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Iran Super Thread- Merged

Those look more like some sort of tank or artillery rounds, held on with hose clamps, than missles on hardpoints on the drone. The dish on the bottom, whatever it's supposed to be, doesn't look very aerodynamic either. Making it harder for the miniscule prop to push this thing off the ground.

Nice looking display, in pretty colours, for the ignorant masses though.

However, my expertise in these things is in the minus column. :dunno:
 
Maybe I am reading too much into the pictures, but is what appears to be a two-bladed propellor sufficient to power an aircraft of that size?
 
recceguy said:
Sure looks like it Jim. Great catch!

Thanks, maybe some air frame experts can shed some more light on this. The do look like those packing straps don't they?
 
Casing is not fluted like a tank round, and too long for an arty round.  Perhaps a Recoilless Rifle round. 

If that is the case, I wonder if this drone is designed to spin/spiral in, so as to arm the warhead, before crashing into its target?  >:D
 
Could be the angle, but the tail boom does not appear to be level. It looks higher on the left side in both photos.
 
Here is a two part video of an UAV called the “Hamaseh” (Epic), which is meant to be a “reconnaissance and combat drone.”  The first part of the video shows the Hamaseh taking off, flying and landing. Note that its not caring any ordnance nor the dish shaped radome. Also, notice how long it takes to get airborne. The second part shows the the UAV being unveiled and then some talking head giving some spiel (Any Farsi speakers out there?). Note this model has a different paint scheme and appears to mounting two tubes under the wings (Rockets launcher tubes?).

Here is another article on the "Hemaseh" UAV that shows it mounting two MANPADS launch tubes under the left wing. Note the different nose configuration.
 
Another angle of the drone.

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Is this man a challenger to the status quo in Iran?

Ahmadinejad protégé poses challenge to Iran's leader

Reuters By Marcus George | Reuters – 18 hours ago.

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By Marcus George

DUBAI (Reuters) - President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's nationalist protégé Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie is one of the most divisive men in Iran, and if he is allowed to stand in June's presidential election, it would be a direct challenge to the authority of the supreme leader.

Mashaie brought to an end years of speculation on Saturday by registering as a candidate in an election that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei hopes will usher in a period of much needed calm and unity
.

But Mashaie's candidacy has the potential to tear apart the already strained political divisions between non-clerical populists, like him and Ahmadinejad, and loyal lieutenants of the Islamic theocracy, just four years after Iran was rocked by widespread protests over Ahmadinejad disputed re-election.

(...)
 
:o

It seems Tehran is taking a more direct role with this move rather than just acting through Hezbollah...

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Iran to send 4,000 troops to aid President Assad forces in Syria


World Exclusive: US urges UK and France to join in supplying arms to Syrian rebels as MPs fear that UK will be drawn into growing conflict

Washington’s decision to arm Syria’s Sunni Muslim rebels has plunged America into the great Sunni-Shia conflict of the Islamic Middle East, entering a struggle that now dwarfs the Arab revolutions which overthrew dictatorships across the region.

For the first time, all of America’s ‘friends’ in the region are Sunni Muslims and all of its enemies are Shiites. Breaking all President Barack Obama’s rules of disengagement, the US is now fully engaged on the side of armed groups which include the most extreme Sunni Islamist movements in the Middle East.

The Independent on Sunday has learned that a military decision has been taken in Iran – even before last week’s presidential election – to send a first contingent of 4,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards to Syria to support President Bashar al-Assad’s forces against the largely Sunni rebellion that has cost almost 100,000 lives in just over two years.  Iran is now fully committed to preserving Assad’s regime, according to pro-Iranian sources which have been deeply involved in the Islamic Republic’s security, even to the extent of proposing to open up a new ‘Syrian’ front on the Golan Heights against Israel.

In years to come, historians will ask how America – after its defeat in Iraq and its humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan scheduled for  2014 – could have so blithely aligned itself with one side in a titanic Islamic struggle stretching back to the seventh century death of the Prophet Mohamed. The profound effects of this great schism, between Sunnis who believe that the father of Mohamed’s wife was the new caliph of the Muslim world and Shias who regard his son in law Ali as his rightful successor – a seventh century battle swamped in blood around the present-day Iraqi cities of Najaf and Kerbala – continue across the region to this day. A 17th century Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbott, compared this Muslim conflict to that between “Papists and Protestants”.

