Everything We Know About Iran's Underground Missile Cities

Every interior image of Iran's buried arsenal comes from the IRGC's own cameras. Two wars bombed the entrances shut; the bulldozers reopened 50 of 69 within seven weeks.

By the Middle East Desk · June 2026 · 14 min read

A decade of curated tunnel videos, a war that bombed dozens of entrances shut, and the bulldozers that reopened them in seven weeks. What is actually known about the buried arsenal.

In late March 2026, four weeks into the war, Iranian state television aired a video of rows of ballistic missiles inside an underground gallery.[1] The release was timed to what the Revolutionary Guard called its seventy-fifth strike wave, and meant to rebut American claims that Iran's missile force had been destroyed. The footage was the latest installment in a propaganda genre Iran has been producing for over a decade, and it shares the genre's defining feature: every interior image of an Iranian underground missile base that exists in public traces to the IRGC's own cameras. No foreign journalist, no inspector, no documentary crew, no visitor of any nationality is known to have ever been inside one. The cities are real, and satellites have watched their doors for years. Two wars have now been fought partly against them.

A decade of unveilings

The genre began in October 2015, days after Iran announced its Emad missile test, when state TV broadcast footage of a tunnel complex with missiles on trucks. The broadcast claimed the facility sat 500 meters underground and was one of "hundreds" across the country; the Aerospace Force commander, Amir Ali Hajizadeh, called it the "tip of the iceberg" of the Guard's might.[2] A second display followed in January 2016. In July 2020, during the Great Prophet-14 exercise, Iran fired missiles from buried launch tubes, and Hajizadeh announced the concept with a hashtag: "#missile-farm." The trade press compared it to Cold War-era American studies of buried-trench basing for the MX missile. Footage that year showed something more sophisticated: missiles moving through cavernous tunnels on an automated rail system, stored in vertical magazines on individual ready-to-fire platforms.

The bases also served domestic politics. In January 2016, days after the second unveiling, the IRGC walked parliament speaker Ali Larijani through one of the galleries and released the photographs, the only known visit by a civilian official ever documented inside one of the complexes.[35] When the regime wanted its own elite to believe in the cities, it sent the speaker of parliament underground.

In January 2021 the IRGC Navy joined in. Commander-in-chief Hossein Salami and the naval commander Alireza Tangsiri toured a coastal complex in Hormozgan province. "What you see today in this complex is one of several facilities containing the Guard's naval strategic missiles," Salami said on camera. "The length of these columns is kilometers and the IRGC navy possesses many of these complexes." His summary of the doctrine behind them was unusually direct: "We believe that our enemies do not accept the power of logic, rather they rely on the logic of power."[4] Tangsiri had described the program a few months earlier: Iran had "established onshore and offshore missile cities all along the coasts of the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman."

The pace of unveilings quickened as war approached. January 2025 brought a tour of a base that state media said had fired the True Promise strikes on Israel. The narration promised that "the volcano lying under these mountains can erupt in the shortest time possible," and two more coastal naval facilities followed within weeks. In late March 2025, after an American ultimatum on the nuclear program, came the largest display yet: the armed forces chief Mohammad Bagheri and Hajizadeh riding through galleries lined with Ghadr, Emad, Kheybar Shekan, Sejjil and Haj Qassem ballistic missiles and Paveh cruise missiles. Press TV counted at least 78 missiles of two types in a single frame. "Iran's iron fist is far stronger today than before," Bagheri said. Hajizadeh, in the rendering of Press TV, claimed: "If we unveil a missile city every week for the next two years, it will still not be finished."[8]

Within three months both men were dead, killed in Israel's June 2025 decapitation strikes, and the bases they had toured were on a target list.

The men who gave the tours: four of the five are dead

• Amir Ali Hajizadeh (Killed June 2025) — IRGC Aerospace Force commander. Fronted the 2015 and 2020 unveilings and called them "the tip of the iceberg."
• Hossein Salami (Killed June 2025) — IRGC commander-in-chief. Toured the naval missile city on camera in January 2021.
• Mohammad Bagheri (Killed June 2025) — Armed forces chief of staff. Rode through the largest unveiled complex in March 2025, ten weeks before his death.
• Alireza Tangsiri (Died March 2026) — IRGC Navy commander. Claimed missile cities all along the Gulf coast; died of wounds from the Bandar Abbas strike.
• Gholamreza Jalali (Alive (late 2025)) — Passive Defense Organization chief and architect of the burial doctrine. The only one of the five not killed; in November 2025 he was still claiming the tunnels intact.

