Iran takes aim at US warships, with Jon Elmer

You are watching and listening to the electronic Kitifada. I am John Elmer. This is the resistance report on day 1,070 of Israel's genocide in Gaza, day 195 of the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran. And I am reporting this live on the afternoon of Thursday, September the 10th. Things always move fast, but we will cover what happened in the last week. And the other things we'll cover next week on the show. So let's start, as we always do with the maps, The war in the Persian Gulf in the Strait of Hormuz has escalated this week with attacks on tankers, taking it to a new level from the sort of slow drip of attacks on tankers that have largely, that have cut oil supplies out of the Strait of Hormuz by significant margins, despite parties trying to tell you that they're getting up to near what they used to be, 20 million barrels a day. It's nowhere close and this week is going to set it back. Let's take a look at the map so you can see the countries that we're going to be talking about. Again, the Iranians have promised that they are going to regionalize this conflict, control the Strait of Hormuz, which you can see there off the tip of the UAE there along the southern coast of Iran, and that they would widen the conflict's duration, that they would extend this conflict, that that is the asset the Iranians have. They wield geography in the strait and they wield the resilience of their country in preparation for this war of choice that the United States launched and now cannot get out of. That is pretty clear. Let's take a look at the Strait of Hormuz because this is where the targeting has happened. You can see on both sides of the Strait of Hormuz, you can see on this, this is from the International Space Station, this photograph, you can see the shallow waters, how shallow the water is in the Strait of Hormuz there. And also that there's two massive anchorage, well, there's a number of massive anchorages, but there's really two large anchorages, one on the outside of the Strait and one on the inside of the Strait where ships are waiting to cross for safer times to cross. Well, those tankers were targeted this week, beginning with strikes by the Americans, and followed up with strikes by the Iranians. The Americans said that they targeted about 10 ships and the Iranians more than a dozen. We haven't gotten confirmation of all of the ships yet. It's interesting how long it takes the maritime trackers to figure out which ships are where, because they're AIS, their system that tells you where they are turned off, their navigation systems are turned off. And so it takes a little bit of work to figure out which tankers where and when. And we usually, as I've shown you on previous shows, usually get that with a few days delay. And that is the case here as well. The Americans targeting of ships, let's look at the targeting map here. Again, almost all in the Omani corridor, that's the US corridor. You can see the dots align there, but again, the targeting includes and will now include ships at port, at pier in Kuwait and Bahrain, in particular the Iranians said in response to American attacks. What we're looking at here is the UK Maritime Transportation Organization, the UK Navy, the US Navy, allied navies tracking of this. We're looking at 67 incidents that have happened in the year to date. So this is the obvious centerpiece of this conflict. And if we take a look at number five, you can watch the Americans actually bragging about sinking these ships. Here you can see them firing on the steering column of a couple of ships here, the Downey and the Stark. and then they are going to sink entirely the kylo that you can see here as an oil tanker, that they're telling the world that they're sinking these oil tankers in creating environmental devastation in the strait. This is what they said. The United States Central Command forces struck three Iranian crude oil carriers on Saturday after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched ballistic missiles towards two US Navy warships patrolling regional waters. A US aircraft carrier guided missile destroyers successfully evaded multiple Iranian attacks. No American personnel were harmed. That's presumably attacks on the USS George Washington or the USS George W. Bush or H.W. Bush that are both now in theater. The Lincoln limped out of theater into Thailand and it is now out of the battlefield after 260 straight days of combat and soldiers jump and sailors jumping overboard. Let's take a look at number six, because this is the first time the Iranians, for their part, they responded by targeting a number of vessels here in the strait, and they showed us these ones. They haven't shown us these attacks on tankers previously. We've just heard about them, but here they are showing the attacks, really dialing up the situation in the Strait of Hormuz that was already setting global markets despite the market manipulation that's been going on. They're not going to be able to kick this down the road forever and that is clear. I am not an economist and I'm not going to get out of my lane on that, but it's obvious that you can't take 20 million barrels off the market each day for 195 days and not have massive implications in the long term. So again, you're seeing drone strikes here. The Iranians have the ability to do this at will, right? They have their entire country to fire on these ships from, they don't need to be fired from the coast or anything like that, and so they're really, if they want this to be a tanker war, the United States wants this to be a tanker war, it can very much be a tanker war, and the Iranians seem to be ready for that and have said that quite clearly before these attacks that they had warned ships in the area eight hours before this attack. They said due to the