America’s alliance now includes the wealthiest states of the Arab Gulf, the vast Sunni territories between Egypt and Morocco, as well as Turkey and the fragile British-created monarchy in Jordan. King Abdullah of Jordan – flooded, like so many neighbouring nations, by hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees – may also now find himself at the fulcrum of the Syrian battle.  Up to 3,000 American ‘advisers’ are now believed to be in Jordan, and the creation of a southern Syria ‘no-fly zone’ – opposed by Syrian-controlled anti-aircraft batteries – will turn a crisis into a ‘hot’ war.   So much for America’s ‘friends’.

Its enemies include the Lebanese Hizballah, the Alawite Shiite regime in Damascus and, of course, Iran. And Iraq, a largely Shiite nation which America ‘liberated’ from Saddam Hussein’s Sunni minority in the hope of balancing the Shiite power of Iran, has – against all US predictions – itself now largely fallen under Tehran’s influence and power.  Iraqi Shiites as well as Hizballah members, have both fought alongside Assad’s forces.

Washington’s excuse for its new Middle East adventure – that it must arm Assad’s enemies because the Damascus regime has used sarin gas against them – convinces no-one in the Middle East.  Final proof of the use of gas by either side in Syria remains almost as nebulous as President George W. Bush’s claim that Saddam’s Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

For the real reason why America has thrown its military power behind Syria’s Sunni rebels is because those same rebels are now losing their war against Assad.  The Damascus regime’s victory this month in the central Syrian town of  Qusayr, at the cost of Hizballah lives as well as those of government forces, has thrown the Syrian revolution into turmoil, threatening to humiliate American and EU demands for Assad to abandon power.  Arab dictators are supposed to be deposed – unless they are the friendly kings or emirs of the Gulf – not to be sustained.  Yet Russia has given its total support to Assad, three times vetoing UN Security Council resolutions that might have allowed the West to intervene directly in the civil war.

In the Middle East, there is cynical disbelief at the American contention that it can distribute arms – almost certainly including anti-aircraft missiles – only to secular Sunni rebel forces in Syria represented by the so-called Free Syria Army.  The more powerful al-Nusrah Front, allied to al-Qaeda, dominates the battlefield on the rebel side and has been blamed for atrocities including the execution of Syrian government prisoners of war and the murder of a 14-year old boy for blasphemy.  They will be able to take new American weapons from their Free Syria Army comrades with little effort.

From now on, therefore, every suicide bombing in Damascus - every war crime committed by the rebels - will be regarded in the region as Washington’s responsibility. The very Sunni-Wahabi Islamists who killed thousands of Americans on 11th September, 2011 – who are America’s greatest enemies as well as Russia’s – are going to be proxy allies of the Obama administration. This terrible irony can only be exacerbated by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s adament refusal to tolerate any form of Sunni extremism.  His experience in Chechenya, his anti-Muslim rhetoric – he has made obscene remarks about Muslim extremists in a press conference in Russian – and his belief that Russia’s old ally in Syria is facing the same threat as Moscow fought in Chechenya, plays a far greater part in his policy towards Bashar al-Assad than the continued existence of Russia’s naval port at the Syrian Mediterranean city of Tartous. 

For the Russians, of course, the ‘Middle East’ is not in the ‘east’ at all, but to the south of Moscow;  and statistics are all-important. The Chechen capital of Grozny is scarcely 500 miles from the Syrian frontier.  Fifteen per cent of Russians are Muslim.  Six of the Soviet Union’s communist republics had a Muslim majority, 90 per cent of whom were Sunni.  And Sunnis around the world make up perhaps 85 per cent of all Muslims.  For a Russia intent on repositioning itself across a land mass that includes most of the former Soviet Union, Sunni Islamists of the kind now fighting the Assad regime are its principal antagonists.

