The incident is another blow to the Iranian armed forces. The Islamic Republic’s navy mistakenly targeted one of its own vessels on Sunday, May 10, during a military exercise. Details of the proceedings are not yet known but on Monday, an official statement reported 19 dead and 15 wounded aboard the Konarak, a logistics support building. Presumably caused by a shooting error aboard the frigate Jamaran, whose crew trained in missile launching in the Gulf of Oman, the Konarak allegedly hit in place of a training target he was too close to.
Accidental targeting of Konarak by another building of the Iranian navy comes while Tehran has put forward in recent months the increase in its production capacity for military equipment. Iran has had some notable successes, such as the launch of a military satellite at the end of April, demonstrating its mastery of certain necessary technologies and the production of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The Sunday incident, however, was a dismal failure. It indeed implies the Jamaran, a ship symbolizing the efforts of the Islamic Republic to strengthen its maritime military capabilities autonomously, without depending on foreign technology, to which the sanctions regime it is subjected to prohibits it from accessing. Equipped with Noor anti-ship missiles, the Jamaran was inaugurated by the Guide to the Islamic Revolution, Ali Khamenei, in person, in 2010.
Credibility of authorities affected
"The Iranians maintain the idea that they can build their defense infrastructure alone and the Jamaran is in this respect their masterpiece in the maritime field ", explains Fabian Hinz, a specialist in the Iranian armed forces at the James Martin Center for studies on non-proliferation. He said the ship's crew could be busy testing a new anti-ship missile with greater range than the systems currently used by the Iranian navy, an innovation recently mentioned by Iranian military officials.
The new deadly incident comes four months after the Iranian air defense destroyed a Ukrainian International Airlines airliner over Tehran that killed 176 passengers. The civilian aircraft was mistaken by an operator for an opposing cruise missile approaching the capital of the Islamic Republic. The disaster came hours after an Iranian ballistic missile was fired at American forces stationed at the Ain Al-Assad base in Iraq. The strike, whose level of sophistication had left its mark on observers, came in retaliation for the assassination of Iranian General Ghassem Soleimani in an American drone fire on January 3 in Baghdad.
If the death of the officer, who had become the figurehead and the symbol of Iran's external action in the region, had provoked a brief moment of national communion, the attitude of the authorities following the The destruction of the Ukrainian Boeing, whose passengers were mainly Iranian or of Iranian origin, had then severely damaged the credibility of the authorities. After hiding the truth, the Revolutionary Guards, the regime’s ideological army and the murderers, were forced to admit their responsibilities.
A few weeks later, the magnitude of the Covid-19 epidemic in the country was in turn hidden from the population, the country soon becoming the main regional focus of the virus. Precipitated from crisis to crisis, Iran is still targeted by the policy of "Maximum pressure" Decided by the Trump administration, whose unilateral sanctions stiffen the economy of the country, hamper the actions of its authorities and weigh on the daily life of ordinary Iranians.
