The fake carrier sits just a short distance away from the parking lot in which the Guard unveiled over 100 new speedboats in May, the kind it routinely employs in tense encounters between Iranian sailors and the US Navy. Those boats carry both mounted machine guns and missiles.
The mock-up, which first began to be noticed among defence and intelligence analysts in January, strongly resembles a similar one used in February 2015 during a military exercise called "Great Prophet 9." During that drill, Iran swarmed the fake aircraft carrier with speedboats firing machine guns and rockets. Surface-to-sea missiles later targeted and destroyed the fake carrier.
"American aircraft carriers are very big ammunition depots housing a lot of missiles, rockets, torpedoes and everything else," the Guard's then-navy chief, Admiral Ali Fadavi, said on state television at the time.
That drill, however, came as Iran and world powers remained locked in negotiations over Tehran's nuclear programme. Today, the deal born of those negotiations is in tatters.
US President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew America from the accord in May 2018. Iran later responded by slowly abandoning nearly every tenant of the agreement, though it still allows UN inspectors access to its nuclear sites.
Last year saw a series of attacks and incidents further ramp up tensions between Iran and the US. They reached a crescendo with the January 3 strike near Baghdad International Airport that killed Soleimani, head of the Guard's expeditionary Quds, or Jerusalem, Force.
Judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Esmaili said Iranian citizen Mahmoud Mousavi Majd had been convicted in a Revolutionary Court, which handles security cases behind closed doors. Esmaili accused Majd of receiving money for allegedly sharing security information on the Guard and the Quds Force, as well as the "positions and movement routes" of Soleimani.
Majd was "linked to the CIA and the Mossad," the Israeli intelligence agency, Esmaili alleged, without providing evidence. Both the CIA and the Israeli prime minister's office, which oversees the Mossad, declined to comment.
Later, the judiciary said Majd was detained in October 2018 and sentenced to death in September 2019, before Soleimani's killing.
Iran's announcement of the looming execution shows how seriously they still take Soleimani's assassination.
An exercise targeting a mock US aircraft carrier could send that message as well, particularly if it involves a swarm attack of smaller vessels, which analysts believe Iran would employ if it did get into a shooting war with the US Navy.
The US Navy's Bahrain-based 5th Fleet, which patrols Mideast waters, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
- AP
