TEHRAN: Three Iranian military pilots whose planes were shot down while attempting to target Qatar have been held for months by the Gulf Arab country, an Iranian military commander claimed in a letter to the Red Cross, according to Iranian media.
Iranian Armed Forces General Staff’s committee for missing personnel chief Brigadier General Mohammad Bagherzadeh said two Iranian Su-24 bombers were shot down after targeting the US military base in Qatar. Three Iranian pilots ejected and one was killed in action, according to Bagherzadeh, who did not provide evidence supporting the claim.
This appears to the first time Iran has accused Qatar of holding the pilots. Just two weeks ago the Iranian military said they were still trying to determine their fate. However, Qatar denied holding Iranian pilots, saying they had violated Qatari airspace earlier this year and had failed to respond to attempts to contact them. A Qatari foreign ministry spokesperson said on X that search and rescue teams later found the remains of one of the pilots and that it had contacted Iran to coordinate a handover. The spokesperson said Tehran had yet to respond to an invitation to review details of its operations.
According to Bagherzadeh, Javad Salehi, Abdolmajid Dashtian, and Omran Beh Rowshia were captured by Qatari forces and have not been permitted visits or meetings despite “diplomatic efforts.”
CNN reported in March citing two sources briefed on the operation that a Qatari military plane shot down two Iranian Su-24s. At the time, the Qataris issued a warning over radio but received no response from the jets. Due to “time constraints” and “based on the available evidence,” the aircraft were “classified as hostile,” one of the sources told CNN.
Qatar then dispatched its warplanes, and a Qatari F-15 fighter engaged the Iranian jets in “aerial combat” before downing them, the sources added.
Bagherzadeh urged the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) president to follow up on the case of three Iranian pilots ‘held’ in Qatar.
General Bagherzadeh, in a letter addressed to Mirjana Spoljaric Egger, stated that credible information indicates three Iranian pilots—who went missing during an operation in response to US-Israeli attacks on the Islamic Republic—were captured alive by Qatari forces.
According to the letter’s text, despite all diplomatic and follow-up efforts, Doha has not allowed the prisoners to meet with, interview, or contact their families and authorities, the Iranian commander complained, and urged the ICRC to take the matter into account.
Recalling Articles 70 and 78 of the Third Geneva Convention, the letter stated that the families of prisoners of war and the ICRC headquarters must be informed about their captivity, and that PoWs have the right to submit complaints and requests to representatives—including those of the Red Cross—who visit their camps, or to hold discussions and negotiations.
The Iranian Armed Forces General Staff’s committee for missing personnel, while expressing grave concern about the situation of the captured pilots in Qatar, has requested that high-ranking ICRC officials conduct interviews with the Iranian pilots at the earliest opportunity, in line with their humanitarian missions and bilateral cooperation, and inform the Islamic Republic of their health status.
Meanwhile, Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi fired back Saturday in a post on ‘X’, stressing that the “Strait of Hormuz has been Iranian, is Iranian, and will remain Iranian.” “This strait will only be closed and opened under Iran’s command,” he added.
The United States remains locked in a stalemate with Iran over the strait, with Iran denying access to much of the civilian shipping and the US Navy mounting a blockade of Iranian ports in an attempt to cripple its economy. “We have the blockade. No ships get through unless we want them to,” Trump said to a cheering crowd of supporters and police.
Meanwhile, Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf said that US President Donald Trump had given the US recognition to the Axis of Resistance by signing the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that included an end to war on all fronts, including Lebanon. In a meeting in Tehran on Saturday, Ghalibaf referred to the process of negotiations within the US and how Trump backed down on Iran’s opening of the Strait of Hormuz at the time of signing the Pakistan-brokered MoU with Tehran, Iran’s IRNA news agency reported.
According to him, the US president, based on the original 15-point document, insisted that Iran must set aside its missile programme, nuclear programme, resistance and the Strait of Hormuz, but he actually signed the recognition of the Resistance Front in Persian.
The parliament speaker also shared the reason behind Iran’s halting of the ceasefire talks with the United States, blaming it on the continued Israeli attacks on Lebanon in breach of the understanding then reached between Washington and Tehran. He said Iran stopped the negotiations when the last attack by the Zionist regime on Dahiyeh resulted in the martyrdom of the head of the intelligence of the Hezbollah resistance movement and his family, adding that the Islamic Republic threatened to retaliate and target the entire region if Israel repeated its military mischief. Ghalibaf also explained the US violation of the clause on lifting the blockade on Iranian ports, saying Trump’s post linking the blockade to the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz prompted Tehran to issue a warning to rectify such a claim since Iranians had agreed to nothing of that sort.
Pointing to Trump’s repeated tweets and claims on the Strait of Hormuz, the top parliamentarian described the negotiations with the US as a type of combat diplomacy.
Meanwhile, Iran’s Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Esmail Baqaei criticised US foreign policy toward Iran and the region, saying that Washington is extremely reliant on lies. Baqaei made the remarks in a post on X on Saturday, citing a passage from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ to describe the situation facing the US system of governance and foreign policy regarding Iran and the region.
