13 Iranian missile men in Syria, training of Scud-B in Damascus

When it was closely felt that answer was to be given in kind to the Iraqi bombardment of Iranian cities, a number of Iranian commanders and high officials decided to dispatch a team of 13 from the IRGC artillery to Syria to undergo missile trainings.

Prior to when war commanders thought of sending a team to Syria, in the month of Tir 1363 Iranian calendar, Mohsen Rafiqdoust, then IRGC minister was invited by two countries Libya and Syria for talks, and he accepted the invitations and made the trips.

As he traveled to Syria, Rafiqdoust asked Hafiz Assad for help to enable Iran to give a proper response to the Iraqi bombardment. But due to the fact that Syria’s missiles were managed by Russia, Assad only promised to provide Iran with missile training.

In his trip to Libya also, the Iranian minister found Moammer Gaddafi only promise Scud B missiles and that turned the necessity of launching a missile unit for the IRGC bolder.

In those days Hassan Tehrani Moqaddam was an upstart and had been commanding Rahim Safavi’s order to launch an artillery in the IRGC.

According to Iranian commanders, the best choise for sending to Syria was that very young, energetic man named Hassan Tehrani Moqadda. He was a smart guy and was the commander of the artillery too. They sent him and 12 other, along with two Arabic- Persian interpreters to Syria. They departed for Syria on Thrusday, 3^rd of Aban, 1363.

The group went to Brigade 155 of Syrian missile army and there they met the commander of the missile unit and got to know of their training program. The program was however not very pleasant for Tehran Moqaddam and his team, because first of all it would take a lot of their time, and also they would see in the meantime that many of their citizens back in Iran were being still bombarded by Iraq.

Under those circumstances Tehrani Moqaddam objected to the program and demanded a more compact one. The proposal was at last accepted and the training term was made short and more compact.

Accordingly, various classes and workgroups were formed which covered a range of commanding a platform, mounting and loading a missile, injecting fuel, stationing the missile, installing the warhead, meteorology, testing, etc. but there was not enough Iranian forces for these topics and classes. Therefore, the 13 people would have to learn all of the material. It was so set that they should hold classes from the morning till noon, and then from the afternoon till evening every day.

The topic of the classes was how to launch the giant Scud B missile, a missile which none of the Iranians had seen from close that far, and that turned the job difficult.

The successor to the R-11, the R-17 (SS-1C Scud-B), renamed R-300 in the 1970s, was the most prolific of the series, with a production run estimated at 7,000. It served in 32 countries and four countries besides the Soviet Union manufactured copied versions. The first launch was conducted in 1961, and it entered service in 1964.

The R-17 was an improved version of the R-11. It could carry nuclear, chemical, conventional or fragmentation weapons. At first, the Scud-B was carried on a tracked transporter erector launcher (TEL) similar to that of the Scud-A, designated 2P19, but this was not successful and a wheeled replacement was designed by the Titan Central Design Bureau, becoming operational in 1967. The new MAZ-543 vehicle was officially designated 9P117 Uragan. The launch sequence could be conducted autonomously, but was usually directed from a separate command vehicle. The missile is raised to a vertical position by means of hydraulically powered cranes, which usually takes four minutes, while the total sequence lasts about one hour.

It has been rumored that Scud-B's had been fired by Gaddafi forces against rebels in the recent Libyan civil war during the first phase of the war. On 14 August that year, a confirmed Scud-B launch was detected by a US Aegis destroyer, with the missile fired from Sirte and heading toward rebel positions in Ajdabiya. The missile fell 80 km off target in the middle of the desert, inflicting no damage. 8 days later, on August 22, three more Scud-B launches were detected by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The Scud B training was over the three months in the month of Azar. But the Syrians proposed to teach Iranians how to prepare and launch Frog missiles as well.

Tehrani Moqaddam agrees to the proposal and leaves 6 of the officers to stay in Syria and learn the new stuff about Frog.

The first missile engineers and officers of Iran came home on Day 11 that year.

When the passenger aircraft landed in the Mehrabad airport it was about 3 in the morning. But a friendship military aircraft was there ready to take Hassan Tehrani Moqaddan and the young officers right to Kermanshah.

There the 13 Iranian officers went to Kermanshah to start their novel task at Shahid Montazeri brigades and establish a big entity, that is Hadid missile brigade.

The brigade had been launched by Amir Ali Hajizadeh in the absence of the young officers in those days so that when Tehrani Moqaddam and his friends got back, they would have the ground work to start their main task. Hajizadeh was then a young officer from the IRGC artillery unit.

On the other side, the Scud B missiles which Libya had promised Iran were also arriving and were ready to be launched.

Now everything was ready for Iran to give Iraq a big shock at the battlefield, that is to launch the missiles at some targets.