Here lies the man who wanted to destroy Israel.”

The words are carved into the tombstone of Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, the man the Islamic Republic later called the father of its missile industry.

Almost in parallel with its nuclear program, the Islamic Republic spent nearly four decades advancing its missile program toward the goal Tehrani Moghaddam had written into his will: the destruction of Israel. It has not achieved that goal.

Iranian officials have long insisted that the program is solely defensive. But the tombstone of the man credited with building it tells a different story.

Tehrani Moghaddam was also a close friend of Imad Mughniyeh, the senior Hezbollah commander who was one of the most wanted militant figures in the world before his 2008 assassination in Damascus. In 1986, in the middle of the Iran-Iraq War, Tehrani Moghaddam traveled to Lebanon to help establish Hezbollah’s missile capability.

Over roughly 40 years, almost every part of the Islamic Republic’s system was, in one way or another, placed at the service of this program.

With the backing of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iran’s president from 1989 to 1997 and one of the Islamic Republic’s most powerful postwar figures, the IRGC’s “Self-Sufficiency Jihad Organization” was established outside the Guards’ formal structure, giving the missile program greater autonomy.

Ali Larijani – a former parliament speaker and veteran nuclear negotiator who returned as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council in 2025 and was killed in an Israeli airstrike during the recent war – was the organization’s first managing director. He was the same politician later described, after his death, as a “philosopher-politician.”

The missiles the Islamic Republic has today owe much to early models purchased from Ukrainian arms dealers, North Korea and China during Mohammad Khatami’s presidency (1997 to 2005).

Under Khatami, Iran unveiled the Shahab-3, the first Iranian missile with enough range to reach Israel. While Khatami spoke of a “dialogue among civilizations,” Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, then commander of the IRGC Air Force, was digging tunnels and building underground missile depots in the Zagros Mountains – facilities that were later given the grandiose title of “missile cities.”

While Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s president from 2013 to 2021, and his foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, sold the nuclear agreement with world powers as a “win-win” diplomatic breakthrough, another project was advancing out of view. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the IRGC Aerospace Force commander later killed in an Israeli strike, was expanding the underground depots Ghalibaf had dug across Iran and building new missile production and assembly complexes in the deserts around Shahroud, northeast of Tehran, and in the valleys of Khojir, one of the Islamic Republic’s key missile-production zones east of the capital.

During the same period, Iran expanded its southern missile cluster, designed to threaten shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf states.

This is the story of the Islamic Republic’s missile program inside Iran.

Missile Bases

The Islamic Republic has roughly 30 missile bases across Iran – the underground tunnels, depots and launch complexes that officials and state media call “missile cities.”

A chain of facilities in north-central Iran, stretching from Shahroud in Semnan province to Khojir east of Tehran and Bidganeh west of the capital, forms a key research-and-development corridor. The Isfahan complex, in central Iran, plays a major role in production and assembly.

Other clusters, including those around Tabriz in the northwest, Kermanshah in western Iran, Shiraz in the southwest, Khorramabad in the Zagros Mountains and the southern strip near the Persian Gulf, have been used to store missiles.

Missile depots have also been built in tunnels in Yazd, Kerman and other scattered bases across the country.

In the southern strip, especially during Rouhani’s presidency from 2013 to 2021, similar bases were built with vertical launch shafts, allowing missiles to be fired directly from hardened underground positions.

Although Islamic Republic officials like to portray the missile program as secret and unknowable, virtually all of these bases have been examined in scattered media and open-source intelligence reports over the past two years. Two organizations – Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, or INSS, and the Alma Research and Education Center, an Israeli security research group focused on threats from Iran and its regional network – have been among the leading institutions mapping and analyzing these sites.

According to Morteza Azimi, a member of the OSINT Iran group, the underground tunnels are only one part of Iran’s missile bases. Satellite imagery shows that the bases include multiple facilities designed to support missile operations: buried concrete bunkers for launchers, elevated communications systems on mountaintops, and equipment for fueling and calibrating missiles.

The Islamic Republic’s missile capability is not just a collection of missiles. It is an operational network of launchers, command centers, communications sites, missile-guidance facilities and intelligence systems that help identify targets, coordinate launches and guide missiles beyond Iran’s borders.

This chain is designed to help missiles penetrate air-defense systems through various tactics, including submunition-dispensing warheads and midcourse maneuvers. Missile bases support different parts of that system.

Reports of air-defense radars being used in support of missile attacks show that Iran’s missile operations can rely on assets beyond the missile force itself, drawing on the wider military network for detection, tracking and targeting.

Key North-Central Chain

The facilities at Shahroud and Garmsar, and the Khojir and Parchin areas east and southeast of Tehran, form the key north-central chain of the Islamic Republic’s missile research-and-development program, from engines to fuel.

In an area of roughly 40 square kilometers southeast of Tehran lies the Shahid Bakeri Industrial Group facility, better known as Khojir. The area is one of the oldest and most important centers of the Islamic Republic’s missile program. Nearby, on the edge of Tehran, the IRGC Aerospace Force’s Hakimiyeh production complex is located.

Military expert Farzin Nadimi told Iran International that Hakimiyeh is significant because it brings together several missile-related industrial groups in one area, including the Mahallati, Kazemi, Jahanara, Mofatteh, Rezvan, Namjoo and Chamran groups.

Nadimi said most of the area’s metal structures and metallurgy industries are concentrated there. For example, at the Shahid Jahanara Industrial Group, fuel tanks are produced for liquid-fuel missiles such as the long-range ballistic missile Khorramshahr.

About 11 kilometers from Khojir, south of the Mamloo Dam, lies the Shahid Hemmat facility, better known as Parchin. The name Parchin is more familiar internationally because of its long association with the Islamic Republic’s nuclear file and suspected weapons-related work. The recently exposed Taleghan 2 site is located inside the same complex.

A major fire was first reported at Parchin in 2007. In 2020, the site was hit by a powerful explosion that The New York Times reported may have been deliberate.

In 2022, Israel carried out its first drone attack on the site. During the 12-day war in June 2025, this area became one of Israel’s main targets and was bombed repeatedly.

Deh Torkaman

The Deh Torkaman facility lies inside the Khojir area southeast of Tehran, near Hajarabad and Deh Torkaman, from which it takes its name.

Satellite imagery shows that, as of 2012, there were no significant facilities in this area. Construction and development began in 2013 and continued until the site reached its current form by 2021.

The Washington Post reported, citing satellite imagery taken in March, that at least 88 buildings in the Khojir complex, including the Deh Torkaman section, were targeted during the US-Israeli offensive.

Development Timeline of the Deh Torkaman Facilities in the Khojir Area.

Iran International