terrorist attacks of the American military and targeting several oil tankers belonging to Iran, we warn all crew members of oil tankers located in the vicinity of Kuwait and Bahrain which host these terrorists and participate in their wicked acts to leave their ships immediately, whether they are in Anchorage or at the pier. So again, threats on anchorages, which is a significant escalation. Let's take a look at number eight here. Also, every time we get an escalation, we get American drones shot out of the sky. This is an MQ-1C Grey Eagle shot down here by a 358 Iranian missile, the one that has taken down more than 50 MQ-9 Reaper drones in Iran, and 25 more in Yemen. In the next slide, I'll show you what that looks like. That's the Great Eagle. It's kind of a cross between the MQ-9 and the MQ-1 Predator, and it's run by the U.S. military. Let's take a look at the choke points map again, because as was stated, if we look on the left-hand side, that's the Red Sea. The answer, Allah, Yemeni armed forces are pressing down from along the coast to take the Red Sea coast and the Bab al-Mandeb, they've been doing that at lightning speed this week, basically started in July when an Iranian delegation attempted to land at Sana'a airport and the Saudis bombed it, and because of that the answer Allah said enough of this and they have been driving out the Saudi mercenaries attacking Saudi oil fields and that has harmed traffic as well. The choke point of the of the of the Babo Mandeb in the bottom left that you see of the Red Sea and then the Strait of Hormuz is in the upper right there that you see and the Strait of Hormuz used to have 125 vessels crossing a day, 20 million barrels, 20 percent of the world's oil supply In the Red Sea, their commodity vessels are down by 50% since they conflict with the Saudis and the Yemenis has escalated. So this really is a regional conflict. It really is both the major choke points up into the Suez, into the Mediterranean, and out of the Persian Gulf, where most of that oil is in the first place. Let's take a look at the base maps because this, If we put these maps back together, you can see where the previous one, also International Space Station shot, and you can see the maps here. Today, we're really going to be focusing on Jordan. The dot right under the O in Jordan there, right dead center in the map, is Moafik Al Salty Air Base, and it was in the line of fire this week. Let's take a look at number 12, and we can watch those attacks. So this is a barrage this week of predominantly Kyber Sheikhan. You can see them there, solid fuel quick to launch, very difficult for the Americans to stop them before they're launched because of the solid fuel rapidly deploy from underground, come above ground, launch, they also launch from silos. But this is a barrage of Kyber Sheikhan versus Muafical Salty Air Base. That is essentially an onshore aircraft carrier for the Americans. These are Goddard and Imad missiles. We've talked about these earlier in the conflict there. Many of their warheads are equipped with cluster munitions, submunitions. The warhead breaks apart into about 20 submunitions. We're going to see that landing on Jordan in a moment but these are pretty significant barrages and when Iran cues up these barrages they have been hitting and we've shown that time and time again and we have proof again of these attacks being successful. Here's the gadir with the submunitions being sent up from Iran and they have shown us these here. They are on the return Incoming into Jordan. I'm gonna break down these videos that we're looking at here So we won't get it too much into them, but you can see in the center the submunitions and then just an all-out battle between ballistic missiles and American interceptors and Jordanian interceptors. Let's look at 12b because you can see those interceptors here from civilian footage And this is remarkable, each one of these is $4 million. So you just saw 4, 5, 6, 8, 30, you know what I mean? You're talking $50 million just by looking at that one barrage. The canisters in the Patriot system are 4x4, there's 4 missiles per canister, 4 canisters per launcher, and there's about half a dozen launchers per battery that are operational at any given time. And what we're looking at here is the emptying of all of those batteries pretty much. I mean, we can count them, counting dozens of them. Coming up, I'll show you a longer video where you can really count them. One of these days we'll get a ticker in the corner counting down the number of interceptor munitions that the Americans have left because that number dwindles with each of these attacks. And this launch of these Patriot interceptors are launching them as if they expect a new shipment which they're not getting a new shipment. Any Patriots ordered today will not be delivered until late 2029. So don't hold your breath on that. Let's look at, are we at 13? Let's look at 13 or 14. I've lost which number I'm on. There's a few of these that we're going to see. But again, the coming down missiles are Iranians that we just watched be launched and the ones that are going up seemingly passing right by the ones going down are the $4 million interceptors. But you certainly see some, we go to the next one, this, yeah, you can see the concentration of them here. This looks a little bit like the early days of the war with this kind of intensity. And this kind of intensity just cannot last. I mean, let's look at this one. This next one is really interesting, 15 here we're on. This is a two and a half minute single camera shot, which is nice. With the civilian cameras, we often just get 15 second clips. But if you look in the bottom right there, you can see something like 15, 16. I mean, 16 would make sense. That would be emptying of a launcher. So are we looking at batches of 16 go up? because there