According to a Tasnim report on Sunday, citing the Iranian Army’s Air Defense Force Brigadier General Alireza Sabahifard, Iranian experts have adapted a homegrown surface-to-air missile with a range of 8 kilometers (4.5 miles) for the ‘Karrar’ jet-powered drone.
The “air defense” version of Karrar drone was delivered today to the Iranian Army.
Karrar in this application is equipped with one tube of the Majid (AD-08) SAM system.
Video includes the system successful test performed on Oct 4, 2023. pic.twitter.com/gTLAmF8DfQ— Mehdi H. (@mhmiranusa) October 22, 2023
The Karrar is a reverse-engineered drone that was developed under President Ahmadinejad based on the American 1970s-era Beechcraft MQM-107 Streaker target drone. In 2021, Karrar jet unmanned aerial vehicles were equipped with Shahab-e-Saqeb missiles to hit air targets. Now, according to Sabahifard, after a year and a half of research and trial, the Air Defense experts made a series of technical modifications to the Majid surface-to-air missile and armed it with explosives to turn it into an air-to-air missile.
The Karrar was the first Iranian military drone that set a service ceiling record reaching an altitude of 47,000 feet. Considered by Iran to be an advanced interceptor drone, the Karrar is part of the new generation of Iran’s jet drones, configured to intercept enemy flying objects.
The Karrar was unveiled on August 23, 2010, one day after the activation of a nuclear reactor in Bushehr by President Ahmadinejad. It was described as a “long-range bomber drone,” and as such became the first long-range UAV manufactured in Iran.
Several sources reported as early as 2014 that the Karrar had been exported to Hezbollah, and it is widely believed that Israel has been bombing Syria, among other reasons, to destroy Hezbollah’s warehouses that contain the Karrar. In November 2020, Bloomberg reported for the first time that Iran was providing the Karrars with warheads.
The new weapon, primitive and limited as it may be, can be extremely effective if it succeeds in hovering above civilian centers deep inside Israel.
