Some 15 years ago, as world powers grew increasingly alarmed by Iran’s nuclear programme, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ordered his military advisers to prepare for a drastic scenario.
“He called me and asked for a plan to close the Strait of Hormuz,” Major General Rahim Safavi, a military adviser to Iran’s late supreme leader, told state television this week. “I asked for three months, but he reduced the deadline to one . . . He foresaw that one day we might have to use this.”
Safavi said that the Islamic republic’s military planners would go on to develop strategies to block not only the Gulf, but the Sea of Oman, Red Sea and even the eastern Mediterranean.
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