Iranian sources say they liaise constantly with Moscow, and that while Hizballah’s overall withdrawal from Syria is likely to be completed soon – with the maintenance of the militia’s ‘intelligence’ teams inside Syria – Iran’s support for Damascus will grow rather than wither.  They point out that the Taliban recently sent a formal delegation for talks in Tehran and that America will need Iran’s help in withdrawing from Afghanistan.  The US, the Iranians say, will not be able to take its armour and equipment out of the country during its continuing war against the Taliban without Iran’s active assistance.  One of the sources claimed – not without some mirth -- that the French were forced to leave 50 tanks behind when they left because they did not have Tehran’s help.

It is a sign of the changing historical template in the Middle East that within the framework of old Cold War rivalries between Washington and Moscow, Israel’s security has taken second place to the conflict in Syria.  Indeed, Israel’s policies in the region have been knocked askew by the Arab revolutions, leaving its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, hopelessly adrift amid the historic changes
.


Only once over the past two years has Israel fully condemned atrocities committed by the Assad regime, and while it has given medical help to wounded rebels on the Israeli-Syrian border, it fears an Islamist caliphate in Damascus far more than a continuation of Assad’s rule.  One former Israel intelligence commander recently described Assad as “Israel’s man in Damascus”.  Only days before President Mubarak was overthrown, both Netanyahu and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia called Washington to ask Obama to save the Egyptian dictator.  In vain. 

If the Arab world has itself been overwhelmed by the two years of revolutions, none will have suffered from the Syrian war in the long term more than the Palestinians.  The land they wish to call their future state has been so populated with Jewish Israeli colonists that it can no longer be either secure or ‘viable’.  ‘Peace’ envoy Tony Blair’s attempts to create such a state have been laughable.  A future ‘Palestine’ would be a Sunni nation.  But today, Washington scarcely mentions the Palestinians.

Another of the region’s supreme ironies is that Hamas, supposedly the ‘super-terrorists’ of Gaza, have abandoned Damascus and now support the Gulf Arabs’ desire to crush Assad.  Syrian government forces claim that Hamas has even trained Syrian rebels in the manufacture and use of home-made rockets.

In Arab eyes, Israel’s 2006 war against the Shia Hizballah was an attempt to strike at the heart of Iran. The West’s support for Syrian rebels is a strategic attempt to crush Iran. But Iran is going to take the offensive.  Even for the Middle East, these are high stakes. Against this fearful background, the Palestinian tragedy continues.
 
Too bad the Iranian combat troops (or Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon) can't have an "accident" while deploying to Syria. It would solve several problems at once, so long as it was not attributable....
 
With Pro-rebel forces poised ready on two borders with Syria, Iran now publically directly involved. I think it will be a clear indication of things to come if we see movement from the US sixth fleet towards Syria, we could be looking at the starting's of a all out war in the middle east.
 
I don't think Iran will actually have the power to strike US soil or Canadian/UK whatever soil anytime soon, Korea has been researching nuclear missiles for years and they can barely reach outside of Korea.

Even so if they make a nuclear missiles they could very well attack Israel or another US Allie in the middle eastern area, witch is concerning considering a major upset in the middle east could cause oil prices to sky rocket.
 
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Israel's Netanyahu says Iran closer to nuclear 'red line'

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that Iran was getting closer to the "red line" he set for its nuclear program and warned the international community not to be distracted by the crises in Syria and Egypt.

Tehran was continuing enrichment activities and building inter-continental ballistic missiles, which could give it a military nuclear capability, he said on CBS' "Face the Nation."

At the United Nations in September, Netanyahu drew a red line across a cartoon bomb to illustrate the point at which Iran will have amassed enough uranium to fuel one nuclear bomb. He said Iran could reach that threshold by mid-2013.


"They haven't yet reached it but they're getting closer to it and they have to be stopped," Netanyahu told CBS. He said the West's sanctions against Tehran needed to be intensified and backed up with the threat of a credible military option.

Netanyahu also said Iran was building faster centrifuges that could allow it to speed up its enrichment activities.

Israel, widely believed to be the Middle East's only nuclear-armed power, has issued veiled warnings for years that it might attack Iran if international sanctions and diplomacy fail to curb Tehran's nuclear ambitions.
Israel has long insisted on the need for a convincing military threat and setting clear lines beyond which Iran's nuclear activity should not advance.

