torpedoed an Iranian frigate<\/a>, the IRIS Dena, just off its coast in March.<\/p>\n“They wanted to bring two warplanes armed with eight anti-ship missiles to Mattala International Airport from March 4 to 8, and we said ‘no’,” Dissanayake said.<\/p>\n
He did not say whether the U.S. request was to use Sri Lanka as a base for the aircraft to carry out offensive actions against Iran.<\/p>\n
Dissanayake said Iran, too, had requested port calls for three of its warships, returning from India after a naval exercise, on the same day the U.S. requested permission to station their two aircraft.<\/p>\n
“We were still considering the Iranian request to bring the three ships to Colombo from March 9 to 13. Had we said ‘yes’ to Iran, we would have had to say ‘yes’ to the U.S. too,” he said. “But we didn’t. We are steadfastly maintaining our position of neutrality.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sri Lanka refused permission to the United States to station two of its warplanes at a civilian airport…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":669264,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[372,69,9967,83,99,3097,50,3345,77218,131,103],"class_list":{"0":"post-669263","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-benjamin-netanyahu","9":"tag-donald-trump","10":"tag-gas-prices","11":"tag-iran","12":"tag-israel","13":"tag-middle-east","14":"tag-news","15":"tag-oil-and-gas","16":"tag-united-states-military","17":"tag-war","18":"tag-world"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116261860999148062","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=669263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669263\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/669264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=669263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=669263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=669263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}