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":2,"featured_media":535766,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,5620,12,29429,801,803,129,3,45063,21,41033,19,22,20,25,24,1139],"class_list":["post-535765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-benjamin-netanyahu","tag-donald-trump","tag-gas-prices","tag-iran","tag-israel","tag-middle-east","tag-news","tag-oil-and-gas","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-military","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=535765"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535765\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/535766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=535765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=535765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=535765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}