Over the weekend, tensions flashed between Israel and Iran and its Syrian proxies. A penetration of Israeli airspace by an Iranian drone led to a reprisal raid, the largest of its kind in thirty years, against the control vehicle for the drone, as well as anti-aircraft and command and control facilities. Iranians as well as Syrians were killed.

#Israel releases video of #Iran(Ian) drone which crossed into Israel and was downed by an Apache attack helicopter near Beit She’an pic.twitter.com/McX4ltwFlf

— Anna Ahronheim (@AAhronheim) February 10, 2018

For those in foreign press or int'l community, here is a handy quick summary of yesterday's events, in which an #Iranian UAV (drone) attacked launched from #Syria into #Israel's territory, in flagrant breach of int'l law and our national sovereignty. pic.twitter.com/3tVpZyA7Kt

— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) February 11, 2018

Now an interesting twist develops.

Israel Air Force says seized Iranian drone is a knockoff of US Sentinel https://t.co/ANQdi1pmbo pic.twitter.com/5K7tc7fGmj

— Defense News (@defense_news) February 12, 2018

Apparently, the Iranian drone was a near carbon copy of the RQ-170 Sentinel that the Iranians manged to hijack from inside Afghanistan.

There were plans to destroy the drone but we never go around to it.

This is how we responded:

President Obama on Monday pressed his request that Tehran return the U.S. surveillance drone captured by Iranian armed forces.

Mr. Obama said he would not comment “on intelligence matters that are classified,” but he said during a White House news conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that the U.S. wants the top-secret aircraft back.

“We have asked for it back. We’ll see how the Iranians respond,” Mr. Obama said.

At the time, Dick Cheney called for the Obama Admin to order an attack to destroy our drone and the unit that brought it down. We should’ve.
But we were already engaged in talks that would eventually produce the JCPOA.
Now here we are. https://t.co/65uuCEg2L5

— Jonathan Greenberg (@JGreenbergSez) February 11, 2018

In 2016, Iran announced that it had successfully reverse engineered the UAV and was putting it into production. Looks like they were telling the truth.

This is just another example of how Barack Hussein Obama placed allowing Iran to have a legal nuclear program that will inevitably…if it hasn’t already…result in an Iranian nuclear weapon ahead of American national security interests. The bills for his decisions are coming due and they will be paid for in blood.