(...)
 
I don't mean to sound like a pessimist, and I'm certainly not trying to "troll" the thread at all...

BUT...

Why do we still care about all of this crap in the middle east??  I remember listening to the news & talking about this kind of stuff with my parents when I was 10yrs old.  I'm 30 now for crying out loud - and you know what's changed??  Not a whole lot.

Iran hates Israel, we all know that.  Israel is looking for any excuse it can to turn its regional adversaries into dust.  Thus the constant and never ending political tension, stroked & relit by parties in all of the countries involved - sometimes, including Israel. 

Will Iran ever achieve the "capability" to produce a nuclear weapon?  In my opinion, its inevitable. 

The rest of the world has had nuclear power & nuclear knowledge for approximately 70 years now.  The rest of the world has had this knowledge for so long, and applied this knowledge for so long, that it has become relatively mainstream for us.  Nuclear powered aircraft carriers, submarines - cities & entire regions powered by nuclear power plants - nuclear powered satellites, etc etc.

So if the rest of the world has an active working knowledge of how to apply nuclear power to everyday life - is it really reasonable for us to assume that Iran "may" get it sometime soonish?  My personal opinion, its a silly argument of inevitability. 

The real question should be - what does the rest of the world do, once they do achieve their goal?  Level it back to the stoneage, and continue doing so anytime they start to make technological progress towards something many of us already take for granted?  Enforce the harshest economic & military sanctions we possibly can?  Keep it permanently occupied with western military forces, to make sure things go as planned?

None of those things would work.  So again, what should the solution be WHEN (Not if) they achieve the technological ability to produce their own nuclear power, and thus potentially a working nuclear weapon?


(While I certainly don't support Mr. CantPronounceHisLastName, we have to keep certain things in perspective.  We did overthrow their democratically elected system of government back in the 50's, in order to ensure our own oil security.  And we did accidentally shoot down one of their civilian airliners.  And we did launch a few Tomahawks into Iraq, courtesy of Iranian airspace - without asking permission first.  And the list goes on and on. 

So while I DO NOT SUPPORT him & his sh*t disturbing rhetoric, we do have to understand they have a reasonable right to view us with a paranoid eye too, and take steps they feel are necessary to ensure their own self defense...even if their reasons are misguided.)
 
Yet another sign of the UN's ineptitude when it comes to situations like this...

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Russia, China block U.N. condemnation of Iran missile tests
Reuters

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - A U.N. Security Council committee is split over whether Iran's missile tests last year violated U.N. sanctions imposed on Tehran because of its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, Australia's U.N. envoy said on Monday.

That division effectively rules out any expansion of sanctions against Tehran over the tests for the time being, U.N. envoys said on condition of anonymity.

Diplomats said it was Russia, backed by China, that refused to declare Tehran's missile launches a violation of the U.N. restrictions, as a U.N. Panel of Experts on Iran said was the case.

The rift on the Iran sanctions committee, which consists of all 15 Security Council members, highlights the difficulties Western powers face in persuading Russia and China to join them in keeping up the pressure on Tehran to halt banned nuclear and missile work
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Iran rejects allegations by the United States, European powers and their allies that it is developing an atomic weapons capability. It says the U.N. sanctions against it are illegal and refuses to comply with them.

As long as the sanctions committee remains divided, it will be difficult for the Security Council to add names of any Iranian individuals or entities linked to the missile tests, Security Council diplomats said on condition of anonymity.

(...)
Western powers accuse Iran of supplying arms to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and militant groups like Lebanon's Hezbollah, which has been fighting alongside Assad's troops in Syria to defeat rebels in the civil war there.

"Several committee members stated that the evidence presented in the report was sufficient to assert that Iran was in violation of its obligations, illustrating a pattern of sanctions evasion through arms smuggling in the Middle East," his report said.

"Other committee members stated that the lack of stronger evidence as to the provenance of the arms, such as documentation, justified the lack of a definitive conclusion," his report added.

Russia and China were the "other committee members" who opposed finding Tehran in clear violation of the U.N. ban on Iranian arms exports, council diplomats said.
 
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