Volga River, reducing other countries to vassal states and establishing complete military, economic and diplomatic control.” Actually, it didn't just seek to do that; Nazi Germany used its preeminent military power to accomplish that objective, at least for a while.

Iran represents nothing that is even remotely akin to any of this, as a matter of accomplishment, capability, or aspiration. Certainly the current Islamic Republic of Iran does not come close, and one would have to reach far back into Persian history to start to get a taste of imperialism even at the reduced scale of the Persians' immediate neighborhood. The twist of the WINEP piece is that the authors reach back in exactly that way. They tell us that “Iran's hegemonic aspirations actually date back to the Safavid Dynasty of the 16th century.” You know that there is a lot of argumentative stretching going on when references to Safavids in the 16th century are used as a basis for opposing an agreement with someone else about a nuclear program in the 21st century.

The Safavid Dynasty faded out before anyone could judge what would have been its willingness to behave as a respectable member of the modern state system. Those other hegemonic powers named in the piece evolved into respectable members of the current international order (although debate related to the Ukraine crisis continues about the attitudes of the Russian government). So the WINEP authors, in trying to argue that Iran never could become a respectable, well-behaving member of the same order, contend that what sets Iran apart is not only that it has hegemonic aspirations but that it is “a revolutionary power with hegemonic aspirations.” And, they say, “Revolutionary hegemonic powers combine the imperialist lust for 'lebensraum' seen in Wilhelmine Germany”—gotta get in those comparisons to the Nazis—“with a religious or millennial worldview that rejects the principles of the classic international order.”

How far divorced from reality this line of argument is emerges from the authors' reference to yet another power whose strengths and ambitions are way out of Iran's league: China, which the authors want us to see as hegemonic but not revolutionary like Iran. They write, “Even today, countries with hegemonic tendencies, like China, acknowledge the legitimacy of this international order.” That is a remarkable statement in view of how much China's international behavior can be explained, and has been explained by innumerable analysts, in terms of China's rejection of aspects of the international order that were established by the West without Chinese participation. A recent example of this aspect of Chinese policy involves the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and other Chinese-created mechanisms as alternatives to Western-dominated international financial institutions.

In contrast, a major feature of the supposedly “revolutionary” Iranian regime's foreign policy has been to try to integrate Iran into as much of the existing international order as possible, notwithstanding its Western origins. (Iran, unlike China, does not have anywhere near the strength to erect alternatives to Western institutions even if it wanted to.) This strand of Iranian policy is reflected not only in what Iranian leaders say but also in what they do, such as participation in this week's Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty review conference. The nuclear agreement currently being negotiated with the P5+1 is itself one of the clearest manifestations of the Iranian policy of making significant concessions and sacrifices in the interest of becoming a more integrated member of the international community.

The depiction of current-day Iran as “revolutionary” in the sense of upsetting the international apple cart requires as much ignoring of recent history and actual patterns of Iranian behavior as does the likening of current Iran to 16th century Safavid imperialism. In the early years of the Islamic Republic there was indeed a belief among many in Tehran that their own revolution might not survive without like-minded revolutions elsewhere in the neighborhood. But with the Islamic Republic having now survived for more than three decades, that perspective is obsolete.

A good case in point is Bahrain, given its Shia majority population and historical Iranian claims. Despite the unrest there in recent years, it has been a long time since any reliable reports of Iranian activity there that could honestly be described as subversive or revolutionary. In stark contrast to whatever minimal Iranian involvement there is in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia rolled its armed forces across the causeway to forcibly put down Shia unrest and prop up the Sunni regime in Manama. A similar contrast prevails today in Yemen, where any Iranian aid to the Houthis, whose rebellion was not instigated by Iran (and during which the Iranians reportedly have counseled restraint to the Houthis) is dwarfed by the Saudi airstrikes that have killed hundreds of civilians. (Tell us again—which Persian Gulf country is the hegemonic power?)

Stories of Iran as a supposedly threatening regional hegemon are not only not a reason to oppose reaching agreements with Tehran; the stories aren't even true.








It is time for the USA and West to stop harassing Iran by pretending it is an imperialist power hell bent on starting Armageddon.
 
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BaalsTears

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On another forum an Iranian has admitted to me that Iran's ICBMs are being built exclusively for use against the American people on American soil. What other reason would Iran have for building InterContinental Ballistic Missiles?
 
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Cliffy

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BaalsTears said:
On another forum an Iranian has admitted to me that Iran's ICBMs are being built exclusively for use against the American people on American soil. What other reason would Iran have for building InterContinental Ballistic Missiles?
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Iran has not attacked anybody in decades. There is no proof of ICBMs and if the Republicans weren't so desperate to stop these nuclear negotiations with Iran, then inspectors would already be in there to prove it. Iran's leaders may be crazy but they ain't stupid. They would be wiped off the face of the Earth before the first bomb hit Yanky soil.
 
B

BaalsTears

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Cliffy said:
Iran has not attacked anybody in decades.
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Iran customarily uses proxies to wage war as in the war against the US in Iraq, and the current war in Yemen. But the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is waging war in Syria and Iraq currently.

There is no proof of ICBMs
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Project Koussar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

and if the Republicans weren't so desperate to stop these nuclear negotiations with Iran,
Click to expand...

Have you heard of Senator Bob Menendez? He's a Democrat who has been leading the charge against the nuke deal.

then inspectors would already be in there to prove it.
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Iran has stated that it won't allow inspection of nuclear facilities at its military bases. That prevents verification.

Iran's leaders may be crazy but they ain't stupid.
Click to expand...

Shiism is a messianic religion in which the return of the Mahdi will not occur in the absence of catastrophe. The leaders of the Iranian Revolution are members of the Twelver Sect. Study up.

They would be wiped off the face of the Earth before the first bomb hit Yanky soil.
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American soil won't be touched directly by a warhead. Instead detonation will be an airburst designed to create an Electro-Magnetic Pulse that throws the US back into the 19th century. That's why NORAD is moving its communication gear back into Cheyenne Mountain.
 
Mahan

Mahan

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BaalsTears said:
Shiism is a messianic religion in which the return of the Mahdi will not occur in the absence of catastrophe. The leaders of the Iranian Revolution are members of the Twelver Sect. Study up.

.
Click to expand...

Disaster in the Apocalypse is shiism prediction and This does not mean that we should make Disaster
 
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