The USS Abraham Lincoln in the Arabian Sea. AFP
The drone “aggressively approached” the aircraft carrier with “unclear intent” and “continued to fly toward the ship despite de-escalatory measures taken by US forces operating in international waters,” Central Command spokesman Tim Hawkins claimed in a statement on Tuesday.
He claimed that the shootdown occurred within hours of Iranian forces harassing a US-flagged and US-crewed merchant vessel that was sailing in the Strait of Hormuz.
The Shahed-139 drone was shot down by an F-35C fighter jet from the Lincoln, which, according to Hawkins, was sailing about 500 miles (800 kilometers) from Iran’s southern coast.
He also alleged that, hours later, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps forces harassed the merchant vessel Stena Imperative, the military said.
According to Hawkins' statement, two boats and an Iranian Mohajer drone approached the ship “at high speeds and threatened to board and seize the tanker.”
Iranian officials did not immediately comment on the US account of the incidents, but later Fars News agency said "an IRGC drone was conducting a lawful surveillance operation in international waters, successfully transmitting its information, until it lost contact. We are investigating the cause."
Citing a military source in Iran, the agency reported the withdrawal of the US Navy’s Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group, along with several accompanying destroyers and submarines, from the Persian Gulf to waters South of Yemen near the Gulf of Aden and East of the island of Socotra.
According to the source, the strike group is located at approximately 1,400 kilometers from the port of Chabahar in Southeastern Iran.
The US aggressions come as tensions are high between the longtime adversaries.
President Donald Trump had promised in early January to “rescue” Iranians from their government's crackdown on protesters, which later morphed into a pressure campaign to get Tehran to make a deal over its nuclear program.
That is even as the Republican president insists Iranian nuclear sites were “obliterated” in US strikes in June.
“We have talks going on with Iran. We’ll see how it all works out,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday. Asked what his threshold was for military action against Iran, he declined to elaborate.
“I’d like to see a deal negotiated,” Trump said. “Right now, we’re talking to them, we’re talking to Iran, and if we could work something out, that’d be great. And if we can’t, probably bad things would happen.”
The US shot down the drone hours after Iran’s president said Tuesday that he instructed the country’s foreign minister to “pursue fair and equitable negotiations” with the US, marking one of the first clear signs from Tehran that it wants to try to negotiate with Washington despite a breakdown of talks last summer.
Turkey had been working behind the scenes to make the talks happen there later this week, as US Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff is traveling in the region.
A Turkish official later said that the location of talks was uncertain but that Turkey was ready to support the process.
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