Ship expands Iran Revolutionary Guard's reach
DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES >> Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard is building a massive new support ship near the strategic Strait of Hormuz as it tries to expand its naval presence in waters vital to international energy supplies and beyond, satellite photos obtained by The Associated Press show.
The construction of the Shahid Mahdavi provides the Guard a large, floating base from which to run the small fast boats that largely make up its fleet designed to counter the U.S. Navy and other allied forces in the region.
Its arrival, however, comes after a series of setbacks for both the Guard and Iran's regular navy, including the loss of its largest warship less than a year earlier. As negotiations over Iran's nuclear deal with world powers also founder, further confrontations at sea between Tehran and the West also remain a risk.
“They are looking beyond the Persian Gulf and into the blue waters of the Arabian Sea and the Red Sea and the northern Indian
Ocean,” said Farzin Nadimi, an associate fellow at the Washington Institute for Near-East Policy who studies the Iranian military.
The Shahid Mahdavi appears to be a retrofit of an Iranian cargo ship known as the Sarvin, based off of previous pictures of the vessel which also has a similar curve to its hull.
The Sarvin arrived off Bandar Abbas in late July last year and then switched off its trackers. By Jan. 29, satellite photos from Planet Labs PBC analyzed by the AP showed the vessel at drydock at Shahid Darvishi Marine Industries, a company associated with Iran's Defense Ministry just west of Bandar Abbas.
An image of the Shahid Mahdavi circulated first on social media. The ship appears to have crewed antiaircraft weapons on its bow and stern, according to H.I. Sutton, a military ship expert who first identified the ship as being near Bandar Abbas. A flag for the Revolutionary Guard, showing its logo of a fist gripping an assault rifle with a Quran underneath and a globe behind it, hangs from the ship's bridge.
A high-resolution Planet image taken of the drydock
Saturday on behalf of the AP showed the gun-metal gray Shahid Mahdavi still at the shipyard. Just next to it, one of Iran's Kilo-class, diesel-powered attack submarines appears to be undergoing a major overhaul. Iran is believed to have one Kilo-class sub that's operational while another is also nonfunctional, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
As the image of the Shahid Mahdavi circulated online, the semiofficial Fars
news agency ran a story about the ship. Fars, believed to be close to the Guard, described the vessel as a “mobile naval city” capable of “ensuring the security of Iran's trade lines, as well as the rights of Iranian sailors and fishermen in the high seas.”
“This range of new defense and combat innovations for the construction of heavy vessels, in line with the mass development of light vessels, and equipping them with various arrays
can maintain Iran's authority over the Persian Gulf and the (Gulf) of Oman always in the face of transregional enemies,” Fars said.
Such floating bases have been used before in the region, particularly by the U.S. Navy during the 1980s so-called “Tanker War” after Iraq invaded Iran. As Iranian mines detonated against crude oil shippers amid that war, the Navy began escorting ships out of the Persian Gulf through its narrow mouth, the Strait of Hormuz. The strait to this day sees a fifth of all oil traded pass through it.
During the conflict, U.S. special forces operated from commercial barges that served as forward operating bases. The Navy still works with the idea today — the Mideast-based 5th Fleet has been home to the USS Lewis B. Puller, a massive ship designed off an oil tanker that can host troops and attack helicopters.
“The Shahid Mahdavi looks like it will be configured to be an afloat forward staging base, to use the U.S. Navy term,” said Michael Connell, an expert on Iran at the Virginia-based Center for Naval Analyses. “The Puller was parked for many years in the Persian Gulf and the Iranian military witnessed its utility as a platform for expeditionary warfare and power projection.”
For years, the Guard patrolled the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, while Iran's regular navy patrolled the seas and oceans beyond. Building the Shahid Mahdavi likely gives the Guard the ability to expand its presence into those waters once patrolled by the navy.