The IRGC and the Ghetto SAMs

-

Redline very much enjoyed our last outing where we followed the IRGC's missile proliferation to Yemen, and we thought we'd continue on that theme a bit longer. Turns out that there's lots to talk about.


Not unsurprisingly, it seems, that as well as smuggling large ballistic missile systems to Houthi-controlled territory in Yemen, the IRGC is moving shedloads of other kit from Iranian arms factories to the Houthis. Secretly. Sort of. Well... not really secretly at all, because the IRGC keeps a secret about as well as Stormy Daniels maintains a nondisclosure agreement.


One item in the IRGC's smuggling pockets that has Redline particularly concerned is surface-to-air missile systems, or SAMs. The Houthis already had a pretty decent stockpile of man-portable air defence systems (aka MANPADs) that they'd plundered from government stockpiles, but over the last year or so, the Houthis' MANPADS stockpiles have diminished, and they've been resorting to home-made, jerry-rigged options, including what unkind (but amusing) commentators have described as "ghetto SAMs". (Niche SAM humour, we appreciate it!)


Anyway, in an attempt to bolster the Houthis' declining abilities to hit coalition aircraft, the IRGC has been shipping very, very capable anti-aircraft systems to Yemen. (More on these systems in a second.) How do we know this? Well, the Saudi government put on a bit of show and tell a few months ago where they displayed various Iranian military systems that the Saudis or their allies captured before they reached the Houthis. This presentation is well worth a close review. Redline acknowledges that the Saudis aren't exactly the most objective observers of the conflict in Yemen (indeed, Riyadh would do very well to bomb less and talk more), but the evidence they present here is extremely credible. Particularly so, as it aligns very closely to what the United Nations Panel of Experts on Yemen has reported in the past with respect to Iran's transfers of military systems to the Houthis.


So what exactly is Iran supplying the Houthis? It's these:



No, that's not the world's largest e-cigarette. It's a Sayyad-2C (-) surface-to-air missile, a recently developed Iranian system that's a highly capable system against fighter aircraft. Based on an American anti-aircraft missile system supplied to Iran prior to the Islamic Revolution, the Sayyad-2 has a range of 150 kilometers and can reportedly reach altitudes of 20 to 30 kilometres.


That is a long, long range for a SAM. And it's precisely this range that has Redline so concerned about the introduction of these systems into the Yemeni conflict. We certainly don't think that any more downed Coalition fighter pilots will bring about peace in Yemen, so there's that reason. But that's not so concerning as an MH17 scenario, where the Houthis and their IRGC advisors accidentally target a civilian airliner thinking that it's a Coalition military transport aircraft.


Think this couldn't happen? Surprisingly, civilian airlines including FlyDubai, Etihad and Air Arabia are flying over eastern Yemen on a daily basis, and aircraft from the Saudi carrier fly awfully close to the northern border area of Yemen, which is under direct Houthi control. All of the aircraft from these airliners fly at cruising altitudes much less than the ceiling range of the Sayyad-2.


Adding to our concern levels is this: we don't think that the IRGC trainers who are schooling the Houthis on how to use the Sayyad systems are, well, very good at their jobs. If they were, they probably wouldn't have been videotaped by a Saudi drone while providing Surface-to-Air Missiles for Dummies lessons at San'aa Airport (of all places?) in broad daylight (ah, screw it, let's just go home). A basic security 101 fail, clearly.


Just for the lolz, here's a pic from the Saudis:


Anyway, let's hope that every Sayyad-2C that's on its way to Yemen gets found and destroyed.


An additional interesting nugget in the Saudi presentation is another item that the Coalition has seized on its way from Iran to Yemen - something called a Virtual Radar Receiver, or VRR. Here it is:
 

While that picture may look like the remnants of the I.T. guy's rampage after he got a bit drunk and destructive at the Nowrouz party (Oh Hamed! Not again?!), it's actually the dismantled components of what's called a passive radar system. These devices can be used to track civilian and military aircraft by snooping on their transponders. If you want to shoot down an aircraft, a VRR like this is a very useful complementary tracking device for your offensive missile system.


There's some amusing background to this particular VRR device. As the Saudis noted, the VRR was produced by an Iranian company called Behine Pardazan Rizmoj Sanat, which was clever enough to leave their label on the packaging before shipping it off to Yemen. Oops. With an epic security fail of this magnitude, we dare say that Rizmoj Sanat has very close ties to the IRGC and its Qods Force, who was most likely the group that tried (and failed) to get this system to the Houthis in Yemen.


Something about this whole IRGC in Yemen thing makes us think that there are a few more articles for us to write on this topic. Terrible Iranian operational security + costly IRGC misadventures abroad + constant bungling = great Redline content!


