Iran Unveils New Warship Named After Anti-American Iraqi Terrorist

By Logan Williams, Warrior Editorial Fellow

Iran held an unveiling ceremony on Sunday, October 7th, to showcase its new military capabilities, ostensibly in an attempt to send a message to the United States and its allies. The star of the show was a new warship, named for the Iraqi terrorist and deputy commander of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who was killed in a U.S. airstrike alongside Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force (IRGC-QF), a military unit dedicated to the training, equipping, and financing of international terrorists. This warship seems to be a smaller derivative of another warship, which took Soleimani as its namesake, which had entered service in 2022. The word Shahid is affixed to the names of these vessels, before the name al-Muhandis or Soleimani — i.e., the full name of the vessel is Shahid Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. Shahid is the Arabic word for martyr.

It is important to note that this vessel is operated by the Navy of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC-N), which is a separate entity from the Islamic Republic of Iran Navy (IRIN). The two naval entities serve distinct purposes, and thus, are equipped differently. The IRIN is the Iranian state’s traditional green-water navy, designed for ensuring the “security” of Iran’s immediate territorial waters. Thus, the IRIN is equipped with traditional vessels ranging from frigates to amphibious assault ships, but with no larger vessels like the United States’ destroyers or cruisers. The IRGC-N operates as a subversive terrorist-militia organization, specializing in unprovoked attacks upon other vessels, using maritime guerrilla warfare tactics, such as speedboat swarms. As such, the IRGC-N is almost completely armed with fast attack craft.

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The al-Muhandis vessel is classified as a catamaran (a vessel designed with two parallel hulls) corvette, although technically it is smaller than the variable metric of 500-800 tons which is often cited as the beginning of the lower-end of the corvette classification — the al-Muhandis has a displacement of approximately 300 tons. The al-Muhandis two hulls are designed with the same wave-cutting features of most modern warships, and reportedly has a top speed of 37 knots (according to Iranian state-owned media, so these numbers are almost certainly inflated), a comparable speed to various United States’ warships.

The Iranian al-Muhandis Warship

Again, according to the claims of Iranian state-media, the al-Muhandis is equipped with four 20mm machine guns, a 30mm cannon, and a launcher carrying eight surface-to-air missiles. The al-Muhandis is also equipped with a landing deck for the launching and receiving of UAVs, as well as six canisters for anti-ship missiles. The al-Muhandis lacks vertical launch capability for its SAMs, a function which other, larger Iranian vessels possess, instead the massive canisters are clearly visible toward the ship’s stern.