Recent comments from senior Iranian officials strongly recommend that Tehran see itself as a booming arms exporter, especially drones. The local drone Bayraktar TB2 to many countries of the world in just a few years. Iran will have to settle for a much more limited market position than other pariah states and cash-strapped countries with few or no alternatives.
In a televised speech on Oct. 22, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said foreign leaders ask about Iran’s indigenous military apparatus when traveling abroad.
“Until recently, our military industry didn’t even have barbed wire, and they didn’t give it to us,” he said. Don’t you need to sell us the products of your military industries?'”
Raisi claimed that he would answer such questions by asking why those countries need Iranian hardware, to which they invariably reply: “Their industry is more advanced. It’s different from the rest of the world. “
On August 22, the aerospace commander of Iran’s hardline Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) paramilitaries also used the analogy of the barbed cord to illustrate how Iran’s arms industry has come about.
“In the military field, we had the functions we have now,” said Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh. “In the past, we even imported barbed wire, but now we export drones. “
And on October 18, Iranian Major General Yahya Rahim Safavi highlighted Iran’s good fortune in drone production.
“Today we have reached a point where 22 countries around the world are not easy to buy drones from Iran,” he said.
These 22 countries come with Armenia, Algeria, Serbia, Tajikistan and Venezuela, analysts are skeptical about the alleged interest of Serbia.
With Iranian-made Shahed-136 fighter ammunition (so-called suicide drones) hitting Ukrainian cities almost every day, it is undeniable that Iran has effectively exported a large number of its drones to Russia.
An Iranian Shahed-136 drone is seen in the sky seconds before firing on buildings in Kyiv, Array. [ ] Ukraine, Monday, October 17, 2022. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
Despite this, Tehran officially denies the lifestyles of what could be, along with Russia’s expected acquisition of a bunch of Iranian ballistic missiles, its largest arms export to date. indifferent” if “we are shown that Iranian drones are used in Ukraine’s war against the people. “
Russia deserves this apparent lie. Moscow officially claims that it only uses Russian aircraft with “Russian names” in Ukraine. “We don’t have that information,” Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said when asked about Russia’s widely publicized acquisition of Iranian drones.
Iranian drones in the service of Russia have Russian names. The Shahed-136, for example, has been rebranded as Geran-2. Yemen’s Houthis have also changed the name of their Iranian-designed drones to mask their apparent origin in a different way. For example, the Houthi versions of the Ababi-2 are known as Qasef-1 and Qasef-2K, respectively.
FILE – This undated photograph released through the Strategic Communications Directorate of Ukraine’s ArmyArray. . . [ ] shows the remains of what Kyiv described as an Iranian Shahed drone shot down near Kupiansk, Ukraine. As protests rage across the country, Iran’s theocratic government is deploying its military force abroad. This includes supplying drones to Russia that are now killing Ukrainian civilians, conducting training in a border region with Azerbaijan and bombing Kurdish positions in Iraq. (Directorate of Strategic Communications of the Ukrainian Army via AP, File)
Even if Iran were open to promoting drones in Russia, this deal is not a sign of a rising Iranian drone industry that could rival that of Turkey or China.
Moscow would have looked for a factory to build TB2. A year before this war there were also signs that he fears those Turkish drones given his successes in past fighting in Syria, Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020. Turkey refuses to sell Russia the TB2, and China is unwilling to sell Russia its drones after the invasion, as this would undoubtedly result in heavy US sanctions. Shrinking missile stockpiles.
This is not to say, of course, that Iran has not exported elsewhere. Outside the Middle East, Ethiopia and Venezuela appear to have acquired the armed drone Mohajer-6 from Iran. Tehran also opened a factory in Tajikistan for the local meeting of its Ababil-2 drones, the first of its kind to build Iranian drones abroad. We may soon be informed that a factory has been set up in Russia to mass produce Shaheds.
However, Turkish drones are much more prevalent in the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future. In addition, Turkey is building factories to manufacture its drones in Kazakhstan, Ukraine and the United Arab Emirates.
TB2 has a combined reputation. Kurdish civilians terrified by Turkish drone movements in Iraq and Syria naturally have a very different view of them than the Ukrainians, who well used their TB2s to prevent Russia’s advance on Kyiv at the beginning of the war. The deployment of Iranian drones to terrorize Ukrainian civilians, in addition to their previous use through militias in the Middle East, has given them a much more one-sided reputation as crude and indiscriminate terrorist weapons. This is likely one of the reasons Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky chose one of the more than three hundred Shahed drones his forces have shot down in recent weeks to defend it when he recently promised that Ukraine would “clip the wings” of the Russian air force to restrict Moscow’s ability to terrorize Ukrainian cities with Iran. help.
Iran will likely locate a dozen countries interested in buying its drones. Safavi was probably telling the fact when he said 22 countries were interested in Tehran’s drones. However, most of these countries have few other characteristics for political or monetary reasons. Therefore, the Iranian drone market will likely remain a niche market that cannot aspire to achieve the foreign good fortune enjoyed lately by the Turkish drone industry.