went one, and you're gonna see in a moment here, a second one come up. You're looking at the very bottom right now is where they're launching from, from Muawafa, called Salty Air Base, which is the key US air base, prosecuting this war, and has been from the beginning. There you go, you get another barrage up of interceptors there. So now you're getting a dozen more. It looks like at least, let's say 16 again, Like I said, there's usually six working batteries. It could be as many as eight, sorry, launchers per battery. And then you have four by four in each of the launchers. So we're looking at something like 60 to 100 interceptors being launched here. And again, with this long shot, you can see the entire barrage take place, which is not something that we normally see. So this is pretty remarkable. And this is from a long distance, And that's why they appear to be going so much slower than the ones that we saw up close. These are the same attacks that we've watched on these past four videos. They're just from different areas of the country, under the threat of imprisonment for showing these videos. But of course, the Jordanians, there's many videos that we won't show, but you can find them easily of Jordanians cheering and Palestinians cheering these operations again. There's another salvo up there in the bottom right corner. It's just incredible to watch in its totality how many they're launching of these. For their purposes, they said that in July, there was about 750 pack three interceptors total left, less than 65%. They have used 65% of their stocks since this war began. And so if they're launching another, this is just since July, we've seen multiple exchanges since July, so clean a few more off that number. And then if you're going to take 60, 80, 100 more off this one, you're talking about a night like this can happen seven more times. That could happen seven days in a row, it could be spread out over months, but this can't go on. And there's no replacement for these weapons for the THAAD interceptors and for the PAK-3s for the medium range ballistic missile interceptors, there's no alternative. It is only those two systems. The THAAD system is even more, I don't even think they're using the THAAD because they're down to 230 total interceptors left of those. And on the base in Jordan, the Americans said late last night, a CBS contact on the base said that, and get this language, roughly eight F-15 Strike Eagles were damaged or destroyed. One A-10 Warthog had his wing blown off, and that adds to what is already something like 40 known damaged or destroyed aircraft or helicopters. That doesn't include the 50 MQ-9 Reaper drones that have been shot down, have been shot down. So in this attack last night, the Americans are admitting roughly eight, I'm not sure what roughly eight means, the pilot that's in that eighth one, that's, he might want to know if it's roughly destroyed, but in any case, funny language by the Americans unable to really say the full extent of what's going on, but for, at least for once, gave us a good sense of the implications of the strikes, the battle damage. of waiting weeks, which is what usually happens. The Iranians said in this punitive operation, the maintenance and repair hangar preparation area and fighter aircraft deployment sites were targeted, including fighter aircraft shelters with heavy solid and liquid fueled ballistic missiles causing significant damage. So the field report from the Iranians and the battle damage assessment by the Americans, they seem to line up pretty close on this one the Jordanians for their part and Americans they said they fired 30 Pac-3 interceptors so for everyone that just watched way more than 30 be fired that's an interesting uh a number that they picked and they also said that there was only 18 ballistic missiles sure looked like a lot more than 18 ballistic missiles but they said 18 were shot down and two landed in unpopulated areas so they're obviously not counting F-15s and their pilots as populated areas Okay, let's take a look at the cluster munition, the submunitions coming out of the garter here. So you can see, we saw these being used against Israel and there had been a question of why these were not being used earlier against these lightly guarded American air bases where planes are under not hardened shelters, so interesting to see that. And Seventeen just shows you that up close after we see it one more time here. You can see it dispersed, and there you see the multiple warheads. So the PAC-3 interceptor looks at that, sees 20 incoming missiles and tries to respond to it, might be part of the reason why we saw that seemingly unhinged barrage heading out. Okay, so that is, let's look at 18. These are anti-ship missiles being fired at US destroyers. The US has admitted that their destroyers been fired on multiple times in the past week and each time it was multiple incidents firing on aircraft carriers, firing on guided missile destroyers. In this, the IRGC said they targeted the two guided missile destroyers of the USS Delbert Black and the USS John Paul Jones And the carrier is probably the Washington. And they're firing here Khyber Shay Khan, medium range ballistic missiles, solid fuel. You can see them going up there targeting these. And the ships, the warships that defend themselves, so the Patriot missiles, our interceptors, are $4 million each. The SM-3s that are fired off of the warships, those are $10 to $30 million apiece being fired at these hundreds of thousands of dollar ballistic missiles. So again, the math just doesn't add up in these at all. We're gonna listen to the audio in this next slide. This next video is going to be a series of attacks with FATA type tactical ballistic missiles, PAVA cruise missiles, anti-ship cruise missiles and Shahid 101 and 136 attack drones. And these were all