A French Navy Falcon flies over two Iranian military ships off Polynesia

Crossing Iranian navy ships off French Polynesia is not common.

And yet, this is what happened, French images published this Sunday in support.

“

”, announced this Sunday ALPACI, the commander of the maritime zone of the Pacific Ocean, one of the territorial divisions of the French Navy.

The images, taken from the sky at low altitude, suggest two hulls, only one of which has a typically military profile.

This is the

, a small, lightly armed gunship commissioned in 2010, pompously referred to as a destroyer by the Iranians, but which most navies would consider a mere corvette.

The second looks like a big civilian tanker from a distance.

Commissioned in 2021, the

, "

" - also the largest building in the Iranian fleet, with 228 meters long and more than 110,000 tons of displacement - is basically a militarized tanker whose deck has been raised by a helicopter platform forward.

French Polynesia, in the middle of the Pacific, 15,000 kilometers from the Iranian coast.

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Cruising south of the Marquesas Islands, the small Iranian naval group finds itself more than 15,000 kilometers from the Iranian coast.

If the imposing

is designed for long distances, you have to imagine the discomfort in which the sailors of the modest

must find themselves , ill-suited to long journeys, in particular crossing the entire Pacific.

The crew will however have to get used to it since the Iranians launched on October 1, 2022 in a circumnavigation around the globe, a first for Tehran.

Naval projection

Rare are the navies to embark on such an adventure which necessarily lasts several months and proves difficult both for the ships and for the men.

The Iranian Navy - apart from these large base ships which make up the bulk of its offshore fleet - is also not sized to make long voyages.

It is a mainly coastal fleet, comfortable in the shallow waters of the Persian Gulf where miniature submarines and speedboats are used to harass opposing forces in an asymmetrical logic.

For the rest, the Iranian naval industry has painfully succeeded in ten years in commissioning four of these

"

, one of which has already sunk in the Caspian Sea in 2018.

The "base ship"

, the largest building in the Iranian Navy.

Wikimedia Commons

But, caught in a vice by international sanctions, the Islamic Republic wants to go beyond its vocation of naval guerrilla warfare near its coasts by demonstrating a real capacity of projection towards the high seas. That is the ambition of this unprecedented circumnavigation , while Tehran seeks to export its hydrocarbons and secure its supplies of technologies and raw materials, while ensuring maritime relations with its allies, such as Moscow or Beijing.

Already, in 2021, the same base ship

, escorted this time by the corvette

-

of the

-, had made a long trip to the Baltic Sea where the Iranians had been able to participate in the great Russian naval parade in Saint Petersburg.

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“

,” said the head of the Iranian navy, Admiral Shahram Irani, on October 1 during the departure. of the naval group.

While, since September, the Islamic Republic has been shaken by a massive, violently repressed protest movement, it is not certain that the

and the

will be able to count on this mountainous and spiritual support.

But that does not prevent them from crossing today, and in an unprecedented way, in the middle of the Pacific, just a stone's throw from the French overseas coasts.

(*) The Falcon is produced by the Dassault Group, owner of the "Figaro".