Russia denies its missiles landed in Iran
Four of 26 rockets went awry, U.S. military officials claim
BRUSSELS— Four cruise missiles, among 26 fired by Russia from warships in the Caspian Sea at targets in Syria, crashed in a rural area of northern Iran, senior U.S. officials said Thursday.
Russian and Iranian officials dismissed the American claim as nonsense.
It was unclear exactly where in Iran the missiles might have landed, or whether there had been any casualties or damage. The U.S. officials said the flight path of the Russian cruise missiles, called Kalibrs, would have taken them across northern sections of Iran and Iraq en route to Syria.
Of the initial 26-missile volley, the officials said, four went awry and hit northern Iran, according to technical sources of information like satellite imagery.
The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss military intelligence.
U.S. officials also said that some sort of problem with the missiles should not have been unexpected, since they had never been fired in wartime.
“This was the first operational test of these in operational conditions,” one official said of the Russian Kalibrs.
News of the apparent crashes came as U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter sharply criticized what he called Russia’s “unprofessional” conduct in its incursion into Syria.
Speaking at a NATO news conference in Brussels, Carter said that Moscow had fired the barrage of cruise missiles with no advance notice.
Carter warned that “in coming days, the Russians will begin to suffer casualties.”
NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg talked tough about Moscow’s expanding military activity in Syria, but the alliance’s chief response to the Russian airstrikes and cruise missile attacks was a public pledge to help member nation Turkey if necessary.
“NATO is able and ready to defend all allies, including Turkey, against any threat,” Stoltenberg declared.
Stoltenberg said NATO had already increased “our capacity, our ability, our preparedness to deploy forces, including to the south, including in Turkey, if needed.” However, pressed about what NATO precisely intended to do to aid Turkey, which shares a border with Syria, Stoltenberg told a news conference the mere existence of a beefed-up alliance response force, as well as a new and highly nimble brigade-sized unit able to deploy within 48 hours, may suffice.
A U.S. defence official said it was something of a surprise that Russia had used cruise missiles to attack Syrian targets, given that those weapons are more commonly used in the face of heavy air defences.
Russia is allied with President Bashar Assad of Syria, so it would presumably not face any opposition from Syrian government forces.
The rebel groups there that Russia has been attacking, including the Islamic State, have no air defences.
U.S. military officials speculated that Russia may simply have wanted to demonstrate its cruise missile capability to the world.
In Moscow, Igor Konashenkov, a spokesman for the Russian military operation in Syria, denied that any of the missiles had fallen short of their targets and landed in Iran.
A few social media users in Iran began linking the reported missile crashes to an explosion in northwestern Iran on Wednesday, when the official Islamic Republic News Agency, quoting the governor of the city of Takab, reported that an “unidentified flying object” had crashed in a mountainous area.
That report also quoted locals as saying the explosion had broken windows in the area.