Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has spent years carving missile storage and launch facilities deep into the granite mountains along the country’s southern coastline and western border regions. These underground complexes, sometimes called “missile cities,” are designed to protect ballistic and cruise missile arsenals from aerial bombardment. Recent weapons tests and satellite imagery of strike damage at mountain-adjacent bases have brought renewed attention to both the offensive capability housed inside these facilities and the question of whether rock and concrete can truly shield them from modern precision munitions.
What is verified so far
The clearest public look at one of these underground facilities came in October 2015, when Iranian state television broadcast footage of a large underground missile base, showing rows of launcher vehicles positioned inside tunnels bored into rock. The state-run broadcast was a deliberate act of signaling, intended to demonstrate that Iran’s missile force could survive a first strike and still retaliate. At the time, Iranian officials framed the facility as proof that the country’s deterrent capability was beyond the reach of foreign air forces.
More recently, the IRGC Navy conducted a weapons test that tied directly to this underground infrastructure. The test involved an anti-warship cruise missile with a stated range of more than 1,000 km, according to IRGC Navy commander Alireza Tangsiri. Tangsiri also said the missile has anti-jamming features, a capability that would make it harder for adversary electronic warfare systems to deflect the weapon in flight. Visuals released alongside the test showed the missile emerging from an underground facility on Iran’s southern coast, reinforcing the connection between the mountain-based storage network and active combat readiness.
The strategic logic is straightforward. By embedding launchers inside granite, Iran aims to ensure that even after absorbing a wave of airstrikes, enough of its missile force survives to threaten shipping lanes, military bases, and population centers across the Persian Gulf and beyond. A cruise missile with a range exceeding 1,000 km can reach targets across much of the Middle East from Iran’s southern coastline, putting naval assets and regional infrastructure within striking distance.
But the assumption that these facilities are impervious to attack has been tested. Commercial satellite imagery from Planet Labs and Maxar showed visible damage at missile bases after Israeli strikes, including at the Kermanshah missile base, which sits up against a mountainside. The overhead images documented craters and structural damage at sites that were presumably hardened against exactly this kind of assault. Kermanshah is not an obscure outpost; it is one of the facilities most closely associated with Iran’s ability to project force westward toward Iraq and beyond.
The satellite evidence introduces a tension at the heart of Iran’s defensive strategy. Mountain-embedded facilities are far harder to destroy than surface installations, but they are not invisible. Modern intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities, combined with satellite-guided munitions, can identify and strike the access points, ventilation shafts, and launch portals that any underground complex requires to function. The damage at Kermanshah suggests that even facilities built into mountainsides are not immune to well-targeted attacks.
What remains uncertain
Several important questions lack clear answers based on available evidence. The full extent of Iran’s underground tunnel network is unknown outside of classified intelligence circles. The 2015 state TV broadcast showed a single facility, and the IRGC Navy test offered a glimpse of another on the southern coast. But the total number of operational “missile cities,” their depth within the granite, and the redundancy built into the network are not publicly documented. No independent observers have been granted access to inspect these sites, and no official Iranian blueprints or engineering specifications have been released.
The condition of the facilities after Israeli strikes is also only partially understood. Satellite imagery can reveal surface-level damage, destroyed buildings, and cratered access roads, but it cannot show what happened inside the tunnels themselves. Whether the strikes at Kermanshah penetrated deep enough to destroy stored missiles or merely damaged external infrastructure is a question that overhead photography alone cannot answer. Iran has not issued detailed public statements about post-strike repairs or the operational status of affected bases.
There is also uncertainty about the specific missile type tested by the IRGC Navy. While Tangsiri provided range and electronic warfare specifications, the weapon’s exact designation, its guidance system details, and whether it has been deployed in numbers remain unclear from available reporting. The anti-jamming claim, in particular, is difficult to verify independently. Electronic warfare capabilities are typically assessed through signals intelligence and controlled testing, not press conferences or brief video clips.
