How the ‘AK-47 of Tehran’ changed warfare and set fire to the Middle East
Published on February 4, 2024
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 in the hangar on a pea-green floor, which looked a bit 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 that 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.
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