The Iranian’s Navy’s 86th Flotilla – consisting of the Dena frigate and the Makran forward base ship, arrived in the southwestern Omani port of Salalah on Sunday on the final leg of its world-spanning tour, which included a much-publicized stopover in the Western hemisphere, to Washington’s annoyance.
The flotilla, which has traveled over 63,000 km, broke the record set by the Makran and the Sahand in 2021.
The United States military closely monitored the flotilla along its route, with the State Department expressing its “deep disappointment” over Brazil’s decision to allow the Iranian warships to dock in Rio. Assistant Secretary of State Brian Nichols told a Congressional committee that the Islamic Republic’s vessels “have no place in our hemisphere,” parroting the rhetoric of the 19th century’s Monroe Doctrine, which holds that the entire Western Hemisphere is the exclusive security domain of the United States.
Washington threatened slap new sanctions on Tehran if the Iranian flotilla sailed through the Panama Canal, with a State Department spokesman warning in February that the US has “a number of tools in our tool belt available to hold the regime accountable.”
The same month, US special envoy for Iran Robert Malley announced sanctions against the Makran and the Dena, and warned that “any person or entity conducting transactions that involve these ships risks exposure to US sanctions themselves.”
Former Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush penned a fiery op-ed calling on Washington to pressure Panama City into choosing “between aiding a misogynistic and murderous regime or clearly aligning itself with the free world.”
Commenting on the 86th's Flotilla's successful round-the-world journey on Saturday, Iranian Navy commander Shahram Irani called US threats little more than an empty “rant.”
“They could not even prevent our flotilla from sailing into the Panama Canal…This was another slap in the face of the Great Satan,” Irani said, using the term often used to refer to the United States since the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
According to Irani, Iran also got some complaints from France, which accused Tehran of violating its exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in French Polynesia during its journey through the Pacific.
“The French own some islands in the Pacific. Unfortunately, they were not aware of their own regulations and caused disturbances for us, to which we responded with the language of the law. The recent incident was a big blow to the French in the field of international shipping, and they never talked about it,” the commander said.
The Makran is a 121,000 ton forward base ship which can be customized with an assortment of anti-air, anti-ship and land attack missiles, and radar systems placed on its football field-sized deck, and features a helicopter landing deck with room for as many as seven helicopters. The warship is a converted oil tanker, and as such can hold tens of thousands of tons of fuel for long, globe-spanning journeys. The Dena is a Moudge-class frigate (Iran classifies this class of warships as destroyers) with a 1,500 ton displacement, advanced radars, a 76 mm naval gun, as well as cannon, heavy machine gun and close-in weapons, surface to air, surface to surface missiles and anti-submarine warfare torpedoes.
The Makran has endowed Iran’s Navy with a global reach never before enjoyed by the Islamic Republic. In March, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Navy took delivery of its own large ocean-going vessel, the 36,000 ton Shahid Mahdavi. That warship – another conversion, this time from a Panamax container ship, can be equipped with an array of onboard missile systems, drones and speedboats, and is fitted with an Iranian-made 3D phased array radar, electronic warfare and communications systems.