Pace Paw Print

Media Credit: www.chieftain.co "The 15" as dubbed by British media after their release from an Iranian prison.

Last Thursday, 15 British Navy soldiers were released from the captivity of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard (IRG) after 13 days of detainment.

For nearly two weeks, since their capture on March 23, British officials have been trying to secure a safe release for their troops taken hostage. When they arrived in London via Heathrow International Airport, the former captives held a press conference.

At this conference, two officers of the group made statements about the conditions under which they were captured and their ordeal in general. There were a few misconceptions that they felt it was necessary to address.

For one, when they were being held in Iran, their captors forced them to state that as British soldiers, they had crossed into Iranian waters. If the soldiers had not complied with this, they were told that they would have faced seven years in an Iranian prison.

Had the British actually crossed, it would have given the Iranians a legitimate reason for at least minimal detention. But Lt. Felix Carman of the British Royal Navy denies that this ever happened.

"Irrespective of what has been said in the past, when we were detained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard ... I can clearly state we were 1.7 nautical miles from Iranian waters," said Carman in his official press statement. They were able to pinpoint their exact location at time of capture using a naval GPS tracking system.

"The 15" as they are being called by the press, were captured during a routine boarding mission. According to Carman's statement, dozens of these boarding missions had taken place in international waters over the past four weeks. The boarding mission included two rigid inflatable rafts, in which the 15 were divided, that board a ship as it enters international waters.

It was on these smaller craft that the 15 were accosted. Seven IRG ships, heavily armed, according to Carman and his crew, surrounded them and forced them out of their rafts.

"They rammed our boats," said Captain Christopher Air, "and turned their heavy machine guns, RPG, and weapons on us… We realized that our efforts to reason with these people were not making any headway. Nor were we able to calm some of the individuals down... They boarded our boats, removed our weapons, and steered the boats towards the Iranian shore."

Air stated that they willingly refused to fight back. "It was clear they arrived with a planned intent," he said. "Had we resisted there would have been a mighty fight that we could not have won and with consequences that would have major strategic impacts."

As this story was unfolding for the past two weeks, many people asked why the troops allowed their own capture and why they made statements to Iranian media that they had strayed within the Iranian territory. "We as a group held out for as long as we though appropriate" said Carman by way of reply. "We then complied up to a point with our captors."

Though they agree that their treatment was "humane," the 15 agree that theirs was not a legal capture. All boarding missions run through the British Navy have been suspended pending an investigation of the events in question.

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