Iranian Army Says It Intercepted US Reaper, Global Hawk Drones During Massive Drills

Iran’s military has warded off a pair of US spy drones apparently attempting to spy on its massive Zolfaqar-1400 drills.

According to a statement released on Tuesday by the drills’ media office, the US drones, a General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper and Northrop Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk, flew into the country’s Flight Information Region and Air Defence Identification Zone near the country’s southeastern coastal and sea areas, where the exercises were taking place.

The military believes the wayward drones intended to gather intelligence on Zolfaqar-1400 – a massive two-day drill taking place on Sunday and Monday, covering over a million square kilometres from the eastern Strait of Hormuz to the northern Indian Ocean, and part of the Red Sea. The drills involved units from the army, Navy, Air Force, and Air Defence troops, and were designed to improve the country’s combat and defence capability, strengthen coordination between various branches of the armed services, and reinforce Iran’s capability to operate in remote international waters.

The US military has not commented on the alleged incident.

The MQ-9 Reaper drone is the US Air Force’s weapon of choice for Washington’s controversial drone strike programme, with the drones used extensively to target mostly poor countries with limited or non-existent air defences in places like Afghanistan, Africa, and Yemen. Although they typically carry weapons, the drones can be configured for reconnaissance operations, and in addition to the military, are used by US Customs and Border Protection on the border with Mexico.

The RQ-4 Global Hawk is a whale-headed UAV designed specifically for intelligence gathering operations. Iran knocked one of these large $220 million stealthy drones out of the sky over the Strait of Hormuz in June 2019 after it entered Iranian airspace and refused to heed warnings to leave. A domestically-developed Khordad 3 air defence system was used to shoot the drone down. Iran collected the UAV’s wreckage, meticulously put it back together and proudly put it on permanent display at its National Aerospace Park in Tehran last year.

The ill-fated Global Hawk is one of two intruding US drones that Iran has managed to take down over the years. In late 2011, a US RQ-170 flying wing-shaped reconnaissance drone was safely brought down in northeastern Iran. The United States initially claimed that the drone had malfunctioned and crashed. However, Iran said that its cyber warfare forces managed to hack into and commandeer the UAV mid-flight, landing it safely. Later, US media reported that the drone may indeed have been captured by jamming its satellite and ground control signals, following a GPS spoofing attack using a Russian-made jamming system. The US later asked Iran to return the drone, with an Iranian company responding by promising to send miniature pink toy versions of the UAV to then-president Barack Obama.

Iran later reportedly worked to reverse engineer the UAV into at least two drone designs – the Shahed 171 Simorgh and the Saegheh.

Iran isn’t the only nation to have shot down US drones. In 2019, Yemen’s Houthi militia, who have been battling a Saudi-led military coalition since 2015, also managed the feat, reportedly dropping two Reaper drones flying over Yemeni airspace in June and August of that year. US Central Command confirmed the first incident and claimed that Iran shot the aircraft down or “enabled” the Houthis to do so. The Houthis reportedly used a 2K12 Kub, NATO designation SA-6 – an ancient Soviet-era surface-to-air missile system hailing from the 1960s, in the June 2019 incident. The USSR provided the former nation of South Yemen with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of military equipment in the 1970s and 1980s, when the country was a Marxist-Leninist one-party socialist republic. The missile system used in the August 2019 incident has not been specified.