TEHRAN -- Iran said on Saturday it had brought down a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drone over the island of Qeshm near the Strait of Hormuz and that a tanker had caught fire after striking a sea mine east of the strait.

The Army's Public Relations Office said the MQ-9 belonging to the "aggressor American enemy" was targeted and destroyed by new air defense systems operated by the Army Air Defense Force under the country's unified air defense network.

It said the drone, capable of flying at up to 50,000 feet and carrying Hellfire missiles at roughly $30 million per unit, was downed over Qeshm Island near the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz.

The IRGC public relations office said separately on Friday that its advanced air defense system had intercepted and destroyed the 16th U.S. MQ-1 reconnaissance-combat drone over Qeshm, adding that "repeated" failures of the enemy's reconnaissance missions had cast a shadow over the record of General Brad Cooper, commander of U.S. Central Command.

The IRGC said its forces constantly monitor enemy aerial movements and drone flight patterns.

The IRGC Navy said two oil tankers caught fire in the Strait of Hormuz after entering restricted waters without coordination with Iranian authorities, attempting to leave through unauthorized passages with navigation and identification systems switched off and with the support of the "aggressive and terrorist U.S. military."

The Navy said on Saturday a tanker had struck a sea mine east of the strait while sailing through a prohibited and unsafe zone despite repeated warnings and with its navigation systems off, leaving it unable to move, and warned this would be the fate of all vessels violating restrictions.

Around 56 MQ-9 and nearly 15 MQ-1 drones have been intercepted and destroyed by Iranian air defense units.  

The significance lies not in the price of each drone but in the ISR — intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance — role the platforms play, where satellites and manned high-altitude aircraft cannot alone meet U.S. needs and disruption of this chain can create battlefield intelligence gaps.

Images of recent IRGC interceptions point to use of the 358 and 359 loitering air defense projectiles, whose relatively low speed and passive optical seekers reduce the probability of detection by enemy radar warning systems, alongside the Majid air defense system.

In June 2019, the IRGC shot down a U.S. RQ-4 Global Hawk over the Strait of Hormuz after it violated Iranian airspace, with radar data later confirming the breach.

IRGC spokesman Brigadier General Hussein Mohebbi, in a social media message, used "MQ-Gone" instead of MQ-9, a play on the Reaper's name meaning lost or vanished.

The IRGC said the downing of its 15th MQ-1 came on Wednesday, and that with Iran's forces having inflicted significant losses on the MQ-9 fleet, Washington has been forced back to MQ-1 drones, retired by the Air Force in 2018, to sustain aerial surveillance.

The core question now is how long Washington can keep using expensive reconnaissance drones inside airspace covered by Iranian defenses, as each loss removes operational and intelligence capacity that cannot be replaced by simply buying a new aircraft.