Along with several countries in South America, many other states in different parts of the world have formally expressed their interest in buying drones from Iran.
This past Monday, Bolivia’s defense minister confirmed his country’s interest in acquiring drones made by Iran. The announcement came one week after the Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi visited countries in South America, including Bolivia, and signed a series of memorandums of understanding with them on many areas, including defense and security.
The details of such documents were unknown until last week when Bolivian opposition party members and neighboring Argentina’s Foreign Ministry demanded information on the reported memorandum. In response, Bolivia’s defense minister, Edmundo Novillo, said his government was indeed interested in purchasing advanced Iranian drones but didn’t specifying mentioned what kind of drones his government wanted.
Novillo also noted that the reason Bolivia intends to buy such weapons rom Iran is to use them to protect the country’s borders from drug trafficking and smuggling, and to help monitor mountainous areas and improve military surveillance. “Their technology could satisfy the requirement that we have raised,” he said. Addressing concerns from critics, the minister said that the drones are “not a threat, nor could we lend ourselves to some type of actions that could generate attacks or something like that. We are pacifists.”
Iran is truly one of the top producers of drones now
In recent years, Iran has been able to gain significant progress in developing surveillance and combat drones. This progress has in fact been so considerable that Iranian military officials now believe that the country stands among the world’s top states manufacturing drones. Iranian officials have repeatedly stressed that the country will not hesitate to boost its military capabilities, including its missile and drone power, which are entirely meant for defense, and that Iran’s defense capabilities will never be subject to negotiation.
In one of his recent remarks, former Commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and top military aide to Iran’s Supreme Leader, Major General Yahia Rahim Safavi said that some 22 countries have submitted official requests to purchase Iranian-made military drones, which shows that Iran is truly an advanced and pioneer country in drone industry. “The current candidate countries to buy Iranian drones are Armenia, Tajikistan, Serbia, Algeria, Venezuela and other countries,” Safavi said, adding also that “before the Islamic Revolution back in 1979, Iran used to import 80 per cent of its military needs from abroad. But now, it is selling military equipment to advanced states”.
Admitting the unquestionable progress of Iran in producing military equipment, the US Defense Intelligence Agency said in one of its latest reports that in 2022, Iran had the largest arsenal of missiles and drones in the Middle East, and that Iran’s drones have made “considerable impact on any battlefield they have appeared in”. What is important to note here is that Iran has made all this progress specifically in drone industry despite production and trade challenges due to heavy Western sanctions.
“Despite all the embargo against Iran’s military, the performance of Iranian drones is at par with the competition, and in some respects, even better — while also being cheaper,” said another report by the U.S. Institute of Peace. “By the fall of 2022, Tehran had also exported drones or drone technology to at least five countries on four continents as well as to at least seven proxy militias in the Middle East,” the report also noted.