Portraits via Wikimedia Commons: Khamenei.ir (Hajizadeh, Salami), Amin Ahouei (Bagheri, CC BY-SA 4.0), Iman Jannati (Tangsiri), Navid Jahromi (Jalali); CC BY 4.0 unless noted.

Who built them

Most of the digging is the work of Khatam al-Anbiya Construction Headquarters, the IRGC's engineering conglomerate and, with roughly 135,000 employees, one of the largest contractors in Iran. The opposition National Council of Resistance of Iran, which first exposed several of the sites, attributes the Kenesht Canyon complex near Kermanshah to firms affiliated with it; the group's claims carry its agenda and should be weighed accordingly.[11] Site selection and hardening doctrine belong to the Passive Defense Organization of Gholamreza Jalali. He has described a twenty-year program of "missile cities and depots built into mountains and deep underground," and says he prioritized Fordow and Isfahan after studying American bunker-buster capabilities.[13]

Iran did not develop its tunneling craft alone. The missile program was born in the Iran-Iraq War, when a decaying, sanctioned air force pushed Tehran to buy Scud-Bs through Libya and North Korea in 1984-85. North Korean tunnel and silo know-how followed over the next decade. Reporting places North Korean engineers in underground work at Natanz and Isfahan, channeled through entities like KOMID, which the U.S. Treasury calls Pyongyang's premier arms dealer.[15] The same knowledge later moved westward through Iranian hands: after 2006, Hezbollah built its own tunnel network in Lebanon with Iranian and North Korean assistance, run through civilian engineering firms as cover.

What is claimed, and what holds up

Three of Iran's central claims about the cities cannot be verified, and analysts actively dispute two of them.

By burying, hardening, and dispersing its projectiles Iran is trying to take the military option off the table for Israel. — Behnam Ben Taleblu, Foundation for Defense of Democracies, March 2025

The depth claim, 500 meters, has circulated since the 2015 broadcast and reappeared in 2025 coverage. No independent analyst has corroborated anything like it. The useful comparison is Fordow, Iran's hardest known site, which sits roughly 80 to 90 meters beneath a mountain near Qom. The American GBU-57 penetrator is rated to roughly 60 meters of rock or earth, and Zagros limestone can reach compressive strengths far beyond the concrete the bomb was designed against. That is why the June 2025 Fordow strike required fourteen of the bombs, and why analysts could still say afterward, in the words of CNA's Decker Eveleth, that "the only piece of evidence of deep penetration is the amount of ejecta that the MOPs produced, but we cannot say for certain what was destroyed."[18] If 80 meters of limestone defeats certainty, 500 meters would defeat the weapon outright. The claim's purpose is deterrence. Whether it is true, no outside analyst has been able to say.

The count claim, "hundreds" of facilities, sits against a mapped reality of roughly a dozen-plus major sites identified by analysts. The most carefully documented oddity is Haji Abad in Hormozgan, where Fabian Hinz of the IISS tracked the appearance of seven large circular structures between 2017 and 2019, each around 20 meters across and accessed by tunnel. By the end of 2019 they housed pairs of twelve-meter cylinders, plausibly read as horizontal launch canisters on rotating racks, a rapid-reload arrangement with no obvious foreign counterpart.[21] The known map, assembled from analyst geolocation rather than any Iranian disclosure, looks like this:

The third claim, that the tunnels made the arsenal untouchable, did not survive its first real test in June 2025. The War Zone's assessment of the March 2025 tour footage had already noted that "the munitions are stored out in the open in long continuous tunnels and large caverns with no, or at least limited, blast doors or separated revetments." A penetration at any point risks fire and blast propagating down the whole gallery.[9] Behnam Ben Taleblu of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies argued the unveilings were themselves reactive, an attempt to put the arsenal beyond Israel's military reach.[22] The attempt failed. Hinz, whose mapping of the bases is the standard open-source reference, wrote bluntly during the war that Iran's missile strategy "was designed to deter attacks on Iran itself. And in that regard, it has already failed abysmally."[23]

The cities at war

The fighting has shown how the bases function in combat, and the answer is closer to garage than fortress. The design logic, as one analysis of the campaign put it, was that launcher vehicles "could emerge from tunnel exits, fire from pre-surveyed positions, and return underground."[36] In practice, the contest has been fought at the doorstep. American and Israeli aircraft loitered over the bases and struck the launchers, in the words of one assessment of the June 2025 air war, "as they were flushed from underground missile bases," bottling the remaining missiles up inside.[37] No launch from inside a tunnel has been documented in either war; the buried launch tubes Iran demonstrated in its 2020 exercise, firing a short-range Fateh-family missile, have not been seen in combat.

