The Drive:

Iranian officials have for the first time acknowledged plans to sell Russia hundreds of short-range ballistic missiles (SRBM) and drones, Reuters has reported, citing two senior Iranian officials and two Iranian diplomats.

The acknowledgment flies in the face of previous denials by Iran about selling missiles and drones to Russia despite the glaring fact that they had done so.

Just last week, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said “the Islamic Republic of Iran has not and will not provide any weapon to be used in the war in Ukraine,” according to an Oct. 16 readout of his call with his Portuguese counterpart, the Washington Post reported. “We believe that the arming of each side of the crisis will prolong the war.”

The deal, first reported in that Post story which did not have an acknowledgment by Iran, involves Fateh-110 and Zolfaghar SRBMs capable of striking targets at distances of between 186 and 435 miles.

Both SRBMs have been used by Iran to strike targets operationally in the past.

The Zolfaghar was used in its Jan. 2020 attack on the Al-Asad Air Base in Iraq, according to Michael Elleman, Director of Non-Proliferation and Nuclear Policy at the International Institute for Strategic Studies and a former U.N. weapons inspector. That attack left more than 100 U.S. troops with traumatic brain injuries. The Fateh-110 was used by Iran in its March 2022 attack on Erbil in Iraq. Zolfaghars were also used to strike targets in Syria prior to both those operations. These weapons hit very hard with an impressive degree of accuracy. That’s something we wrote about earlier this month when we predicted that Iran, which makes a wide range of ballistic missiles and military drones, would sell Russia ballistic missiles. You can read more about that here.

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