fired against US ships and shipping in the strait in response to the sinking of those ships. So there's gonna be audio in this next one for the next minute. So a significant barrage to say the least. And then I just wanted to show you the weapons because you can't really see them in these dark flights but this is the Fatah 110 series, the Fatah series of tactical short range ballistic missiles we've seen. Hezbollah use these and various, it's a family, it's a class of missiles. There's several different versions of them We've seen Hezbollah fire, both of them. And these are used with three to 500 kilometer range. So they're used around the Gulf. They're precision guided and they're very accurate and have caused a lot of damage. We can take a look at the next one as well being launched. So that gives you a sense as it's being launched there, that's what you're seeing in the dark. We haven't seen daytime launches since the July exchange of fire, so it's been all nighttime stuff that we're seeing. But there you can see the solid fuel class. And again, 350 kilogram to 500 kilogram warhead, depending on the different structure of each missile. They're all slightly different, the class of that family. Let's take a look at 22, because the PAVA cruise missiles, We saw these be used in the first Iran-U.S. exchange. These are long range cruise missiles. You can see they're 1,650 kilometer range. I think they are even extended the range on those highly accurate cruise missiles, long range cruise missiles. And then they have a family of them that are anti-ship cruise missiles, which you can see in 23. This is the Goddard 380 and it's built on the same idea. That's the anti-ship variant of the PAVA with a range of well over a thousand kilometers. That means if US warships are 600 kilometers out at sea, which they are because they're afraid to go anywhere closer, that these can be fired from hundreds of kilometers inland in Iran. So this is something that can carry on for the Iranians for a long time. So I'm not sure what the American plan is here. I don't think they do either, but it's not going to be the Iranians that run out of ammunition faster. So just to put that on the table there. And then of course, 24, the Shahid drones. These are the drones you're familiar with. They can pack a 50 kilogram explosive charge. They have long range. They're about the size and speed of a car. They're very cheap to manufacture. And these could be shot down in the Strait of Hormuz, the helicopters that follow the escort, right? the escort isn't naval escort, it's helicopters flying over top. They can shoot down these individually, but that's a long-term project that would require helicopter resources in the region on a daily 24-7 basis that the United States simply doesn't, it just doesn't have at the moment to fight this type of war. So let's take a look at some of the battle damage. We'll look at the battle damage from this week, next week, but this is last week's battle damage of what I showed you in the strikes last week. So let's take a look at 31. This is Ali al-Salem Air Base in Kuwait. This is a key U.S. Air Base in Kuwait. You see there in the before, you can see their base housing there, and then you can see it gone. So that's a direct strike on, that's the before and after, and we can see in the video 33 of the way that SOAR Atlas uses the layering of these maps to show that. So Americans didn't admit to any casualties in last week's attacks that I showed you, but this week, earlier in the week, before this exchange of fire, the Pentagon's Defense Casualty Analysis System quietly bumped up the casualties and increased their casualty count to 820 wounded this week. So were they on this base that was hit that was clearly targeted? IRGC said that the targeting was of the headquarters residents of the American commander of the Ali al-Salam base in response to the wedding party massacre with cruise missiles. So at the time we don't here have any casualties, but then in a week where there was only one exchange of fire, we're talking now last week, two weeks previous, where there was only one exchange of fire, presumably the casualties came from this incident. So again, people want battle damage assessments, they want to see the the results of these strikes. The Americans lie, they obfuscate, and they make it difficult to know until after the fact how much damage is really happening. And they're covering it up because they know they're losing the war and they're losing this war on many fronts. And the propaganda front is definitely one of them that they are losing as well. And I just wanted to, I had this on the show last week, but I bumped it because we had too much material. But I wanted to show you this because we talked about two shows ago about the bases in the region being essentially somebody just has to stick a fork in them. It's over for these bases and people in the American military establishment are starting to realize and dawn on this. Actually, sorry, one before that is I wanna show you the commander of the central command, the chief, the central command chief, the operational commander of the US military here. He gives this press conference And after three years of us watching military media produced by resistance groups, showing us the most, you know, right in the battle footage, we get this from the commander of CENTCOM. Let's roll that right now, 34. The US military has achieved a major milestone in the Strait of Hormuz. We have successfully cleared sea mines in the strait's international shipping lanes that were laid months ago by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Internationally recognized transit routes in the strait are free of Iranian sea mines thanks to the incredible work of the U.S. military. Over the past several months, U.S. forces have assisted nearly 1,500 commercial