The suppression campaign worked through the launchers, not the magazines. The Israeli air force reported some 300 launchers destroyed or disabled in the war's first week, and CENTCOM said Iran's ballistic launch rate had fallen to about a tenth of its opening level by Day 8. Coalition planners attributed the collapse to launcher attrition and the destruction of launch-support infrastructure; Iranian statements called it deliberate rationing.[25][38] "We're hunting Iran's last remaining ballistic missile launchers," the Fifth Fleet commander, Admiral Brad Cooper, said in March.[38] What no one on either side has claimed is the destruction of the stockpiles themselves. As the Soufan Center noted in April, strikes on the underground sites "generally target entrances and ventilation shafts, and do not necessarily destroy the missiles or drones directly."[39]

Which bases fired which waves is, with rare exceptions, not publicly known. Iran itself has made the only base-level claim, saying in January 2025 that a single unnamed complex had fired the True Promise strikes on Israel.[40] The one independently documented case ran the other way: open-source analysts geolocated footage of a launch from the Yazd missile base on March 27, and the coalition struck the base within hours.[41] Whether Iran's ninety-five strike waves drew on bases in rotation or fired from several at once has no answer in the open record. What observers could measure was tempo, small salvos spaced through the day with pauses of hours, a pattern analysts read as rationing and psychological pressure rather than a launch pattern tied to any particular base.

The stockpile's composition is similarly unpublished. American intelligence assessed in April that roughly half of Iran's missile and drone arsenal had survived five weeks of bombing, with thousands of Shahed-type drones still in inventory; the expert estimate of about 1,000 ballistic missiles in deep storage followed in May.[29][39] The drones mostly live elsewhere: the Washington Institute's survey of the drone war found one-way attack aircraft operating from small airstrips and "a few underground bases at undisclosed locations in central and southern Iran," launched from truck-mounted rails, roughly 4,400 of them before the April ceasefire.[42] No analyst has published a breakdown of what fraction of the medium-range force, the short-range force or the drone fleet sits under the mountains. The type-level contents of the cities are known exactly to the extent Iran has chosen to film them.

The June rekindling has followed the same pattern. Nothing in the public record ties the drone that downed the American helicopter over Hormuz, or the missile salvos that preceded it, to any named facility. The American retaliation, meanwhile, has fallen on the Hormuz coastal belt, Qeshm, Sirik, Jask and Bandar Abbas, where the naval tunnel complexes sit.[43]

Two campaigns at the entrances

Israel's June 2025 campaign struck the underground bases at Kermanshah, Khorramabad, Tabriz, Bidkaneh and south Shiraz in its opening days. The revealing detail was the method: munitions hit tunnel entrances at angles rather than attempting to penetrate from above. Janes' assessment was that "the damage can be cleared, enabling any TELs trapped inside to deploy."[19] The strikes, in other words, sealed doors rather than destroying contents. Maxar imagery showed wrecked surface buildings and missile-maintenance sheds at Kermanshah; what happened under the mountain was, and remains, invisible.

The 2026 war scaled the approach up. Operation Epic Fury struck more than 2,000 targets, and CENTCOM said Iran's ballistic launch rate had fallen to roughly a tenth of its opening level by Day 8. In one raid, more than 80 Israeli fighters dropped 230 bombs on a single underground complex. The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs claimed an 86 percent reduction in Iran's theater-ballistic-missile operational capability.[24] Yet the same campaign record concedes that the tunnel complexes proved more survivable than anything on the surface. Iran's passive-defense chief made the counterclaim explicit on a state podcast: "Almost all underground and under-mountain missile infrastructure remains intact and has no serious problems."[13] Jalali is a regime voice with every incentive to say so. Much of the open-source record fails to contradict him.

The bulldozers

The question of how Iran reopens bombed entrances has a precise, documented answer: earthmoving equipment.

The template appeared at Fordow within days of the June 2025 MOP strikes, when Maxar imagery showed excavators and personnel working directly at the tunnel entrances and beside the northern bomb shaft. David Albright's Institute for Science and International Security read the activity as preparation "for downhole inspections at two impact sites," lowering cameras or people into the penetration holes.[26] Trucks had lined the access road before the strikes; analysts read them as sealing the entrances with dirt in advance, a maneuver that converted America's deepest-penetrating weapon into a door-knocker.

