Paveh

The cruise missile with three names — Iran's Paveh is the IRGC's Project 351: a cheap, terrain-hugging land-attack missile with a claimed 1,650-kilometer range that exists in the Houthi arsenal as the Quds, in Iraqi militia hands as al-Arqab, and reportedly in Hezbollah's tunnels via the now-severed Syrian corridor. Its family drew first blood at Saudi Aramco's Abqaiq in 2019 and flew against Israel in April 2024 — where, by Israel's count, none of roughly thirty got through. In the ballistic-missile-dominated wars of 2025 and 2026, Iran's cruise missiles stayed conspicuously quiet.

Overview

The Paveh — named for a Kermanshah-province town, and known to Western analysts as "351" — is the current apex of Iran's land-attack cruise missile line and its most successfully proliferated strike weapon. Iran Watch's assessment is unambiguous: the Paveh and the Houthis' Quds "by all appearances… are identical," and the US Defense Intelligence Agency typed Iraqi militias' al-Arqab as Paveh-class — one design, three arsenals. Unveiled by IRGC Aerospace Force commander Amirali Hajizadeh in February 2023 with a claimed 1,650 km range (never independently verified), the Paveh is a small, ground-launched, subsonic missile: pop-out wings, a distinctive dorsal-mounted turbojet derived — per UN Panel of Experts debris analysis of the Quds — from the reverse-engineered Czech PBS TJ-100, and a terrain-hugging profile that takes roughly 2–2.5 hours to reach Israel. Iranian media add claims of route variation, 360-degree attack geometry and networked salvos with a "leader" missile — all unverified state-adjacent messaging. Its combat ledger is instructive in both directions: the family's debut at Abqaiq–Khurais (2019) blinded half of Saudi oil processing and embarrassed US-supplied defenses, while the April 2024 True Promise strike saw all ~30 cruise missiles fail to reach Israeli territory. In the June 2025 and 2026 wars — more than 1,800 ballistic missiles and thousands of drones — no Paveh use has been publicly attributed: the flagship finding of this file is that Iran's own doctrine has moved past its cruise missiles for peer-level salvos, while the design's real career is proliferation.

Development

Iran's cruise-missile line began with theft: Soviet Kh-55 strategic cruise missiles covertly acquired from Ukraine in the early 2000s and reverse-engineered by MODAFL's Samen al-Aeme Industries, yielding the Soumar (unveiled 2015, ~700 km class) and improved Hoveyzeh (2019, claimed 1,350 km), per CSIS Missile Threat. The 351/Quds branch diverged as the exportable, downscaled product: revealed in Houthi hands in July 2019 and combat-proven that September at Abqaiq–Khurais, where the UN Panel of Experts found engines "identical in design" to the PBS TJ-100 — two with original Czech parts, the rest fully reverse-engineered, per Iran Watch. Iran claimed the design as its own on 24 February 2023, when Hajizadeh announced the 1,650 km Paveh on state TV, per Reuters; IISS analysis tied it to Project 351 "first seen in the guise of the Quds." Combat employment under Iranian and proxy flags followed: an Iraqi-militia al-Arqab attempt on Ashkelon and Hatzerim in April 2024, typed by the DIA as Paveh-class, per the Washington Institute; then True Promise I (13–14 April 2024) — more than 30 cruise missiles, assessed by The Guardian as "most probably the newly designed Paveh-351," of which none entered Israeli territory, per the IDF via BBC. Alma Research assesses 351s reached Hezbollah before the Assad regime's fall closed the land corridor in December 2024; Paveh rows appeared in Iran's fourth underground "missile city" reveal in March 2025; and Iran marketed the missile for export at Russia's Army-2024 show. Through the June 2025 and 2026 wars, no verified Paveh employment appears in any authoritative count.

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