Iran unveiled two new missiles and announced they are named after two military leaders killed by the United States.
The weapons, one a ballistic missile and the other a cruise missile, were displayed at a ceremony on Thursday marking Iran’s Defense Industries Day. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Defense Minister Brig. Gen. Ali Hatami virtually attended the unveiling, according to Radio Farda.
The Iranian government claims that the surface-to-surface ballistic missile named after slain Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani has a range of 1,400 kilometers, or about 870 miles.
The cruise missile is named after Iraqi militia leader Abu Mahdi al Muhandis and has a reported range of 1,000 kilometers, or some 620 miles. Muhandis was the head of Kata’ib Hezbollah, a group that is a proxy of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
“The fact that we have increased the range from 300 to 1,000 in less than two years is a great achievement,” Rouhani said on Thursday.
The Washington Examiner reached out to the Pentagon for comment.
Soleimani and Muhandis were killed in a U.S. drone strike outside of Baghdad’s international airport in January.
The U.S. began on Thursday the process of instituting a “snapback” of United Nations sanctions against Iran. The controversial move was announced by President Trump on Wednesday and will likely infuriate Iran. The push for snapback sanctions follows a stinging defeat for the U.S. in its attempt to extend an arms embargo against Iran set to expire in October.
The 2015 Iran nuclear deal stipulated that any of the signatory nations could reinstitute sanctions if Iran substantially violated the terms of the pact. The U.S. invocation of the snapback provision has generated controversy because the U.S. left the nuclear deal in 2018.
