Hezbollah has Russian anti-ship missiles that threaten US Navy - Reuters
Date: 2023-11-09 Author: Кирило Загоруйко Categories: WORLD
The Lebanese Hezbollah group, which is supported by Iran, may be armed with powerful Russian Yakhont anti-ship missiles (an export version of the P-800 Onyx), which it can use against US warships.
Reuters writes about this, citing its sources familiar with the group’s arsenal. According to them, when Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah warned Washington last week that his group had something in store for American ships in the region, he was referring specifically to Russian Yakhont missiles with a range of 300 km.
Nasrallah said in his speech that US warships in the Mediterranean "do not scare us and will not scare us." “We have prepared for the fleets you threaten us with,” he said.
The US says its naval assets in the Mediterranean, including two aircraft carriers and support ships, are deployed to prevent the conflict from spreading in the region by containing Iran, which supports groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Hezbollah perceives US warships as a direct threat because of their ability to strike the group and its allies.
It is noted that Hezbollah may have purchased Yakhont missiles from Syria after the group's forces were deployed there more than a decade ago to help President Bashar al-Assad fight the civil war.
The Syrian army has been arming Russia for a long time. Moscow said it signed an agreement in 2010 to send anti-ship cruise missiles, including the Yakhont variant, to Damascus.
One of the sources told Reuters that Hezbollah's anti-ship capabilities have expanded significantly since 2006, when the group first demonstrated it could hit a ship at sea by hitting an Israeli warship in the Mediterranean during the war with Israel.
“There is Yakhont and, of course, there is something else besides it,” the source said, without going into details.
The source added that the use of these weapons by Hezbollah against warships hostile to them would mean that the conflict has escalated into a major regional war.
Three current and one former U.S. officials said Hezbollah has amassed an impressive arsenal of weapons, including anti-ship missiles.
“Obviously we pay a lot of attention to this... and we take their capabilities seriously,” one of the officials said, without directly commenting on whether the group has Yakhont missiles.
U.S. officials added that U.S. naval forces recently deployed to the region have capabilities to defend against incoming missiles.
Earlier, Nasser Qandil, a Lebanese political scientist close to Hezbollah, explained how the Yakhont missiles in the group's arsenal could be used against US warships.
He called the missile "the biggest prize" for Hezbollah's participation in the war in Syria, where the group helped turn the tide of the civil war in Assad's favor.
