Three Indians were killed in an US strike on a vessel off the coast of Oman. It is not the first time that Indians have come under the line of fire from American miscalculations.
July 1988. The Persian Gulf is a battlefield.
A US Navy warship is exchanging fire with Iranian gunboats near the Strait of Hormuz. On the radar screen, a new contact suddenly appears.
The aircraft is approaching. The operators have minutes to decide.
Friend or foe? Passenger jet or fighter aircraft?
Warnings are transmitted. The blip keeps moving. The range closes.
Then comes the order.
Two missiles leave the deck of the USS Vincennes.
Moments later, 290 people aboard Iran Air Flight 655 are dead.
Nearly four decades later, the waters around the Gulf have once again become the scene of a deadly confrontation involving the United States military and civilians caught in the middle.
This week, India publicly accused the US Navy of carrying out strikes against three commercial vessels carrying Indian crew members off the coast of Oman. Three Indian seafarers were killed. Another tanker was disabled. New Delhi summoned the US charge d’affaires twice in two days and described as a strong protest over the use of “lethal and deadly force” against civilian shipping.
The deaths of the three Indian sailors have reignited an old question that has followed American military operations in the Gulf for decades — what happens when civilian lives become collateral damage in a region where military commanders operate under the pressure of seconds?
For many Iranians, the answer arrived on the morning of July 3, 1988, when Iran Air Flight 655, travelling from Tehran to Dubai with a stopover at Bandar Abbas, was blown out of the sky by one of the most sophisticated warships in the US Navy.
All 290 people aboard – 274 passengers and 16 crew — died.
The aircraft was a civilian Airbus A300 operating a short scheduled flight from Bandar Abbas in Iran to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.
The tragedy remains one of the deadliest incidents involving the accidental destruction of a civilian airliner by a military force. It also remains one of the most controversial episodes in modern American military history.
Today, as India demands answers over the deaths of three of its citizens in US military actions near Oman, the story of Flight 655 has returned to uncomfortable relevance.
India’s Protest
The Ministry of External Affairs on Friday summoned US charge d’affaires Jason Meeks and conveyed what it called deep concern over continuing attacks by American naval forces on commercial vessels carrying Indian mariners in the Gulf of Oman.
The ministry said a strong protest had been lodged regarding attacks that had already resulted in “the tragic and avoidable loss of three Indian lives”. It further described the use of lethal force against civilian shipping as unacceptable and warned that such actions undermined the safety and stability of international maritime commerce in a sensitive region.
According to the Centre, three separate merchant vessels carrying Indian crew members came under attack from US forces this week.
The Palau-flagged oil tanker.
The first was the Palau-flagged tanker Marivex, carrying 24 Indian seafarers. It was disabled by US forces on June 8, though all crew members were rescued safely.
The second vessel, another Palau-flagged tanker named Settebello, was struck on June 10. Three of the 24 Indian sailors aboard were killed.
The third vessel, Jalveer, a Guinea-Bissau-flagged tanker carrying 20 Indian crew members, was attacked on Thursday.
MEA spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said the strikes came from the US Navy. He added that two of the vessels were under sanctions administered by the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), while another had been classified as non-compliant. OFAC oversees enforcement of sanctions related to the trade of Iranian and Russian oil.
