Iran has boosted its air defense capabilities by acquiring long-range remote-controlled drones equipped with air-to-air missiles, state media reported Sunday.

“Dozens of Karar-type drones, armed with air-to-air missiles, have joined the anti-aircraft defense in all border areas of the country,” state news agency IRNA reported.

Several UAVs of this type were demonstrated yesterday Sunday morning during a televised ceremony held at a military academy in Tehran.

The head of the Iranian armed forces, General Abdulrahim Mousavi, assured that “the enemies will now need to review their strategies” as the Iranian army “is getting stronger”.

The Karar stalking drones, a first version of which was presented in 2010, are equipped with missiles that have an infrared tracking sensor — s.s. in other words, they are directed by the heat of the targets’ engines, they belong to the “Fox 2” class, in Western terminology—the Majid type, with an effective range of eight kilometers, “made entirely in Iran,” IRNA clarified.

They “passed” the operational tests they underwent during training sessions held in October, according to General Mousavi.

The development of Iran’s arsenal is of concern to many, especially in the US and Israel, enemies of the Islamic Republic.

The US and Israeli governments accuse Tehran of supplying fleets of drones to its allies in the Middle East, notably the military arm of the Lebanese Hezbollah movement and Yemen’s Shiite Houthi rebels.

The Islamic Republic has also been repeatedly accused of supplying Russia with kamikaze drones used in the war in Ukraine. Tehran has admitted that it supplied UAVs to Russia, but stresses that their deliveries took place long before the war, which did not prevent the West from imposing a barrage of sanctions on it.

Iran had started building remote-controlled unmanned aerial vehicles as early as the 1980s, when the war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was still raging.