Recent comments from top Iranian officials strongly suggest that Tehran perceives itself as a rapidly ascending arms exporter, especially of drones. In reality, Iran, at least under the incumbent regime in Tehran, will not likely prove capable of replicating Turkey’s impressive success in exporting its well-known homegrown Bayraktar TB2 drone to numerous countries worldwide in just a few short years. Iran will have to settle for a much more limited market consisting of other pariah states and cash-strapped countries with little to no viable alternatives.
In a televised address on Oct. 22, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi claimed that foreign leaders frequently inquire about Iran’s indigenous military equipment when he travels abroad.
“Until recently, our military industry did not even have barbed wire, and they would not give it to us,” he said. “Today, in New York, in Samarkand, when I meet with heads of state, they ask me: ‘You don’t want to sell us the products of your military industries?'”
Raisi claimed he would respond to such questions by asking why those countries want Iranian hardware all of a sudden, to which they invariably reply: “Your industry is more advanced. It is different from the rest of the world.”
File Photo shows, Visitors look on The Shahed-129, an Iranian single-engine medium-altitude … [+]
NurPhoto via Getty Images
On Aug. 22, the aerospace commander of Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) paramilitary also used the barbed wire analogy to illustrate how far Iran’s arms industry has come.
“In the military field, we did not have the capabilities that we have now,” said Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh. “In the past, we used to import even barbed wire, but now we export drones.”
And on Oct. 18, Iranian Major General Yahya Rahim Safavi emphasized Iran’s success in drone manufacturing.
“Today we have reached a point that 22 world countries are demanding to purchase unmanned aircraft from Iran,” he said.
These 22 countries include Armenia, Algeria, Serbia, Tajikistan and Venezuela, although analysts are skeptical about the alleged interest from Serbia.
With Iranian-built Shahed-136 loitering munitions (so-called suicide drones) descending on Ukrainian cities almost every day, it’s an indisputable fact that Iran has successfully exported a very large number of its drones to Russia.
An Iranian Shahed-136 drone is seen in the sky seconds before it fired on buildings in Kyiv, … [+]
AP
Despite this, Tehran officially denies the very existence of what could be – with the addition of an expected Russian acquisition of hundreds of Iranian ballistic missiles – its most significant arms export ever. Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian even went so far as to say that Tehran “should not remain indifferent” if it is “proven to us that Iranian drones are being used in the Ukraine war against people.”
It suits Russia to support this self-evident falsehood. Moscow officially …….