09 February 2007
Iran's Revolutionary Guard has successfully tested Soviet-designed SSN-4 Sark anti-ship missiles, Iranian television reported. The tests were part of military exercises that began on Wednesday in southern Iran, and all missiles successfully hit training targets at sea, the channel said. Iranian military experts say the SSN-4 Sark missiles, designed in the 1960s in the Soviet Union, had a hitting range of 300 km (186 miles) and were capable of reaching all classes of ships in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, as well as in the northern part of the Indian Ocean. The Revolutionary Guards are an ideological wing of the Islamic Republic's armed forces and have a command structure separate from the regular military. They regularly hold exercises in the Gulf area that are widely seen as deliberate demonstrations of military power.
On Wednesday, Iran also successfully tested an air defense missile system recently supplied by Russia. In late January, Russia delivered 29 TOR-M1 anti-aircraft missile systems to Iran under a US$ 700 million contract signed at the end of 2005. Russia's weapons supplies to Iran have alarmed the United States, which imposed new sanctions on the Russian government's official arms dealer Rosoboronexport and on two other companies for the sale of the TOR-M1 to Iran.
On Thursday, Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that if the United States were to attack Iran, the country would respond by striking US interests all over the world. His comments came on the same day that Tehran's ambassador to the United Nations, Javad Zarif, warned in a column in the "New York Times" that efforts to isolate Iran would backfire on the United States and increase sectarian tensions in the Middle East, including in Iraq. The United States was reaping "the expected bitter fruits of its ill-conceived adventurism," he wrote, adding, "But rather than face these unpleasant facts, the United States administration is trying to sell an escalated version of the same failed policy. It does this by trying to make Iran its scapegoat and fabricating evidence of Iranian activities in Iraq," he said. Meeting with fellow NATO defense ministers in the Spanish city of Seville, US Defense secretary Robert Gates said: "We are not planning for a war with Iran." At a press conference, Gates also said that the decision announced in January to send a second US aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf region would not mean that the US was planning for a war with Iran. He said the purpose was to underscore to US allies as well as potential adversaries that the Gulf was of vital interest to the US. Gates added that the United States' main aim with regard to Iranian influence inside Iraq was to counter what he called networks providing explosives used to make roadside bombs that are powerful enough to destroy a US tank.
Meanwhile, Iran's intelligence minister Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejeie announced that 100 spies working for the US and Israeli secret services in border areas of Iran had been identified and caught. The minister added that a number of Iranians who wanted to take part in spying courses abroad had also been arrested. "We were able to identify and arrest all those who wanted to take part in espionage course abroad under the guise of taking part in educational courses," Mohseni Ejeie said, without elaborating. Early last month, the Iranian member of parliament Ahmad Tavakoli said that Iran had arrested a spy working in the parliament's research center, and that he had been passing information on its nuclear program to the outlawed armed opposition group People's Mujahedeen. Iranian authorities claim that the US supports armed insurgent groups in the country's border provinces, whose population includes Kurd, Arab and Baluch ethnic minorities.
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