December 31, 2021
In yet another disaster for the Iranian Navy, a warship under construction in Bandar Abbas has capsized, according to video posted on social media and satellite imagery.
The ship is named Talayieh and is the latest in the group of Moudge-class warships that are rated around the world as light frigates.
A social media posting asserted that one person had been killed.
The Iranian government has said nothing about any capsizing.
It isn’t clear when the ship capsized. The social media posting was on December 6, but a check of satellite photos from December 4 showed the ship was capsized then, according to Planet, an American operator of almost 200 satellites.
Yet on December 9, five days after the satellite photo showed the ship on its side, the commander of the Navy, Rear Admiral Shahram Irani, announced in a speech that a new destroyer named Talayieh would join the Navy “in the near future,” apparently unwilling to admit what had happened to the ship.
This is just the latest in a series of disasters the Iranian Navy has faced in recent years.
In June, the supply ship Kharg, the second largest ship in the Iranian Navy, caught fire at sea. The fire was extinguished and the ship was in the process of being towed to Jask when it sank.
In May 2020, the Navy’s Jamaran fired a missile at a target. It missed the target, however, hitting the warship Konarak and killing 15 sailors.
In January 2018, the Jamaran-class warship Damavand, which operates in the Caspian, hit a breakwater at Bandar Enzeli as it was trying to dock during a storm and sank, settling on the bottom off the breakwater.