IRGC to unlock US arms tech from 15 unexploded missiles in south
The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) said it has discovered 15 undetonated US missiles in the southern Iranian province of Hormozgan and thousands of bomblets in the northern province of Zanjan, less than a month after a US-Israeli aggression on Iran halted with a ceasefire.
The IRGC’s Imam Sajjad Corps, based in the provincial capital of Bandar Abbas in Hormozgan, said in a Sunday statement that its bomb disposal teams had successfully neutralized more than 15 heavy American missiles in the province.
The statement said the missiles were mostly of the GBU and BLU types and other advanced models, adding that the weapons had been transferred to technical and research units of the IRGC for reverse engineering.
It said the Imam Sajjad Corps had neutralized or destroyed more than 60 missiles and drones, including bunker busters, cruise missiles, and advanced drones, since the beginning of the US-Israeli aggression in late February.
The force said that it had successfully concluded bomb disposal operations related to the recent war of aggression in all areas of Hormozgan province.
Meanwhile, IRGC’s Ansar al-Mahdi Corps, based in the provincial capital of Zanjan, also issued a statement on Sunday, saying that its bomb disposal teams had recovered more than 9,500 bomblets in various parts of the province.
The statement said that the small munitions had been dropped during the US-Israeli aggression through the use of cluster bombs as part of aerial mining operations, with the purpose of contaminating critical and sensitive locations across the province.
It said IRGC bomb disposal teams in Zanjan had also neutralized or destroyed some 55 rockets and missiles during the recent US-Israeli aggression, including a GBU-57 bunker buster, which was successfully defused and handed over to qualified authorities.
The precedent is not theoretical, because Iran’s 2011 capture of a single intact American RQ-170 Sentinel stealth drone near Kashmar produced a decade-long expansion of indigenous stealth UAV capability, resulting in the operational Shahed-171 Simorgh and Shahed-191 Saeqeh combat drone fleet. This time, however, Iran is not studying one stealth aircraft but a broader portfolio of American strike systems, including GBU-series bunker busters, BLU cluster munitions, cruise missiles, precision-guided bombs, and reportedly even neutralized MQ-9 Reaper and Harop-type unmanned systems.
The GBU-57, weighing approximately 30,000 pounds or roughly 13.6 tones, represents the US most powerful non-nuclear bunker-buster and was specifically designed to destroy deeply buried hardened targets such as Fordow and Natanz.