New Delhi: Iran has shifted its sights to Europe and is “weighing” attacks on US military bases in the region should the Trump administration escalate the ongoing West Asia conflict, Financial Times reported Wednesday.
Citing two “regime insiders”, the report said Tehran has assessed potential strikes on US assets in south-eastern Europe including in Bulgaria, which last month approved the use of its Bezmer air base for American refueling aircraft.
Cyprus, where a British air base was hit by a drone in March, has also been identified as a possible target in the event of renewed US military action, according to the report.
Iran could use medium-range ballistic missiles, including Shahab, against US facilities in southern and southeastern Europe if it decides to take this course of action, but the response would also depend on the scale of American escalation, the “regime insiders” told the British broadsheet. The preparations, the report adds, reflect a growing sense in Tehran that another round of fighting may be inevitable. Negotiations aimed at reopening the Strait of Hormuz have stalled, while Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, has elevated hard-line figures to senior security and military positions.
Inside Iran, however, there are signs of disagreement over how far Tehran should go.
Some officials worry that the government is overplaying its hand.
Hard-line figures, on the other hand, argue that the US cannot be trusted to honour any agreement and that Iran must impose greater costs on Washington to ensure compliance with any future settlement, the FT report added. Among those hard-line figures is Mohsen Rezaei, a former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) whom Mojtaba Khamenei last week appointed as the country’s security chief.
Iranian analysts interpreted the appointment as evidence that figures such as Mohammed Bagher Ghalibaf, the country’s leading negotiator, have been sidelined as prospects for a durable agreement have faded. “Iran is sending a clear message that if you don’t reach an agreement with Ghalibaf, you have to deal with Rezaei,” one of the insiders told Financial Times, adding, “The message is: ‘Don’t be mad, because I’m madder than you are.’”
US President Donald Trump has repeatedly been making U-turns on his statements on the course of the conflict. After claiming earlier that there were backchannel talks between US and Iran which led to the IRGC calling him “delusional”, Trump Tuesday said that there were “no talks or conversations going on, or scheduled” with Tehran.
The IRGC and other Iranian military commanders have warned that in the situation of a prolonged conflict Tehran could go beyond the strategy deployed in previous confrontations, when Tehran largely targeted American military facilities, energy infrastructure and other assets across West Asia.
The IRGC warned Britain last month that any British base used to launch an attack on Iranian territory would be considered a legitimate target.
Iranian forces have separately examined attacks on undersea fiber-optic cables in the Strait of Hormuz, according to FT, raising the prospect that a new conflict could threaten not only military and energy infrastructure but also critical communications networks.
Trump said last month that Washington would destroy an Iranian bridge or power plant each time Iran attacked a ship in the strait.
One of the insiders quoted in the report said Iran would impose “no limits” on its response to American aggression. “Should the US go too far, Iran will defend itself at any price, go beyond the region and hit Europe too,” FT was told.
The report also highlighted how Iran’s newest weapons systems are capable of striking targets more than 2,000 kilometers away, bringing a larger portion of Europe within reach, according to research compiled by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Iran Watch, and the Financial Times.
Khorramshahr, a liquid-propellant missile, tops the list with a range exceeding 2,000 km and the heaviest payload capacity of the group at 1,800 kg, making it both the longest-range and most destructive missile in Iran’s current arsenal.
Then there is Shahab, the longest missile in Iran’s current arsenal, which has a range of 1,000 km and can carry a payload of up to 1,200 kg.
This is not the first time. After the war began in February, Washington had accused Tehran of firing several missiles toward Diego Garcia, a joint American-British military base in the Indian Ocean roughly 4,000 km away. None reached its target.
Turkey said in March that NATO air defences had intercepted several ballistic missiles launched from Iran. That same month, a drone struck Britain’s Akrotiri air base in Cyprus. Western officials suspected at the time that the drone had been launched by Iranian-backed proxy forces rather than directly by Tehran.
The two people said an Iranian attack last month on an American base in Jordan, which killed three US service members, represented the Islamic Republic’s most precise long-range strike and demonstrated an expanding ability to hit distant targets. “This was also a message to Europe: it can receive missiles, so it should know where it should stand in this war,” one of the insiders was quoted as saying.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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