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The Iranian drone program continues to expand rapidly. The Iranian military is increasingly pressing drones into service. While most Iranian discussion regarding drones focuses on their military application against external adversaries, the excerpted article from DefaPress.ir, Iran’s main defense news portal, suggests that Iranian authorities will also use surveillance drones in emergency response operations.
The threat of earthquakes in Iran is real: every decade Iran experiences major earthquakes, some of which claim thousands if not tens of thousands of lives. Tehran’s huge expansion in the years since the Islamic Revolution—it has grown from a city of two million in 1979 to perhaps fourteen million today—coupled with a widespread failure to comply with earthquake-resistant engineering standards has left many Iranians fearing the inevitable “big one” will hit Iran’s capital.
While any decision to move Iran’s capital is years away, that Iranian authorities are testing drone surveillance in a disaster exercise in Tehran shows another strategy of preparation in which the Iranian government is engaged. That the drone belongs to and is operated by the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC)—a group dedicated to defending Iran’s revolutionary regime from enemies foreign and domestic—suggests that drone surveillance against Iranian civilians might be employed in scenarios other than their protection. At the very least, the IRGC’s ownership of disaster search-and-rescue drones suggests an unwillingness to allow civilian Iranian bodies to acquire or utilize such technology.
