The USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group arrives in the Arabian Sea, 6 February 2026. [Getty]
The Iranian army on Saturday claimed to have inflicted “significant damage” on one of the US’s largest aircraft carriers, forcing it to withdraw from the region.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guards earlier said it had conducted a successful missile and drone attack against the USS Abraham Lincoln, one of two aircraft carriers participating in the US-Israel war on Iran.
Speaking in a televised interview on Saturday, army spokesperson Abolfazl Shekarchi said the attack put the nuclear-powered vessel “out of operational service”, forcing it to pull back from its position in the Sea of Oman.
He did not provide evidence to support his claims.
Iran’s military has claimed several times during the 14-day war to have struck the vessel.
The US military denies the claim and has accused Iran of “peddling recycled lies”.
“To be clear: the Abraham Carrier Strike Group continues to dominate Iranian airspace from the sea,” US Central Command wrote in a post on X on Saturday.
This came after US news media reported that an Iranian vessel had approached the aircraft carrier, prompting the strike group to open fire.
The incident, which occurred earlier this week, saw a helicopter strike the boat with two Hellfire missiles, two US officials told CBS News. The status of the Iranian vessel and its crew was not disclosed.
The carrier was several hundred kilometres from Iran’s maritime border in the Gulf of Oman at the time.
The USS Abraham Lincoln is a powerful Nimitz-class aircraft carrier and is one of two strike groups currently deployed in the Middle East.
It arrived in the Indian Ocean in January as part of a massive naval buildup described by US President Donald Trump as an “armada”.
Since launching in the late 1980s, it has been deployed primarily in the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific.
