Russia likely behind Iran's increased precision in hitting Gulf targets
Despite the US secretary of war rebuffing a question about Russia's involvement in the US-Israeli war with Iran this week, it appears Moscow's intelligence could be helping to refine Iran's targeting of American assets in the region.
The Washington Post, citing unnamed US officials, reported that Iran is now better able to track US warships and aircraft because of assistance from its longtime ally.
Middle East Eye has reached out to the State Department for confirmation, but did not receive a response in time for publication.
Just over a year ago, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a comprehensive 20-year strategic cooperation agreement, which includes strengthening military ties, amid international isolation and increasingly harsh US sanctions.
This week, satellite images show Iran likely destroyed Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (Thaad) radars in three countries in the region. If confirmed, the attacks would be a massive setback for the US and its allies, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Jordan, all of which are exclusively dependent on Washington for protection.
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The Thaad defence system is designed to detect incoming short, medium, and long-range ballistic missiles. It is a product of the US weapons giant, Lockheed Martin.
"Not only is there an improvement of Iran's targeting and what they're targeting, but there's existing cooperation between Iran and Russia in the intelligence domain, and this is something that Russia could offer Iran," without actually getting involved in the war, Nicole Grajewski, the author of Russia and Iran: Partners in Defiance from Syria to Ukraine, told MEE.
While "a lot of this is going to be space-based," she added, "Russia's space-based capabilities are nothing compared to the United States. There's a lot of gaps in their coverage."
A CNN report this week outlined just how much destruction Iran has caused US facilities as it retaliates, in what many observers have described as an "existential" fight for Tehran.
'Some of the targets that they’ve hit - that’s impressive to an extent'
- Nicole Grajewski, author
At least nine US bases were hit by Iranian missiles and drones in the first 48 hours of the war, with little signs of a slowdown.
On Monday, an Iranian drone hit a previously undisclosed CIA station in the Saudi capital, Riyadh.
"Some of the targets that they've hit - that's impressive to an extent," Grajewski said.
"Even when they're having their command and control disrupted. It looks like they were still able to put together strike packages that even in the other iterations of the conflict with Israel would have been considered pretty advanced or pretty sophisticated."
Still, she added, "This isn't something that's radically going to transform the war."
American casualties
There are so far six US military personnel who have been publicly declared killed, all of them in Kuwait. The country seems to have sustained the most damage to its numerous US-operated military sites.
Judging by the president's own words, he may be priming the public for larger casualty numbers to come.
"Sadly, there will likely be more before it ends," Trump said earlier this week. "That's the way it is."
The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Dan Cain, echoed that sentiment.
"We expect to take additional losses, and as always, we will work to minimise US losses," he told reporters at a Pentagon press conference.
Andrew Leber, assistant professor at Tulane University’s department of political science and Middle East and North Africa studies programme, told MEE the US has "complete informational control over what happens" on its bases in the Gulf, indicating there may be further unannounced losses.
To that end, a now-deleted LinkedIn job posting by government contractor Joint Technology Solution Inc this week called for part-time "Personal Effects Specialists" to inventory and process the personal items of US personnel killed overseas.
So far in this war with Iran, 18 Americans have sustained serious wounds, US Central Command revealed in its last update on 2 March.
On 4 March, it denied Iran's claim of having killed 100 American troops.
It's unclear whether the number of wounded includes the two US personnel that The Washington Post revealed were inside a Crowne Plaza hotel in the Bahraini capital, Manama, on 1 March, when it was hit by an Iranian strike. The paper cited an internal State Department cable.
Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told Al Jazeera earlier this week that the Americans "evacuated their bases and moved into hotels, turning civilians into human shields".
Bahrain's government and its Gulf partners decried the attack on civilian areas.
"My understanding of the policy in Bahrain is actually that they try to spread US personnel out as much as possible to basically every hotel in Bahrain, because if a hotel were bombed, then you would lose a lot of personnel," Leber, who is also a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told MEE.
The nature of the hotel attack, in particular, also suggests there was a level of human intelligence-gathering involved, not just satellite surveillance.
"Iran does have a pretty large network of intelligence assets in the Gulf, so that's also plausible as well," Grajewski noted.
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