Shabtabnews In this dark night, I have lost my way – Arise from a corner, oh you the star of guidance.
Al-Monitor – Iran’s Defense Ministry unveiled a new advanced combat drone on Tuesday, the latest from a generation of such unmanned aircraft it has allegedly been shipping to Russia in the course of the ongoing war on Ukraine.
Dubbed Mohajer 10, the drone was unveiled by hard-line President Ebrahim Raisi at a ceremony in Tehran as the country marked its National Defense Industry Day.
The new military aircraft boasts a variety of features, as detailed by the state-funded Tasnim news agency. With a fuel capacity of 450 liters, Mohajer 10 can fly at a maximum speed of 210 kilometers per hour (130 mph) to a range of up to 2,000 kilometers, or about 1,240 miles.
Mohajer is the name of a family of drones Iran has developed and unveiled one after another in recent years. Western intelligence sources as well as the Ukrainian military maintain that Mohajer 6 is being extensively used by Russia in its bombardments of Ukrainian infrastructure and civilian targets. The accusation has triggered an array of packages of Western sanctions against the Islamic Republic. Tehran, on the other hand, claims that it has shipped only a limited number of such drones to Moscow and it did so prior to the invasion of Ukraine. In the latest, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian told reporters on a visit to South Africa that Ukrainian authorities have failed to present evidence on Iranian drone deliveries to Russia and that Moscow has promised not to use Iranian equipment in its war on Ukraine.
During the Tehran ceremony, the Iranian Defense Ministry also introduced Arman-1, which, according to Tasnim, is a new guided air-launched bomb. A series of earlier unveiled equipment now being mass-produced were also delivered to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, among them Khorramshahr and Haj Qasem ballistic missiles. The latter has been named after Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s most revered commander, who was killed outside Baghdad’s international airport in 2020 in a drone strike ordered by former US President Donald Trump.
Delivering his speech to Iran’s top military brass, Raisi did not address the drone shipment accusations but praised how the Islamic Republic had reversed the impacts of Western sanctions, claiming it has made “utmost progress” across military and nuclear fields.
At a time when Iran faces relentless threats of military action from its regional foe Israel and amid recent naval deployments by the United States to the Persian Gulf, Raisi warned that “the Islamic Republic’s strong armed forces will cut off hands that seek to commit any aggression against Iran.”
