THREATS

Iran Warns Afghanistan About U.S. Drones

While military official says crashed drone was looking at Iran’s nuclear sites.

An Iranian official warned Afghanistan Thursday that Iran would treat any U.S. drone flights that left from Afghanistan as hostile acts—a move that threatened to bring Afghanistan into the mushrooming U.S.-Iran conflict for the first time. There was no immediate response from the U.S. or Afghanistan, but Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Wednesday that the drone flights would continue, despite the much publicized crash of a CIA-operated drone in Iran last week. Meanwhile, an American military official told CNN Thursday that the crashed drone was on a surveillance mission of suspected nuclear sites in Iran, not patrolling the Afghan-Iran border as was originally stated. But officials also refuted Iranian claims that the drone had been overtaken and crashed, with one intelligence source saying the drone “simply fell into [Iran’s] laps.”