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On Friday it was reported that Russia is providing Iran with targeting intelligence to help it strike U.S. forces, just as the U.S. is doing for Ukraine to strike Russian forces.
The intelligence sharing includes the location of American military vessels and aircraft in the Middle East. Tehran uses the information for the telemetry of their missile attacks. Three unnamed officials “familiar with the intelligence” first reported this development to The Washington Post.
“The assistance, which has not been previously reported, signals that the rapidly expanding conflict now features one of America’s chief nuclear-armed competitors with exquisite intelligence capabilities,” The Washington Post said. “Since the war began Saturday, Russia has passed Iran the locations of U.S. military assets, including warships and aircraft, said the three officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.”
Iran is shaping up to be Russia’s “Ukraine” – a proxy nation it can fight vicariously through.
Analysts said that the sharing of intelligence would fit the pattern of Iran’s strikes against U.S. forces, including command and control infrastructure, radars and temporary structures, like the one in Kuwait where six service members were killed.
The CIA’s station at the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s capital, also was struck in recent days.
Iran is “making very precise hits on early warning radars or over-the-horizon radars,” said Dara Massicot, an expert on the Russian military at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “They’re doing this in a very targeted way. They’re going after command and control,” she added.
Iran possesses only a handful of military-grade satellites, and no satellite constellation of its own, which would make imagery provided by Russia’s much more advanced space capabilities highly valuable — particularly as the Kremlin has honed its own targeting after years of war in Ukraine, Massicot said.
Nicole Grajewski, who studies Iran’s cooperation with Russia at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, said that there had been a high level of “sophistication” in the Iranian retaliatory strikes, both in what Tehran has targeted and in its ability in some cases to overwhelm U.S. and allied defenses.
“They’re getting through air defenses,” she said, noting that the quality of Iran’s strikes appeared to have improved even from its 12-day war with Israel last summer.
The CIA and the Pentagon declined to comment to The Washington Post.
Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov also declined to comment on the matter, while Moscow’s official position on the war is that it is an “unprovoked act of armed aggression.”
On Wednesday Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that “although we are hearing claims from the U.S. and Israel that they are even supposedly defending themselves… no one attacked them, no one threatened them.”
Indeed, Trump himself confirmed on Wednesday that the U.S. went to war for Israel after the Jewish State had decided they will attack Iran.
“When asked this week about his message to Russia and China, which are among Iran’s most powerful backers, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that he didn’t have one and that ‘they’re not really a factor here’,” The Washington Post said.
Fascinatingly, a 2009 think tank white paper detailed every step of the conflict which is now unfolding.
While Ukraine began to be provided targeting intel by the U.S. under President-via-autopen Joe Biden, President Donald Trump continued the practice, only cutting it off temporarily when upset with the country’s Dictator Vladimir Zelensky.
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