Alwaght- Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) have managed to infiltrate into US military systems, hacking its drones,a senior commander has revealed.
Speaking to reporters on Sunday in Tehran, IRGC Aerospace Commander Brigadier General Amirali Hajizadeh that Iran recently hacked American drones in Iraq in response to Washington’s “cheekiness”.
“The Americans were cheeky enough to say they had sent faulty parts into our missile industries. We did this (infiltration into their systems in Iraq) to tell them that they were unable to achieve their goals, that we have infiltrated into their systems as a response to their rude behaviour,” said General Hajizadeh.
Earlier this week, Hajizadeh rejected US officials’ recent claims that Washington has managed to sabotage Iran’s missile program as “a very big lie”.
It came after The New York Times recently reported that the Trump White House has accelerated a secret American program to sabotage Iran’s missiles and rockets, according to current and former administration officials.
Brigadier General Hajizadeh elaborated on Iran hacking American drones in Iraq.
He announced recently that the IRGC had acquired footage showing the US military bombing one of its own drones for fear that it might be seized by the IRGC.
“Seven or eight aerial vehicles [belonging to the US-led coalition] with regular flights in Syria and Iraq were under our [intelligence] control; we could monitor their data, and managed to acquire their first-hand information,” Hajizadeh said a few days ago.
According to the top general, one of these unmanned aerial vehicles was once forced to have an emergency landing due to a problem it faced during the flight.
As shown in a drone footage released by the IRGC, the unmanned aerial vehicle landed with difficulty in a desert area 10 km from the US base.
However, the Americans did not dare to approach their own drone, and thus bombed and destroyed it with a jet fighter, so that it would not be seized by resistance forces.
Iran famously grounded a US unmanned aerial vehicle RQ-170 Sentinel in December 2011 using electronic warfare techniques, as the stealth aircraft was flying over the Iranian city of Kashmar near the Afghan border.
Back in November 2018, General Hajizadeh highlighted the Islamic Republic’s drone intelligence, saying Iran now knows in which hangar of the US' Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan the RQ-170 had been deployed.
In November 2018 remarks, the IRGC Aerospace commander said Iran used the reverse-engineered version of the RQ-170 drone to target Daesh positions in Syria and Iraq.
Iran currently possesses the biggest collection of captured or downed American and Israeli drones, including the US' MQ1, MQ9, Shadow, ScanEagle, and RQ-170 as well as the Israeli regime's Hermes, Hajizadeh added.
The Israeli drone was intercepted and shot down in October 2014 by IRGC forces on its way to the Natanz nuclear facility in the central Isfahan province.
In the field of unmanned aerial vehicles, Iran is now one of the world’s top four or five countries, and the top drone power in the region, General Hajizadeh said.