We're just profoundly sorry that it comes at the price of an awful humanitarian crisis - one for which Iran has just as much to answer for as all the other parties to the conflict. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in HD

-
Image
We can't believe our luck today here at Iran Redline. The world's most elusive entity has been caught on camera! No, not the giant squid filmed in the Gulf of Mexico , although that's quite good too. Rather, we've found video footage of Iran's most notorious individual: Mohsen Fakhrizadeh ( محسن فخری زاده or محسن فخری زاده مهابادی ), head of Iran's pre-2003 nuclear weapons program, and the man most likely to lead any resumption of such work should Iran make good on its former threats to leave the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) . Today, we're pleased to point out the first video of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh that (to the best of our knowledge) has ever been released in the public domain. Taken in January 2019, the video footage shows Fakhrizadeh taking part in a meeting with Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ( سيد علی خامنه ای ), and members of a governmental neuroscience coordination body called the Cognitive Science and Tech
Read more

The giant steel balls of Saeed Borji

-
Image
Are you struggling to find the smoothest, most perfectly spherical balls? Iran Redline feels your pain! And apparently so too does SPND ( سپند ) - the hapless Iranian defense research organization with a penchant for nuclear weapons - because SPND's latest business venture involves solving exactly this problem.  In today's post, we're revealing the SPND front company that is leading a rather ludicrous commercial effort to deliver the best giant balls in all of Iran. The company is run by two notorious SPND old-timers - mechanical engineer Saeed Borji ( دکتر سعید برجی , national ID 1816934984) and metallurgist Mohammad Reza Heydari (aka Mohammadreza Heidari, or مهندس محمدرضا حیدی , national ID 4489244029). It's not hard to tell which of these guys is the bigger fish in the SPoND, as Dr Saeed Borji has tastefully named the company after himself: say hello to the Azar Afrouz Saeed Engineering Company! In Farsi, they're known as شرکت فنی مهندسی آذر افروز
Read more

New sanctions, same old SPND

-
Image
The public revelation of Iran's atomic archives continues to cause ripples, with the United States Treasury the latest government authority to delve into the documents pinched from under the nose of Iran's intelligence agencies. On 22 March, the Treasury released an extensive list ( here and here ) of sanctions designations targeted directly at SPND ( سازمان پژوهش ‌ های نوین دفاعی ), the Iranian military research organisation responsible for curating (and losing) the extensive records of Iran's pre-2003 nuclear weapons programme.  This news must have been a real blow to scientists and other staff working at SPND, many of whom are already upset by stressful working conditions under Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. Now they will find their freedom to travel, to publish and to speak academically, as well as their future work prospects,(even more) severely limited. These sanctions basically mean that SPND and its employees can forget about ever getting a bank account with anyth
Read more

Sadra Cognitive Research Center: where SPND gets their freak on

-
Image
No villainous organization, factual or fictional, is truly complete without a part-time penchant for the truly weird. The Nazis had an obsession for finding the Spear of Destiny and Holy Grail. Spectre had a volcano lair and chinchilla cats. SPND ( سپند), the Iranian defense research organization that holds the ageing expertise from Iran's nuclear weapons program, is no exception. When SPND wants to get its freak on, it calls on one of its subsidiaries: the Sadra Cognitive Defense Science Center ( مرکز علوم شناختی دفاعی صدرا or مرکز علوم شناختی و دفاعی صدرا or مرکز پژوهشی صدرا or مرکـز مطالعات علوم شناختی دفاعی صدرا ). The Sadra Center has been around for a few years, but its status as a component of SPND was only revealed publicly in March 2019 in a US government sanctions list. Since then, a short article from a corporate intelligence company, Kharon, has provided some extra details on Sadra . Today, we want to provide even more evidence on the connections between SPND and Sadr
Read more

Mohsen Fakhrizadeh creeps into the limelight

-
Image
Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the head of Iran's shadowy SPND organization, has traditionally shunned publicity. Until recently, the only glimpses that we've had of Fakhrizadeh have been from grainy photographs probably purloined by intelligence agencies.   That's all changed. We recently wrote about how we spotted Fakhrizadeh in publicly-released footage from a meeting in January 2019 of Iran's Cognitive Science and Technologies Council (CSTC or ستاد توسعه علوم و فناوریهای شناختی ) - probably much to Fakhrizadeh's annoyance. Little did we realize then that Mohsen actually made at least two public appearances that month - and at the second one, he certainly wasn't hiding from the cameras.   On 5 January 2019, as an obscure Iranian media outlet reported , Fakhrizadeh signed a trilateral memorandum of understanding on behalf of SPND with the IRGC's Basij mobilization organization ( مسلح سازمان بسیج سازندگی کشور ) and Iran's Supreme National Defense Univers
Read more

