Iran's armed forces chief of staff, Maj.-Gen. Ali Abdollahi, stood in a tunnel full of ballistic missiles on Tuesday and told the world that if the enemy makes another move, "our response will extend beyond the region." He was giving the tour. The audience was never the people living above the tunnels.
The IRGC showed off what it called a new underground "missile city," packed with ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and their launchers, on Iran's Tasnim News Agency. Abdollahi and Brig.-Gen. Majid Mousavi, commander of the IRGC Aerospace Force, walked the facility together. The footage can't be verified, and the site may or may not be brand new. A predecessor of Mousavi's, Amir Ali Hajizadeh, was killed in 2025 during the conflict with Israel. The brass change; the tunnels stay.
The State's Monopoly
"Advanced missiles will surprise enemies with their battlefield impact," Abdollahi said, according to Rudaw. IRGC spokesperson Brig.-Gen. Hossein Mohebbi added on Sunday that missile and drone production had moved into underground complexes. Per Tasnim, the IRGC has gone past storage and is building "missile production cities" deep underground. Mohebbi claimed domestic expertise and flexible production would keep weapons rolling off the line even under heavy bombardment.
Read that again. The pitch is that the state's capacity to kill survives even if everything else doesn't. Nobody in the briefing promised the same for hospitals, bakeries or apartment blocks.
OSINT watchers picked through the images. Osint613 noted that Fattah-1 medium-range ballistic missiles appear to fill the site, with maneuvering reentry vehicles displayed alongside complete missiles fitted with boosters and warheads. Expert Tal Inbar identified a maneuverable reentry vehicle for the Khiber Shekan missile, apparently developed for the Fateh-1, and noted older missiles with plain conic reentry vehicles in the same facility. Commercial trucks fitted with a concealed missile that can be raised into launch position also appeared. A weapons system disguised as ordinary freight, parked among ordinary traffic. Civilians are the camouflage.
Both Sides of the Same Coin
The unveiling came after repeated Israeli and American strikes aimed at degrading Iran's missile capabilities. During the 2025 conflict, Israel hit launchers, storage facilities and associated infrastructure. Satellite imagery reviewed by Reuters in February 2026, about nine months ago, showed Iran repairing missile bases damaged in the fighting and working to reinforce or conceal sensitive military and nuclear facilities.
Then there's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said in March, about eight months ago: "After 20 days, I can tell you – Iran today has no ability to enrich uranium, and no ability to produce ballistic missiles." The satellite photos of repair crews and Tuesday's tunnel tour sit awkwardly beside that sentence. Each government needs the other's weapons to justify its own. Tehran gets to claim it survived. Jerusalem gets to claim it's winning. Both can't be telling the whole truth, and both profit from the standoff.
The Mediation Racket
The timing was no accident. The show coincided with Qatar's attempts to mediate between the US and Iran, and with a meeting between US President Donald Trump and Qatar's Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani. The report says the US remains optimistic about reaching an agreement, a mood it says Iran shares.
So here's the choreography: display the missiles, threaten the region and beyond, then sit down with a state-sponsor mediator and talk about optimism. Governments call this diplomacy. The people in range of those launchers, and of whatever answers them, aren't at the table and weren't asked.
No mutual aid network, refusenik group or neighborhood committee got a camera crew on Tuesday. The missiles did.
- iran
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- irgc
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- ali abdollahi
- donald trump
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