IRGC Denies their own Story

Sometimes the fact that I rarely post on weekends keeps me from jumping to conclusions. A story went around for a while yesterday claiming that Iran's Fars news agency had reported that seven US soldiers and two Iranians had been captured inside Iran in the southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchistan. Fars may have been repeating something that has also been attributed to the Javan agency associated with the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), according to this rather detailed attempt to locate the origin of the report. Then the Pentagon, NATO, and Pakistan all denied the story. Then Fars denied the story, Javan retracted the story and apologized, and the IRGC denied he story. So what looks like an IRGC leak ends up being disowned by the IRGC, and the story vanishes.

Good; I'm glad there's no new crisis. But what happened here? A propaganda effort gone haywire? A confused report of some mistaken-idenity incident? A psychological op of some sort, by somebody? Or something like a covert team that were captured but then managed to be extracted?

Or, nothing at all.

I doubt we'll learn from internl Iranian sources, so we may never know.