TEHRAN — Iranian state television on Saturday
broadcasted footage of an air force base for drones under the
Zagros mountain
range in the west of the country.
اضافة اعلان
The exact location of the base was not
revealed, although the TV reporter said he traveled on a helicopter for nearly
40 minutes from the city of Kermanshah to reach it.
Iran started developing drones, or unmanned
aerial vehicles (
UAVs), in the 1980s during its eight-year war with Iraq.
The US and Israel accuse Iran of dispatching
fleets of drones to its proxies in the Middle East, including Lebanon's
Hezbollah movement, the regime of
Syria's President Bashar Al-Assad and Yemen's
Houthi rebels.
Video aired on state television showed
Iran's armed forces chief of staff General Mohammad Bagheri and army commander
Abdolrahim Mousavi visiting the underground site.
"More than 100 combat, reconnaissance,
and attack drones belonging to the army are kept for operations in this base
located in the heart of the Zagros mountains," the report said.
Bagheri, quoted by the official news agency
IRNA, described the site as a "safe operational base for strategic
drones".
"We never underestimate threats, we
never assume the enemy is asleep, and we are constantly alert and
vigilant," he added.
Mousavi told state television the base was
located "several hundred meters underground", without giving further
details.
State TV said the flagship of the fleet was
the "Kaman-22", a drone equipped with missiles and able to fly at
least 2,000km.
The US Treasury slapped sanctions on the
drone program of
Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in October last year.
It accused the Guards of being behind a
September 2019 drone strike on a Saudi oil refinery, as well as a July 2021
drone attack on a commercial ship off the coast of Oman that killed two
crewmen.
Iran denied the charges.
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