The maritime surveillance aircraft made contact with the base ship Makran and her escort west of the French EEZ. The Iranian tandem is circumnavigating the globe, a first for Tehran.
Crossing Iranian navy ships off French Polynesia is not common. And yet, this is what happened, French images published this Sunday in support. “The Falcon 200* [de la Marine nationale] established contact with two Iranian navy ships to the west of the EEZ [zone économique exclusive] French Polynesian. They declared their intention to cross it south of the Marquesas for transpacific transit“, announced this Sunday ALPACI, the commander of the Pacific ocean sea zoneone of the territorial divisions of the French Navy.
The images, taken from the sky at low altitude, suggest two hulls, only one of which has a typically military profile. It’s about Jamaran, a small, lightly armed gunship commissioned in 2010, pompously referred to as a destroyer by the Iranians, but which most navies would consider a mere corvette. The second looks like a big civilian tanker from afar. Commissioned in 2021, the Makran“multipurpose base ship– also the largest building in the Iranian fleet, at 228 meters long and over 110,000 tons displacement – is basically a militarized tanker whose deck has been raised by a helicopter platform at the front.
Cruising south of the Marquesas Islands, the small Iranian naval group is more than 15,000 kilometers from the Iranian coast. If the imposing Makran is designed for long distances, you have to imagine the discomfort in which the sailors of the modest Jamaran, not very suitable for long journeys, in particular the crossing of the entire Pacific. The crew will however have to get used to it since the Iranians launched on October 1, 2022 in a circumnavigation around the globe, a first for Tehran.
Naval projection
Rare are the navies to embark on such an adventure which necessarily lasts several months and proves difficult both for the ships and for the men. The Iranian navy – apart from these large base ships which constitute the bulk of its offshore fleet – is also not sized to make long voyages. It is a mainly coastal fleet, comfortable in the shallow waters of the Persian Gulf where miniature submarines and speedboats are used to harass opposing forces in an asymmetrical logic. For the rest, the Iranian naval industry has painfully succeeded in ten years in putting into service four of these “destroyers» Mudgeone of which has already sunk in the Caspian Sea in 2018.
But, caught in a vice by international sanctions, the Islamic Republic wants to go beyond its vocation of naval guerrilla warfare near its coasts by demonstrating a real capacity of projection towards the high seas. That is the ambition of this unprecedented circumnavigation , while Tehran seeks to export its hydrocarbons and secure its supplies of technologies and raw materials, while ensuring maritime relations with its allies, such as Moscow or Beijing. Already, in 2021, the same base ship Makranescorted this time by the corvette sahand – sister ship from Jamaran -, had made a long trip to the Baltic Sea where the Iranians had been able to participate in the great Russian naval parade in Saint Petersburg.
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“If we are present in the oceans today, the mountain behind us is the people and their prayers“, had declared on October 1 the head of the Iranian navy, Admiral Shahram Irani, during the departure of the naval group. While, since September, the Islamic Republic has been shaken by a massive, violently repressed protest movement, it is not certain that the Makran and the Jamaran can count on this mountain and spiritual support. But that does not prevent them from crossing today, and in an unprecedented way, in the middle of the Pacific, just a stone’s throw from the French overseas coasts.