How ‘AK-47 of Tehran’ changed warfare and set the region on fire

Iran’s deadly Shahed drone has been exported to war zones across the globe with devastating effect

In the summer of September 2013, a handful of journalists with close ties to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard were summoned to a secretive ceremony in an aircraft hangar.

Waiting for them on a pea-green floor, which looked like a repurposed school gymnasium, were two brand new aircraft in white and blue livery, marked with the number “129”.

To the journalists charged with taking photographs of the new kit, ahead of a big announcement by the Revolutionary Guard, it may have felt like just another routine assignment.

But this was no ordinary plane: this was the Shahed (Witness in Persian), a deadly long-range drone that in the decade to come would wreak havoc across the Middle East and beyond.

“Our scientists, through scientific struggle, have built Iran’s most strategic unmanned plane,” declared Gen Mohammad Ali Jafari, then the commander-in-chief of the Revolutionary Guard. “This smart technology can do the job of thousands of soldiers, military posts and border guards... and protect the security of the borders.”

It was a bold claim for a regime with a reputation for building dubious imitations of superior Western drones; in 2011, the Iranians had also managed to capture a US RQ-170 which was reverse-engineered some years later to make another drone in the Iranian fleet, the Simorgh.

This time, however, Gen Jafari was proven right, as the Shahed became what one expert has called the “AK-47” of Tehran: cheap, mass- produced and ready to be exported worldwide to conflict zones where the regime has a vested interest.

The menace of the Shahed was underlined this week after US officials, said it had been unleashed on its desert outpost of Tower 22 in Jordan.

Emitting its distinctive, lawnmowerlike whirr, the drone was launched by an Iranian-backed militia group in Iraq and somehow evaded US air defences before crashing into the barracks, killing three US soldiers and injuring a further 25.

The next day, US media broadcast the names, ranks, ages and pictures of the slain troops – Specialist Breonna Alexsondria Moffett, 23, Specialist Kennedy Ladon Sanders, 24, and Sergeant William Jerome Rivers, 46 – as they did during the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns. It was the moment that the latest war in the Middle East was brought home to America.

US officials called it “the most deadly attack since Oct 17”, the date when armed groups across the Middle East started attacking US forces in retaliation for Israel’s ongoing war with Hamas. It was also, they said, “an escalation of significance” – raising the spectre of direct conflict with Iran.

The Shahed had been used many times by Iranian proxies before in the Middle East, notably by Houthi militia groups who relied on it against the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, and more recently in a string of attacks on Western commercial ships in the Red Sea. The Syrian regime’s drone fleet is also reported to include Shaheds.

A Shahed-136 drone was, according to US officials, used in the notorious July 2021 drone attack by Iran on the Mercer Street vessel in the Red Sea, which killed a Romanian sailor and a British security guard.

Perhaps most significantly, it is being exported en masse to Russia for use in Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as part of a shadowy new security alliance with Moscow.

In Ukraine, the sound of a Shahed rumbling through the skies signals an imminent explosion and, frequently, civilian casualties. Fitted with warheads of up to 50kg and with a range of up to 2,000 kilometres (1,240 miles), the Russians have mainly been relying on Shaheds to attack energy grids and grain storehouses.

A September 2023 report by Airwars, a British investigative news website, found that nearly 2,000 Shaheds have been launched at Ukraine from Russia since that month.

Ulrike Franke, a drone expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said Iranian drones like the Shahed were particularly attractive to Russia because they were already battle-tested in the Middle East and easy to ship in huge quantities.

“Iran has a long history of building these smaller and less sophisticated drones and testing them around the world,” she said. “What is surprising is the sheer numbers – they are giving out hundreds and hundreds which were either quickly produced or already in their arsenal.”

Experts like Dr Franke stress that drones are not strategic weapons, in the sense of being able to decide the overall outcome of the war in Ukraine. However, “they bring an element of surprise that other elements cannot – they are a nuisance to the point it can become a new problem.”

They are also a drain on the enemy’s resources, she added: “The munition used to shoot them down tends to be more expensive than the drone itself.”

Ukrainian forces have also been hard at work developing electronic warfare solutions to incoming drones, such as jamming their GPS so they cannot reach their target. Then there are the old fashioned, and sometimes most effective, methods – such as putting up huge nets around a base to block small aircraft.

As for the attack in Jordan on US troops, some reports suggest this was more a case of a US security failure than an Iranian triumph; staff on the base may have mistaken the Shahed for a US drone and allowed it to pass.

It could be argued that the story of the Shahed mirrors Iran’s expanding influence across the Middle East and Europe: secretive, low-cost and more geared towards disruption than mass destruction.

As for General Jafari, he is quietly retired in Iran, where he lives under US and UK sanctions – but the legacy of his “scientific struggle” drones on.