A broader question concerns how many of Iran’s underground facilities are built into granite specifically, as opposed to softer rock formations or reinforced concrete bunkers. The distinction matters because granite offers significantly greater resistance to penetrating munitions than most other geological materials. The recurring emphasis on “granite mountains” reflects Iranian state messaging, but independent geological surveys of each site are not publicly available. Without that data, outside analysts can only infer the hardness of individual locations from topographical maps and limited ground photography.
Another unknown is how integrated these underground bases are with Iran’s command-and-control systems. Footage from 2015 and more recent tests shows missiles and launchers, but not the communications infrastructure that would be needed to coordinate salvos under combat conditions. It is unclear whether launch orders could still be transmitted if surface-level antennas, fiber lines, or power substations were destroyed. A facility that survives physically but loses connectivity may be unable to contribute meaningfully to a sustained campaign.
How to read the evidence
The strongest evidence in this story comes from two categories: Iranian state broadcasts and commercial satellite imagery. Each has distinct strengths and limitations that readers should weigh carefully.
The 2015 state TV footage is a primary source in the sense that it was produced and released by the Iranian government itself. That makes it reliable as proof that at least one large underground facility exists and that Iran wanted the world to know about it. But state-produced media is also inherently promotional. The footage was edited and framed to maximize the impression of strength. Viewers saw what the IRGC chose to show, and there is no way to verify claims about depth, blast resistance, or capacity from a television broadcast alone.
The visuals from the IRGC Navy test sit in a similar category. They confirm that at least one coastal tunnel complex is active and capable of launching long-range cruise missiles. Yet the camera angles, cutaways, and absence of continuous, unedited sequences mean that outside analysts must be cautious about drawing firm conclusions. For example, a missile emerging from a tunnel on screen does not reveal how many launch cells exist beyond the frame, how quickly they can be reloaded, or how many missiles are actually stockpiled on site.
The satellite imagery from Planet Labs and Maxar occupies a different evidentiary tier. Commercial satellite providers operate independently of the governments involved in the conflict, and their imagery can be cross-referenced against known coordinates and pre-strike baseline photos. This makes the damage assessments at Kermanshah and other sites relatively trustworthy as records of what happened on the surface. The limitation is that satellites photograph from above. They excel at documenting destroyed buildings, displaced earth, and blast patterns, but they cannot image the interior of a mountain tunnel or confirm whether stored weapons were hit.
Readers should also pay attention to what is not visible. For instance, intact tunnel entrances after a strike may suggest that underground sections remain operational, but they could also conceal blast doors warped by shock or internal collapses that are impossible to see from orbit. Conversely, a cratered access road may look dramatic in satellite photos while leaving the deeper galleries untouched and quickly repairable. Without corroborating information from inside the facilities, assessments of long-term damage remain probabilistic rather than definitive.
Statements from military officials fall somewhere between these visual sources. On one hand, they can clarify intent and technical aspirations, such as Tangsiri’s emphasis on long range and resistance to jamming. On the other hand, officials speaking to domestic media have strong incentives to overstate capabilities and downplay vulnerabilities. Their comments are most useful when they can be cross-checked against independent evidence, like flight-test footage, debris analysis, or third-party tracking data.
For now, the public record supports a few cautious conclusions. Iran has invested heavily in underground missile infrastructure and has at least several large tunnel complexes tied directly to its operational forces. These facilities complicate any adversary’s targeting plans and increase the likelihood that Iran could fire missiles even after absorbing initial strikes. At the same time, recent imagery of damaged bases shows that hardened sites are not invulnerable and that modern precision weapons can at least degrade, and possibly disable, parts of this network.
The unanswered questions (about the network’s true scale, geological resilience, internal damage from recent strikes, and the real-world performance of new cruise missiles) will likely remain unresolved in open sources. Until more verifiable data emerges, the safest reading is that Iran’s “missile cities” are neither mere propaganda sets nor unassailable fortresses, but evolving assets whose effectiveness depends as much on concealment, redundancy, and rapid repair as on the granite that surrounds them.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
