Iran will add to its ‘collection of downed drones’ if US border violations continue – IRGC commander

Shooting down a US drone was a ‘natural response’ by Iran when its airspace was violated, a high-ranking Revolutionary Guard commander said, adding that any further aggressive acts by the Americans would be tackled the same way.

“We possess a collection of US drones, which is proof that the US has violated Iran’s airspace, and shows that they don’t want to respect international law,” Brigadier General Amirali Hajizadeh, who heads the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Aerospace Force, said.

If such aggression is repeated, we will add other US [military] products to complete this collection.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has also posted maps with detailed coordinates on Twitter, saying that they showed that “there can be no doubt” that the US drone was over Iranian territorial waters.

Early on Thursday, Iran’s air defenses hit a high-altitude US Navy drone, with Tehran insisting that it was violating the country’s airspace. The US claimed that its unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) was over neutral waters when it was downed, with Donald Trump saying that he’d only called off retaliatory strikes against Iran just 10 minutes before they were to be carried out.

“It is possible that a US general or some operators were behind this American aggression, we don’t know that,” Hajizadeh pointed out. But, in any case, the intrusion of the UAV into Iranian airspace was “a violation of international aviation rules… which then received our natural response.”

A similar position was voiced by Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Abbas Mousavi, who said that “we will not allow any of Iran’s borders to be violated. Iran will firmly confront any aggression or threat by America.”

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