Amid US tension, Iran builds fake aircraft carrier to attack

The faux foe, seen in satellite photographs obtained on Tuesday by The Associated Press, resembles the Nimitz-class carriers that the US Navy routinely sails into the Persian Gulf from the Strait of Hormuz, its narrow mouth where 20 percent of all the world's oil passes through.

While not yet acknowledged by Iranian officials, the replica's appearance in the port city of Bandar Abbas suggests Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard is preparing an encore of a similar mock-sinking it conducted in 2015.

It also comes as Iran announced on Tuesday it will execute a man it accused of sharing details on the movements of the Guard's Gen. Qassem Soleimani, whom the US killed in a January drone strike in Baghdad.

The replica carries 16 mock-ups of fighter jets on its deck, according to satellite photos taken by Maxar Technologies.

The vessel appears to be some 200 meters long and 50 meters wide. A real Nimitz is over 300 meters long and 75 meters wide.

The fake carrier sits just a short distance away from the parking lot in which the Guard unveiled over 100 new speedboats in May, the kind it routinely employs in tense encounters between Iranian sailors and the US Navy. Those boats carry both mounted machine guns and missiles.

The mock-up strongly resembles a similar one used in February 2015 during a military exercise called "Great Prophet 9". During that drill, Iran swarmed the fake aircraft carrier with speedboats firing machine guns and rockets. Surface-to-sea missiles later targeted and destroyed the fake carrier.

"American aircraft carriers are very big ammunition depots housing a lot of missiles, rockets, torpedoes and everything else," the Guard’s then-navy chief, Adm. Ali Fadavi, said on state television at the time.

That drill, however, came as Iran and world powers remained locked in negotiations over Tehran's nuclear program. Today, the deal born of those negotiations is in tatters. President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew America from the accord in May 2018. Iran later responded by slowly abandoning nearly every tenant of the agreement, though it still allows UN inspectors access to its nuclear sites.

Last summer saw a series of attacks and incidents further ramp up tensions between Iran and the US. They reached a crescendo with the January 3, strike near Baghdad International Airport that killed Soleimani, head of the Guard's expeditionary Quds, or Jerusalem, Force.

The US Navy's Bahrain-based 5th Fleet, which patrols Mideast waters, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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