Massive war games light up Iran's skies
Leaders of Iran’s armed forces said they were testing air defense preparedness in a large-scale exercise involving half of the country’s airspace.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and regular army conducted a joint air defense exercise to test a wide array of military equipment, including missile and radar systems, electronic warfare, reconnaissance and communications tools and monitoring networks.
According to military spokesman Abbas Farajpour, the drills were conducted in a vast area including half of Iran's airspace with the purpose of testing preparedness and boosting the operational experience to protect one of the country’s “sensitive” centers, which he did not specify. “Maintaining security is a job with no leave, and invites constant readiness among armed forces against any threat,” he added.
The exercise followed some of Iran’s regional foes, including the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, normalizing ties with Israel. Tehran has denounced the Arab-Israeli rapprochement as a destabilizing factor.
During the war games, medium and high-altitude objects were targeted by two missile defense systems developed by the IRGC and the army. Using epic terms in praise of the exercise, an IRGC-linked media outlet warned, “Any eagle transgressing Iran’s territorial airspace [will] find its wings clipped.”