“The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others,” Baqaei quoted Dostoevsky. “This passage from Dostoevsky’s ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ aptly describes the situation in which the US system of governance & foreign policy regarding Iran and the region finds itself due to its extreme reliance on ‘lies’,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, Yemen’s Mokha port has suspended commercial and maritime operations after being hit by more than 25 missiles in Houthi attacks over recent days, the port’s director said on Saturday. The attacks killed seven people and caused an estimated $16 million in losses, the director told a news conference.
Mokha is a Red Sea port near the Bab al-Mandeb strait, a strategic chokepoint connecting the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden and a key route for international shipping. The port is controlled by forces aligned with Yemen’s internationally recognised government. It has a smaller cargo capacity than Yemen’s main ports of Aden and Hodeidah.
Yemen’s government said on Friday the Houthis fired six ballistic missiles at Mokha that day, killing at least four civilians and targeting civilian, economic and maritime facilities.
Major fighting in Yemen had largely subsided following a UN-brokered truce in 2022, but efforts to reach a lasting political settlement have stalled.
On the other hand, oil pollution is affecting about 12 kilometers of coastline near Oman’s Ras Madraka, while Masirah Island remains unaffected, state news agency ONA said on Saturday after efforts to tackle a spill from a leaking tanker have made progress. Oil began reaching Oman’s coast on Wednesday after spreading at sea for weeks. The Environment Authority said response operations were under way and the offshore slick was moving towards open waters.
Meanwhile, the USS George Washington aircraft carrier is departing the Pacific and expected to replace the USS Abraham Lincoln in the Middle East amid growing concerns about mental health and supply issues aboard the long-deployed carrier. The Lincoln has had its time at sea extended from its original May return date to support operations against Iran.
The lack of a US carrier in the Pacific may be short-lived if the Navy deploys another in the next couple of months. But it shows how the open-ended operations with Iran are running some American sailors ragged, analysts say, while the Trump administration further retreats from the Asia-Pacific region and focuses on the Western Hemisphere.
“The administration says that the Pacific is supposed to be the most important behind the Western Hemisphere,” said Greg Poling, director of the Southeast Asia Programme at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Instead, the US is “doing the exact opposite” of its previously expressed goal of pulling out of the Middle East.
American allies in the Pacific are unsettled over the unpredictability of the Republican administration, Poling said, while Beijing “is quite happy with US distraction, with the frustration of US allies and partners.”
Trump has relied heavily on aircraft carriers to support military operations during his second term. For example, the USS Gerald R Ford returned home in mid-May after an 11-month deployment, the longest since the Vietnam War, during which it supported the US fight against Iran and the capture of Venezuela’s then-leader, Nicolás Maduro.
The Ford had experienced a fire in a laundry space that forced the carrier to turn around and return to the Mediterranean Sea for repairs and left hundreds of sailors without places to sleep. Meanwhile, the Lincoln has spent a record uninterrupted time at sea of more than 240 days. Democratic lawmakers have been calling for investigations and greater visibility into conditions aboard the ship.
Warships and their crews can only handle so much, said Robert Farley, who teaches national security and diplomacy at the University of Kentucky and often writes about aircraft carriers. “People don’t get enough rest. It’s psychologically exhausting. And R&R is part of keeping the crew healthy,” Farley said. “Sometimes it’s framed as, ‘These people haven’t had a vacation.’ But we are dealing with well-known limits on the capacity of a crew to operate at top efficiency over time. And that just declines.”
Clark, of the Hudson Institute, said the squeeze on the nation’s aircraft carriers stems from the lack of preparation and planning for the Iran war. “If we were going to mobilise to do this kind of conflict, and we anticipated it might go this long, we might have done some changes to the carrier schedule to make sure more would be available,” Clark said.
Clark said the Navy has 11 aircraft carriers and typically deploys two or three at a time. But it could soon deploy four if the USS Theodore Roosevelt leaves San Diego for the Middle East, allowing Washington to return to Pacific.
But the massive warships will need maintenance, likely causing a bottleneck at the nation’s only two carrier shipyards. “We’ll end up with a maintenance debt that needs to be paid for the next few years,” Clark said. “We’ll probably have less carrier presence than we’ve had in the previous years because carriers will be lined up to get into the shipyard.”
Meanwhile, flights at the Iranian port city of Bandar Abbas resumed on Saturday after repeated interruptions during hostilities with the US, state media reported.
Kazem Tavassoli, director general of airports in Hormozgan province, said “scheduled flights at Bandar Abbas International Airport on high-traffic domestic routes resumed today,” according to the IRNA state news agency. The reopening comes “following limited flights in recent days,” Tavassoli said, adding passengers can now buy tickets for the Tehran-Bandar Abbas, Mashhad-Bandar Abbas and Bandar Abbas-Isfahan routes, in both directions. The airport “handled 35 to 40 domestic and international flights per day” before the war, Tavassoli said. The airport has been repeatedly closed since the conflict with the United States began in February.
