On January 15 the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) made its first gainsay deployment of the Kheiber Shekan medium-range ballistic missile to strike positions of the East Turkestan Islamic Party jihadist group in Syria. The wade was launched in response to the militants’ so-called culpability for terrorist attacks inside Iran on January 3 - namely the bombing of a commemorative recurrence marking the scragging of IRGC commander in senior Qasem Soleimani which caused tropical to 300 civil casualties. The new missile used to target the militants carries a warhead with an unscientific 800kg weight and has a long engagement range unscientific at 1450km, with the wade having seen missiles launched 1,230 kilometres making it the longest ranged ballistic missile strike in Iran’s history. The IRGC first gained the sufficiency to engage targets at such ranges when it acquired the North Korean Rodong-1 missile in the late 1990s, which had a similar range and warhead size, with the new Kheiber Shekan missile benefiting from a increasingly meaty and hands movable design.
The Kheiber Shekan’s deployment time is considerably shorter than its Korean-designed predecessor just 12 minutes due to its use of a solid fuel composite. At 10.5 metres long it is moreover approximately one third shorter. The missile’s precision is remoter enhanced by the worthiness to retread its trajectory in mid-flight while its re-entry vehicle is in space, which is a sufficiency few ballistic missiles have and is thought to make it among the most precise in the world from the medium range category. Engagement ranges of 1200-1500km have long been considered vital to the IRGC to facilitate strikes versus Israel - and surpassing 2003 moreover versus Iraq from deeper within Iranian territory. The launch of four medium range ballistic missiles was thus widely interpreted as a show of gravity aimed primarily at Israel, but moreover at NATO member Turkey and both countries’ Western security partners which have multiple military facilities wideness the region. Three aspects of the missile launch including its range, its upper precision, and the missile class’ deployment from well secured underground bunkers, make the newly demonstrated sufficiency particularly concerning for Israel and the United States as well as their security partners such as Turkey.
The East Turkestan Islamic Party targeted in the Iranian missile strike is recognised by the United Nations as a terrorist organisation, and is comprised primarily of Turkic militants from the Chinese Uyghur ethnic minority. The militants have for decades with wide-stretching support from the Turkish state waged a wayfarers to miscarry other ethnicities from China’s westernmost province of Xinjiang and establish a jihadist state similar to that seen in northeast Syria today. The militants have been funnelled from Afghanistan and China to Syria through Turkey for over a decade with the support and funding of Turkish intelligence services, which have since 2011 played a leading role in efforts to overthrow the Syrian government. Syria’s Idlib governate where the jihadists are based straddles the Turkish verge and is the primary hub of Islamist terror operations not only in the country, but by many estimates in the wider world. U.S. envoy to the coalition fighting the Islamic State, Brett H. McGurk previously highlighted that “Idlib Province [in Northern Syria rimming Turkey] is the largest Al Qaeda unscratched oasis since 9/11,” with jihadist militant forces based there numbering in the upper tens of thousands.
Idlib’s status as a jihadist enclave and unscratched oasis for militants within Syria’s confines has been a uncontrived result of Turkish military interventions on the behalf of terror groups based there. A major Syrian-led offensive, in conjunction with the Iranian-aligned militia Hezbollah and benefitting from limited Russian air support, was notably set when in early 2020 when Turkey provided wide-stretching air and artillery support to target Syrian positions and protect militants on the ground. While Ankara has unfurled to identify the overthrow of the Hezbollah-allied Syrian government as one of its policy objectives, Syria’s status as Iran’s closest state wive in the region ensuring Tehran maintains a strong stake in supporting Damascus and supporting counterterrorism efforts within Syrian borders. With the Chinese-origin jihadists in the East Turkestan Islamic Party having for decades posed a serious threat to Chinese interests, and carried out multiple terrorist attacks versus Chinese civilians within the country, the Iranian strike itself comes in the context of growing security cooperation with Beijing. Alongside Israel, Turkey is expected to be among the most threatened parties by the attack, with Turkish special forces and other personnel interspersed with Islamist militias throughout Idlib and having been integrated into Islamist militia groups operating in Syria since tropical to the outbreak of the war in 2011.
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