US deploys B-2-s on Diego Garcia to target Iran

(Middle East Eye): The air base the US may use if it decides to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities is a speck of land in the Indian Ocean that few associate with the Middle East but that the US has used for decades to project military power in the region, agency reports said.

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Throughout this week the US has been amassing B-2 bombers, stealth aircraft used for precision strikes that can evade air defence systems, at Diego Garcia, an island that’s roughly 3,500 km south of the Maldives, which is home to a joint US-UK military base.

The US military confirmed earlier this week that it had deployed B-2 bombers to the island. Open-source satellite information provided by Planet Labs earlier this week showed three B-2 bombers on the US base. On Friday, other open-source accounts shared imagery suggesting at least five B-2 bombers were on the base.

Diego Garcia is part of the Chagos Islands archipelago in the Indian Ocean. The US’s footprint there can be traced back to the waning days of the British Empire.

In the 1960s, Britain was pulling out of its colonies but wanted to maintain a few strategic claims on the map to remain a power on the world stage. In the Eastern Mediterranean, they carved out a base on Cyprus. In the Indian Ocean, they pressured Mauritius, a former British colony, to sell the Chagos Islands to just Britain.

To build a military base on Chagos’ largest island, Diego Garcia, the British forcibly displaced around 1,500 native islanders without compensation into slums in Mauritius and the Seychelles.