Heavy Metal in Tehran

-
Image
I’m told that one of the hardest things to do when making nuclear weapons is metallurgy – getting the fissile material ‘pit’ [1] that sits at the heart of the bomb just right. You don’t want your pit to be contaminated by other materials, nor for it to be brittle or aerated – they’re all things that cause nukes to fizzle [2] rather than bang. If Iran wants to produce nuclear weapons, getting metallurgical aspects of its fissile material right is a hurdle that it needs to overcome. And it’s not entirely clear how much work Iran has already done in this area. The Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran has admitted [3] to the IAEA that it conducted experiments in producing uranium metal from Chinese-origin uranium tetrafluoride. Helpfully, we also know from the IAEA that the pre-2004 ‘AMAD’ nuclear weapons development organisation had a ‘ uranium metallurgy project ’ [4] (dang, I wonder what they were working on?), and, given that AMAD ran for at least four years, it’s not a grea
Read more

Amad Men: Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi

-
Image
While we sip on pomegranate juice and throw pistachio shells around the office with carefree abandon, Redline is also enjoying the fallout (pardon the pun) from the revelations of the so-called Atomic Archive , the stash of incriminating paperwork nabbed by the Mossad from Iran. The Atomic Archive has lots of juicy details about Iran's pre-2003 nuclear weapons programme, and provides unparalleled insights into Iran's crash effort to build nukes in the early 2000s. Those analysts who've been granted access to parts of the archive have shown that Iran got much further towards preparing fissile material for use in nuclear weapons than has generally been understood in the public domain. From covert facilities under mountains for uranium enrichment to, erm, covert facilities under mountains for uranium metallurgy , the archive shows that Iran's plan for putting nukes together was real and extensive. And thank God that the Supreme Leader got antsy and pulled the pin on t
Read more

The IAP is back - and putting Iran's biggest university at risk of sanctions: Part II

-
Image
In our last post , we revealed documents showing that in 2016, SPND used the IAP as a nom-de-plume to sign a memorandum of cooperation with Iran's oldest and most prestigious private university, the Islamic Azad University Central Tehran Branch ( دانشگاه آزاد واحد تهران مرکزی ). There is a lot of evidence in there that the SPND is behind it. Let’s take a closer look: First, the document is signed by Dr Rouhollah Ghaderi ( روح الله قادری ), who is described in the document as the head of the IAP. Here is Ghaderi's signature below on the contract, using a shortened version of his first name: We know from authoritative sources that Dr Rouhollah Ghaderi (national ID 4579489705) is a long-time, senior official of SPND. In March 2019, the US Treasury put Dr Ghaderi under sanctions for directing SPND's Shahid Fakhr Moghadam Group ( گروه شهید فخار مقدم ), one of SPND's main research entities. Shahid Fakhr Moghadam has built explosion simulators and radiatio
Read more

How SPND is at the heart of Iran's Novichok research - Part II

-
Image
In this post we're continuing our deep dive into Iran's research on novel chemical weapons, which we think is being spearheaded by SPND. You can read the first part of this work here . In that article, we revealed that Iran's internationally-certified chemical weapons research laboratory, the DCRL, is co-located with and probably controlled by an SPND entity, the Shahid Meisami Research Group.   In this article, we pinpoint the person responsible for Iran's work on novel chemical weapons - and his close ties to SPND.   The man behind Iran's novichok work   Dr Mehran Babri ( مهران ببری , ID: 0050111078) is one of Iran's foremost experts on the science of chemical weapons. With more than 25 years of experience in chemistry, he's an expert in gas chromotograph mass spectrometry - an extremely precise means of measuring chemical compounds, and of detecting the presence of chemical weapon agents in environmental samples. Babri's published research
Read more

A moment of silence for Mohsen Fakhrizadeh-Mahabadi (محسن فخری‌زاده مهابادی)

-
Image
  In terms of security, we think the last couple of years are a blip that the Iranian powers-that-be would rather forget.    Since 1397, we’ve seen troves of documents from the supposedly secret Nuclear Archives make international headlines , the explosive killing of IRGC-QF head Qasem Soleimani (قاسم سلیمانی ), a series of mysteriously unexplained incidents at nuclear and other sensitive facilities here and there, and now this: our main man, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, has been assassinated . On Iranian soil. Just outside Tehran. In broad daylight.    All of this, despite the regime continuously taking freedoms away from the Iranian people in the name of "security". No wonder they're claiming their revered nuclear scientist died facing an elaborate, futuristic robot that no one could defeat. As head of the shadowy Iranian nuclear research organization SPND (سپند ), F akhrizadeh had been a regular presence in our features here at Redline over the years, so much so tha
Read more