Iran Seizes Ten American Sailors and Two Navy Boats, Accuses U.S. of 'Snooping'

This is not good news:

The crews of two small Navy boats were picked up by the Iranian authorities on Tuesday after commanders lost contact with the vessels, and Pentagon officials said that Iran had agreed to return the sailors soon.

An official said that the boats appeared to have drifted into Iranian territorial waters after one of them experienced mechanical problems. The boats were moving between Kuwait and Bahrain when contact was lost late in the afternoon, a Defense Department official said.

It was unclear how contact had been lost, and Navy officials in Washington said they were trying to determine what had happened. One official said the two vessels had failed to make a scheduled rendezvous with a larger ship to refuel.

Iran, for its part, is accusing the sailors of “snooping:”

The semifofficial Fars news agency in Iran said that the boats had illegally traveled more than a mile into Iranian territorial waters near Farsi Island, in the Persian Gulf. It said that forces of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Navy had confiscated GPS equipment, which would “prove that the American ships where ‘snooping’ around in Iranian waters.”

For now, Pentagon officials are hopeful the sailors won’t be held long, but the incident is coming on the heels of numerous Iranian provocations, including a ballistic missile test and a rocket launch close to an American aircraft carrier. Moreover, this isn’t the first time Iran has seized sailors it claimed strayed into its territorial waters. In 2007, Iran seized 15 British sailors and held them for almost two weeks.

That same year Iran attempted to seize a U.S. patrol in Iraq, triggering a deadly firefight in Diyala Province – not far from where I served:

The soldiers who were there still talk about the September 7 firefight on the Iran-Iraq border in whispers. At Forward Operating Base Warhorse, the main U.S. military outpost in Iraq’s eastern Diyala Province bordering Iran, U.S. troops recount events reluctantly, offering details only on condition that they remain nameless. Everyone seems to sense the possible consequences of revealing that a clash between U.S. and Iranian forces had turned deadly. And although the Pentagon has acknowledged that a firefight took place, it says it cannot say anything more. “For that level of detail, you’re going to have to ask the [U.S.] military in Baghdad,” says Army Lieut. Col. Mark Ballesteros. “We don’t know anything about it.”

When the patrol attempted to escape, Iranian forces opened fire:

Army officials say the Iranian troops fired first with small arms and rocket-propelled grenades, and that U.S. troops fell further back into Iraqi territory, while four Iraqi army soldiers, one interpreter and one Iraqi border guard remained in the hands of the Iranians.

The official release says there were no casualties among the Americans, and makes no mention of any on the Iranian side. U.S. soldiers present at the firefight, however, tell TIME that American forces killed at least one Iranian soldier who had been aiming a rocket-propelled grenade at their convoy of Humvees.

 

While it’s entirely possible that the current official story is true — and the matter will be resolved within a day — the 2007 incidents should remind us that Iran can and does play deadly games with the U.S. and its allies. Right now we have only fragments of a story. The full account of what just happened in the Persian Gulf may be far more interesting — and dangerous — than we currently know.