The missile bases got the same treatment at scale after this war's April ceasefire. A CNN investigation published May 31, using Airbus imagery, found that in roughly seven weeks Iran had reopened 50 of the 69 tunnel entrances struck across 18 underground missile facilities, using bulldozers, front-end loaders and dump trucks. The roads that had been cratered to immobilize launcher vehicles were almost all filled in, and two sites were freshly repaved. Experts cited in the investigation estimated around 1,000 missiles remained stockpiled in deep storage, now accessible again. Timur Kadyshev of the University of Hamburg drew the larger conclusion: "They were preparing for this kind of war for 20 years."[29]

You're using very sophisticated, very expensive weapons... recovery is very low tech — it's just bulldozers. — Timur Kadyshev, University of Hamburg, to CNN, May 2026

During the war itself, the earthmoving had been a target. CENTCOM published footage in late March of strikes on bulldozers and loaders that Iran was using to reopen tunnel entrances, and imagery the next day showed a bulldozer struck while clearing debris at the Dezful missile base.[41]

Every battle-damage assessment in the public record stops at the tunnel entrances. No imagery analyst has published an inside-the-mountain accounting of any Iranian base, and whether any deep magazine, rail system or stored missile has actually been destroyed in either war is not publicly known.

Life underground

Iran has never shown living quarters, generators, air filtration or crew arrangements in any tunnel video; the tours show hardware, not habitation. The closest available guides to what life inside such complexes involves are the documented underground installations of other countries and other wars.

The high end of the genre is Cheyenne Mountain, NORAD's Colorado complex. Its buildings sit on more than 1,300 thousand-pound steel springs beneath 600 meters of granite, behind twenty-five-ton blast doors that can be cranked by hand. It holds an internal reservoir of a million and a half gallons and, famously, a sandwich counter, because people posted under a mountain for days still have to eat. North Korea, Iran's tunneling tutor, operates an estimated 200 to 500 hardened artillery sites whose guns fire from cave mouths and withdraw to reload, plus underground air bases and radar sets raised on elevator shafts "like a submarine periscope."[31] China's Rocket Force maintains thousands of kilometers of tunnels for shuttling missiles by truck and rail, the so-called Underground Great Wall, mapped over three years by a Georgetown research team working from open sources. Hezbollah's Imad 4 complex, unveiled in a 2024 video subtitled in Hebrew, showed missile trucks driving the galleries and fighters riding motorcycles down them. The analyst consensus placed command rooms, depots and field hospitals in the deeper network. And the Cu Chi tunnels of Vietnam preserve what long habitation underground actually costs: kitchens engineered to vent smoke far from the source, surgeons operating with instruments ground from bomb fragments, malaria endemic in the garrison, and fighters who surfaced after days below temporarily unable to see in daylight.

One precedent cuts the other way, and any reader of curated tunnel imagery should keep it close. In 2001, Western newspapers printed diagrams of Tora Bora as a multi-story fortress with a hospital, a hydroelectric plant and roads sized for tanks. Donald Rumsfeld, shown one on NBC that December, said, "This is serious business; there's not one of those, there are many of those." The caves American forces actually took held a couple of hundred men at most, and the fortress diagrams corresponded to nothing on the ground.[34] Iran's galleries are visibly real, and the missiles on the racks are not props. But the lesson stands: the gap between an adversary's underground legend and its underground reality is historically wide, and it widens in the direction the adversary prefers.

The ledger

The verified record is shorter than the propaganda. Iran spent two decades and Khatam al-Anbiya's engineering capacity burying its missile force, with doctrine from its own besieged history and tunneling craft partly imported from North Korea. Analysts can name and watch roughly a dozen-plus major sites. Two wars have now bombed their doors, and the doors were open again within weeks at the cost of diesel fuel and bulldozer hours. The contents beneath the mountains remain unaudited by anyone outside the IRGC. The propaganda claims of 500-meter depths, hundreds of cities and eruption on command are unverified and partly contradicted by the regime's own footage. The strategic claim collapsed in February 2026: the cities were built to deter an attack on Iran, and the attack came anyway.

What the public evidence supports is narrower: a buried arsenal that two air campaigns have suppressed but not destroyed. The state that maintains it has proven it can absorb the sealing of 69 entrances and reopen 50 of them before the diplomats finish arguing. The men who gave the tours are dead. As far as anyone outside Iran can demonstrate, the tunnels they drove through are still there.

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