vessels in transiting the strait by providing coordinated protection. Those ships were carrying nearly 750 million barrels of crude oil destined for global energy markets which is a massive volume. So you see he's saying that he's linking the clearing of the strait. He's showing these ships going through the strait and they're just it's the most peaceful shot of ships going through. It looks like it's so easy to travel the Strait of Hormuz and the way he worded that made it seem like these are the ships that he's talking about but let's take a look at the next slide. He just ripped it from Shutterstock straight out of royalty-free videos. They didn't even pay for them. There's the two tankers that we just saw sailing through, and they're many years old. They're not in the Strait of Hormuz. They're just simply oil tankers shipped about royalty-free stock footage. So that's where the Americans are at. And that number that he said, 175 million barrels that he said that they have escorted through. This is a 195 day war. That number should be almost four billion barrels. So he's bragging about 175 million barrels at 20 million barrels a day. He's talking about like a week and a couple of days. So really just remarkable in this propaganda war, how badly the Americans are losing. And this is not something that only I noticed here. This is is something that was picked up, so. All right, this is Bahrain that we're talking about, about the bases that they're never going home to. This is a Wall Street Journal article. There's many others from other publications where you can read about how the headline here, how Iran devastated an American naval base and caused a U.S. recalculation. Okay, so the recalculation is that they're never going back to these bases and they're slowly realizing that that is true. We could take a look at the next slide shows you, We watched this in the first days of the war. I showed you all of these strikes before the Wall Street Journal months, a month later, said that these were hit because the Americans denied it at first, but we had satellite imagery that has now been censored and we don't get any more that showed how badly this base had been damaged. And this is the key, this is the fifth fleet. This is central command for the Navy runs out of Bahrain, the Naval Support Activity Base in Bahrain. Let's take a look at the next slide here. Is this 37? Sorry, this is 37. So John Cordell, he's a retired Navy captain who commanded the destroyer, the USS Oscar Austin, and he had previously been based at the Naval Support Base in Bahrain. So he wrote in the Navy Times this week that, quote, it is important for the American people to understand how this situation happened. The magnitude of the impact, the idea that this broad functioning hub built over decades was significantly degraded in the space of a few hours by a regional player, it is unimaginable. The naval support activity Bafrein is now virtually uninhabitable with families left in limbo. It is difficult to grasp, he said. This is in a Naval Times essay op-ed. The damage is estimated to be close to 400 million. It's way higher than that. Buildings reportedly harmed include the Fifth Fleet Headquarters, barracks, warehouses, communications towers, our potable water station. It's important to understand that the NSA Bahrain is more than just a headquarters. It provides a regional naval operating base for the US Navy in the Middle East. The idea that the US could not prevent and defend against a predictable attack on the Fifth Fleet Headquarters on our sailors stationed there is quite startling. It is likely just as alarming to our allies. The potential loss of NSA Bahrain is effectively the equivalent of losing an aircraft carrier. It could not have come as a surprise that Iran would attack in retaliation, yet it and those living and working there were left exposed, and the facilities inadequately protected from Tehran's ballistic missiles. So this is now Navy captains who are based at that base saying that they're appalled by what they're witnessing and the lack of preparation. And also reading between the lines, the capability of the Iranians, which isn't going anywhere and was obviously underestimated, that they're in a in a pickle. So here, the new admiral, the top sailor in the Navy, Admiral Darrell Coddle, he had a worldwide town hall with his sailors where when he took on the new job and he had this town hall and let's listen to what one of the sailors says here. I'm one of the sailors that got displaced from Bahrain. So I'm here, I guess here to ask a question about household goods and just an update on that if and when we are going to get our household goods from there. There is nothing more frustrating than basically not having your stuff. We're not getting back in there anytime soon. I just want to be completely honest with that. So, but we're working real hard to develop a scheme of maneuver in order you to get your things. A scheme of maneuvers. He's coming up with a scheme of maneuver because they know they're not going back to that base. Everybody fled in panic from the base and they left all of their belongings there, And this is the new, you know, the new top sailor telling all the sailors, yeah, you're probably not getting your stuff. And if you do get it, it's going to involve a scheme of maneuver, which is a military term for pulling off some sort of operation to get that those things out of there. So I just wanted to follow up with that, because a couple of shows ago, I was talking about how it was slowly permeating into the military establishment, that they're not going back to these bases and that this entire global posture by the United States is being fundamentally and potentially forever changed by Iranian resistance. So this has been the Resistance Report for Day 1070 of Israel's genocide in Gaza.