Iranian Official Warns UK Could Lose Diego Garcia Base

The head of Iran’s parliamentary National Security and Foreign Policy Committee has warned the United Kingdom it could lose its strategic Diego Garcia base if it continues supporting US military operations against Iran. Ebrahim Azizi said London would face consequences for its continued backing of American military action.

Writing on social media, Azizi said the era of Sykes-Picot ended long ago, and that the day isn’t far when Britain will lose its Diego Garcia base in the Indian Ocean just as it lost other colonial territories — invoking the century-old British-French agreement that carved up former Ottoman territories, a reference commonly used in Iranian political rhetoric to frame Western regional influence as an outdated colonial-era arrangement nearing its end.

Azizi urged London to consider what he called the fragile situation of its own borders, and reminded the UK government that Iran’s military capabilities aren’t limited to conventional options — language suggesting an implicit threat extending beyond direct military confrontation into asymmetric or unconventional forms of pressure, though he provided no further specifics.

Diego Garcia is a British-administered territory in the Indian Ocean hosting a major US military base under a long-standing agreement, a facility previously used to support American operations during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the current conflict against Iran, the base has reportedly been used to deploy long-range strategic bombers, including the B-2 Spirit, aircraft capable of striking targets from significant distances and historically associated with high-value, hardened target strikes.

Iranian officials have made clear that any country or foreign base facilitating US operations could become a target for Iranian forces — a warning consistent with recent threats issued against Gulf states hosting American bases and claimed Iranian strikes on installations in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Jordan throughout the conflict. Extending this warning to the UK and a base as strategically significant as Diego Garcia marks a notable widening of the countries Iran has explicitly named in its retaliatory threats.

Diego Garcia’s political status itself remains a matter of ongoing dispute independent of this current conflict, with Mauritius having long claimed sovereignty over the Chagos Islands, of which Diego Garcia is part, and international courts including the ICJ having previously ruled in favor of Mauritius’s claim, though the UK has continued administering the territory and hosting the US base under bilateral arrangements.

Whether Azizi’s warning reflects a genuine assessment of Iranian retaliatory intentions toward UK assets, or functions primarily as rhetorical pressure aimed at discouraging continued British support for US operations, remains unclear. Given the pattern of extensive but largely unverified Iranian military threats throughout this conflict — spanning claims against bases across multiple countries — the practical significance of this specific warning will likely depend on whether any concrete action against Diego Garcia or British assets follows in the coming days.