U.S. forces shot down an Iranian drone approaching the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in the Arabian Sea, officials said Tuesday, escalatory moves as Washington floods the region with military hardware amid renewed tensions with Tehran.
The incident occurred about 500 miles from Iran’s southern coast. U.S. officials identified the drone as a Shahed-139, a variant in a class of one-way attack drones that crash into targets and detonate onboard explosives. It was flying with “unclear intent” and approached the carrier despite U.S. personnel using unspecified de-escalatory measures, according to Navy Capt. Tim Hawkins, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the region.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News the drone was “acting aggressively” when it approached the carrier.
An F-35C fighter jet shot down the drone, Hawkins said. No American personnel were injured, and no equipment was damaged, he said.
The U.S. military has deployed dozens of aircraft to bases operating near Iran and assembled about 12 warships in or near the Middle East over the past month, for what President Donald Trump has described as a pressure campaign to reach a new deal aimed at restraining Tehran’s nuclear program.
It is unclear whether U.S. forces attempted to contact Iranian counterparts to defuse the conflict before the aircraft was shot down. An Iranian drone carrier has transited the Strait of Hormuz in recent days.
Hours after the incident, Iranian vessels, joined by another drone, “harassed” a U.S.-flagged and U.S.-crewed tanker, the merchant vessel Stena Imperative, and threatened to board and seize it, Hawkins said. A nearby guided-missile destroyer, the USS McFaul, intervened and escorted the ship to safety under “defensive air support” provided by the U.S. Air Force, de-escalating the situation, Hawkins said.
“Iran’s unnecessary aggression near U.S. forces, regional partners and commercial vessels increases risks of collision, miscalculation and regional destabilization,” he said.
It is unclear, too, whether that separate incident was retaliatory or otherwise in response to the drone shoot-down, but Central Command warned Tehran on Friday to operate with restraint as Iranian forces launched scheduled training exercises in the region. The drone encounter was reported earlier by Reuters.
Iranian officials could not be reached for comment.
Earlier Tuesday, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said on social media that he had instructed Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to “pursue fair and equitable negotiations” with the United States “guided by principles of dignity, prudence, and expediency.”
He did so, he wrote, with the caveat that a “suitable environment” must exist “free from threats and unreasonable expectations.”
The confrontation strains the already tenuous negotiations over the staging of an upcoming meeting between senior U.S. and Iranian officials aimed at staving off a full-blown military conflict between Iran and the United States.
Those talks were scheduled to take place in Istanbul on Friday, but Iranian officials on Tuesday requested a new format and location for the meeting, said officials familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions.
“The Iranians are now pushing for a completely different meeting,” said a diplomat in the region. Tehran now wants the talks, originally designed as a multilateral gathering with Arab and Turkish diplomats, to happen in Oman with only Iranian and U.S. officials, officials said.
The bilateral format has a substantive purpose: Iranian officials want the discussions to focus exclusively on a deal to restrict Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief and avoiding a military confrontation, the diplomat said.
The point of a multilateral meeting was for a potential deal to encompass broader issues beyond Iran’s nuclear program, including Tehran’s support for proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas. Tehran has long balked at efforts by the U.S. to dictate Iran’s foreign policy, though diplomats say some progress has been made in recent days to draft compromise language that both Tehran and Washington could support.
The developments occurred as the U.S. military has spent weeks building up its forces in the region in response to Trump’s open threat to attack Iran. He reconsidered amid concerns that the U.S. did not have adequate defenses in place at the time that would be needed to respond to a counterattack.
Trump then ordered the Lincoln and three accompanying destroyers from the South China Sea to the Middle East. They arrived last week.
Other warships, aircraft and air defenses also have arrived in the region, defense officials have said, though the Pentagon still has a smaller military presence in the region than it did last year, when Trump ordered airstrikes with B-2 bombers on Iran’s nuclear program.
Susannah George contributed to this report.
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