ISRAEL - Iran’s Saegheh is no ordinary UAV; it is the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ prize drone for assault and intelligence gathering. It made its debut outside Iran on Saturday, February 10 when it slipped into Israeli airspace, first circling east into Jordan. The speed of this counter-punch confirmed that Israeli intelligence had tracked the drone from the moment it took to the air from T-4 and was on standby to snag it.
The infiltrator drone was discovered to have been part of a whole fleet of advanced armed Saegheh UAVs housed at the T-4 base. The second wave of Israeli air strikes against 12 Syrian and Iranian targets decimated this fleet.
Most importantly, the drone intrusion and its sequel exposed the incident to have been no one-off, but part of a calculated Iranian plot against Israel at the highest level, that was coordinated in advance with the Russian air force, which shares the use of T-4, and the Syrian air defense systems, which operate under Russian command.