Why Iran is using cheap drones into Arab countries

Having already proved its cheap and lethal effectiveness on the Ukrainian battlefield, the Iranian-made Shahed-136 kamikaze drone was unleashed across the Persian Gulf this weekend, inflicting significant damage amid Iran’s direct retaliation to attacks by the United States and Israel.

The 136 is a variant of unmanned aerial vehicles in the Shahed family (Shahed means “witness” in Farsi) that is cheap to produce and can act like a guided missile because it travels to a predetermined target. They were developed by a company associated with the powerful Revolutionary Guard, the ideological military branch that protects Iran’s ruling system. Iran has been producing them at least since 2021 and has used them before in Iraq.

Videos verified by The New York Times from Saturday show Shahed-136s slamming into buildings in Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. As the drone hovers in the air, its engine makes a distinct buzzing sound.

It is audible in a video of the attack in the capital of Bahrain, Manama, on a high-rise residential building. The triangular drone pounds into the side of the building, starting a fire and sending debris flying.

One-way attack drones have several advantages over traditional missiles, notably their cost-effectiveness at roughly $35,000 each. They also have a relatively long range of 2,000 kilometers (about 1,200 miles).

Seth Frantzman, an expert on drone warfare, said while the Shahed drones were ineffective compared with other weapons, they can occasionally evade expensive air defense systems, spreading chaos and terror, and can be produced in high numbers.

“They give the Iranians a cheap air force-like weapons system,” said Frantzman, whose book, Drone Wars: Pioneers, Killing Machines, Artificial Intelligence, and the Battle for the Future, was published in 2021.

Another video from Saturday showed a Shahed-136 appearing to hit infrastructure inside a US Navy base in Bahrain. Dark smoke is rising from the area when the buzz of the Shahed becomes audible, and moments later it can be seen curving over the smoke and exploding on impact.

Footage filmed in the Jumeirah neighborhood in Dubai, UAE, shows a Shahed-136 striking the Fairmont Palm, a luxury hotel where nightly rates for a standard room are around $200. “Oh my God,” said the person filming the scene.

On Saturday, the US and Israel launched a series of strikes against Iran’s leadership and military sites that killed the country’s decades-old ruler, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iran retaliated by firing missiles and drones across the Middle East, targeting countries hosting US troops.

On Sunday, Ali Larijani, a senior Iranian official, wrote on social media that Iran was not attacking Arab countries, but rather bases used by US forces.

The Shahed-136 has also been used by Russia to target civilian infrastructure across Ukraine. Geran is one of Russia’s names for its domestically produced line of Shaheds, which Russia now manufactures in a remote factory in the east of the country, and it has been modified over the course of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Late last year, the US announced that it would deploy one-way attack drones known as the LUCAS, which was reverse engineered from the Shahed by an Arizona-based company, SpectreWorks. US Central Command announced on the social platform X that the US had deployed these for the first time in its campaign against Iran, although that could not be independently verified.