Khorramshahr Missile Range: How Far Can Iran’s Khorramshahr-4 Fly?

It is a liquid-fueled, road-mobile medium-range ballistic missile run by the IRGC Aerospace Force, and it carries one of the heaviest warheads of any missile Iran fields. The missile is about 13 meters long and 1.5 meters wide. Its name comes from the port city of Khorramshahr, retaken from Iraq on May 24, 1982, during the Iran-Iraq war.

Iran first showed the Khorramshahr at the Sacred Defence Week parade in Tehran on September 22, 2017, after a test flight from near Semnan on January 29 that year that flew about 950 km before it broke up. Western analysts judge that it descends from North Korea’s Musudan, a missile based on the Soviet R-27 submarine missile, which Iran is believed to have bought from Pyongyang around 2005. Iran says the design is its own. A second version with a smaller, finned re-entry vehicle was paraded in September 2019, and Iran released video in August 2020 of what it called the Khorramshahr-2. Defense Minister Mohammad-Reza Gharaei Ashtiani unveiled the fourth version, the Khorramshahr-4 or Kheibar, on May 25, 2023.

Iran’s official figure is 2,000 km with a 1,500 kg warhead. The Defense Ministry gave that figure at the May 2023 unveiling, and state media repeated it in February 2026, when the Guards showed the missile in one of their underground “missile cities.”

Range depends on warhead weight. The original Khorramshahr was credited with a payload of up to 1,800 kg, and Iranian state media now say that cutting the warhead from 2,000 kg to 1,500 kg would add range, a starting weight that does not match the 1,500 kg Iran gave in 2023. Western analysts estimated in 2019 that the version with the smaller re-entry vehicle could reach about 3,000 km with a lighter load. The 4,000 km figure has never been demonstrated. For comparison, the solid-fueled Sejjil is also credited with about 2,000 km, but only with a 700 kg warhead.

Britain’s bases in Cyprus, yes. Britain itself, no: its airfields are 3,600 to 3,800 km from Iran’s nearest border, nearly twice the range the Khorramshahr-4 has shown.

Measured from the Bazargan border crossing in Iran’s far northwest, RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus is about 1,140 km away and Incirlik air base in Turkey about 830 km, both well inside 2,000 km. Athens is about 1,800 km away and the US naval base at Souda Bay on Crete about 1,830 km. Berlin is about 2,770 km away and Ramstein Air Base in Germany about 3,090 km. RAF Lakenheath is about 3,620 km away, London about 3,660 km and RAF Fairford about 3,770 km.

So the claimed range decides the answer. At 3,000 km, a Khorramshahr fired from the northwest would cover the Balkans, Italy and Berlin, but stop just short of Ramstein and well short of Paris and Britain. Only at the very top of the claimed range, 4,000 km, would RAF Fairford and London fall inside it, and then only from launchers in Iran’s far northwest, near the Turkish border. Iran would also need a re-entry vehicle that survives that much longer and faster flight, which it has not shown.

Yes in speed, no in the sense the word usually means now. Every medium-range ballistic missile re-enters the atmosphere at well over five times the speed of sound, and Iranian state media said in February 2026 that the Khorramshahr-4 reaches about Mach 16 outside the atmosphere and Mach 8 inside it, with a flight time of 10 to 12 minutes.

It is not a hypersonic glide vehicle like Russia’s Avangard. It flies a ballistic arc. Iran says its warhead has small engines to steer it in the final phase, which would make it harder to intercept, but that has not been confirmed outside Iran. Iran also says its fuel lets crews launch in under 15 minutes, which matters because older liquid-fueled missiles had to be fueled in the open, where they could be seen and hit.

Yes, by the Guards’ own account, in the June 2025 war with Israel and in the 2026 war with the United States and Israel. On June 22, 2025, hours after US bombers struck Iran’s nuclear sites, Iranian state media said the Khorramshahr-4 had been fired at Israel for the first time.

In the war that began on February 28, 2026, the Guards named the Khorramshahr-4 in their statements from early March onward. On March 5 they said the missiles were fired at Tel Aviv and Ben Gurion airport, and they listed the Khorramshahr in later waves through late March, some described as multi-warhead. No full count of Khorramshahr launches or hits has been published, the Guards’ damage claims were not independently confirmed, and our estimate of how many missiles Iran has left explains why the totals are disputed.

No. The Kheibar is the Khorramshahr-4, a heavy liquid-fueled missile. The Kheibar Shekan is a lighter solid-fueled missile with a range Iran puts at about 1,450 km, first shown in February 2022. The two names are often confused in reports of Iranian launches.

Nobody outside Iran has published a count. The Khorramshahr is a small part of an arsenal that US and Israeli estimates put at between several hundred and about 2,000 ballistic missiles as of late October 2026, and the November 10 unveiling of a new underground missile city showed that the Guards are trying to keep production out of reach of airstrikes.