How did Iran target a secret CIA site in Iraq?

A scoop at The Washington Post by John Hudson and Louisa Loveluck revealed that Iranian-backed militias were able to target a “secret CIA hangar” using a drone in April. This attack hit a hangar in Erbil in the autonomous Kurdistan region.

This is a major escalation and shows careful planning and complex know-how by the Iranian regime and its militias in Iraq. It means that Iran was able to transfer the drone itself to Iraq and gather the intelligence on the apparent location of this secret site, which is inside a known US facility, and precisely set the drone to strike it.

This kind of kamikaze drone is similar to the technology Iran used to target Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq and similar to the kind of drones the Iran-backed Houthis use to attack Saudi Arabia and drones that Hamas unveiled in recent attempts to attack Israel.

Iran has thus transferred its drone threats all over the region.

The attack in Iraq is particularly interesting because US bases are supposed to have some sort of defenses against this known and rising threat. US CENTCOM head Kenneth McKenzie has warned for a year about the rising threats of drones in the region. He warned in March 2020, and again in February 2021.

“We’ve spent billions of dollars in the Department of Defense on counter drone systems. I’m concerned that we’re still under grave threat from them. But I’m also encouraged to see that your command has been experimenting with so many new and more effective counter drone systems,” he told the US Senate in March 2020.

The US has sent Patriot missiles, C-RAM and other defenses to Iraq to stop ballistic missiles and rocket threats. The US army has also acquired two Iron Dome batteries which can be used against drones, although this is not linked to the current threat in Iraq.

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The drone attack alarmed the US according to the report. It has led to questions about the warehouse and whether Iran knew specifically who was running the building. Remains of the drone were recovered after the attacks. The article says that the drone was used a  new method after years in which pro-Iran militias used rockets, such as the 107mm.

The “evolving drone threat” is a major concern in Iraq. “The drone’s flight was tracked to within 10 miles of the site, but its path was then as it moved into a civilian flight path, the coalition official said,” according to the report. “Preliminary analysis suggested it was made in Iran.”

The White House was unnerved. The facility was covert and the attack was sophisticated. The April 14 attack was the first major drone attack by the pro-Iran militias in Iraq. However, they have provided Kataib Hezbollah with drones in the past to strike at Saudi Arabia in May 2019 and again in January 2021. Another drone was used to target Al-Asad base in May 2021.

The type of kamikaze drone used in Iraq is not known. It could be like an Ababil or Qasef what Hamas calls its Shehab drone. This is a drone about the size of a person with a warhead and guidance up front and two sets of small wings. It is launched from a catapult. However, Iran has a plethora of other types of kamikaze drones.

According to the Twitter handle Alex Almeida, the drone attack may have targeted a hangar housing one of the CIA or Special Operation Command’s contractor-operated turboprop aircraft that fly from the base and which are used for reconnaissance and intel gathering missions. The US has its own drones at the base, according to Joseph Trevithick at The Drive. He wrote in May that a Long Endurance Aircraft Program drone crashed in July 2020. This kind of drone is basically a small prop plane that looks no different than a civilian two-seater aircraft but has had everything removed and flies autonomously now as a UAV. According to online sleuths who use OSINT to find information, a hangar was damaged by the April drone attack on Erbil airport.

According to the image showing the damage, the location is a hangar in the central eastern part of the base near an area where chinook helicopters are parked. This is a huge, sprawling base that has expanded with the war on ISIS and also likely expanded as the US reduced forces in other facilities. How one would determine to attack that specific hangar, out of dozens of other locations and hundreds of buildings, is unclear. The particular complex is unique for having four buildings with red-colored roofs.
If an Iranian-backed militia used a drone to target a hangar where drones fly from, this could be one of the few instances of drone versus drone combat, using drones to take out other drones.

Targeting US drones in Iraq using Iranian drones may be a sort of new drone “world order”, so to speak, taking place in the Middle East, especially if Iran knew this hangar was used for surveillance droned that might one day be used against its own forces in Iraq. The region, as it were, is now rapidly approaching a kind of cross between The Terminator, Robocop and Skynet, as machines are doing the fighting and people are just watching computer screens – though we may not be there quite yet.

At the very least the US needs to be concerned that Iran is collecting intelligence on its covert and secure sites, its hangars and other systems in Iraq, and that Iran’s vastly expanding precision missile and drone technology could be used more in the future.

The drones give Iran some plausible deniability because they can be launched by Iranian proxies. However, the gyroscopes and other systems on the drones link them to Iran, at least in the past.

It should be noted that a drone mysteriously entered Israeli airspace on May 18 and was shot down by Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later said it came from Syria or Iraq. A drone damaged a hangar in Asad base in Iraq on May 8. The Erbil attack was on April 14. These attacks may all be linked and have an address in Iran.