Sejjil Missile: Range, Speed and Iran’s Use Against Israel

The Sejjil, also spelled Sajjil and sometimes called Ashura, is a road-mobile ballistic missile designed and built in Iran. It is about 18 meters long and 1.25 meters wide, and it weighs about 23.6 tonnes at launch.

Iran announced the first test flight in 2008. A second test followed in May 2009 in Semnan province, east of Tehran, and Iran called that version the Sejjil-2. It is still unclear whether the Sejjil-2 is a separate model or simply the name Iran gave the improved missile tested that year. Four more flights followed through 2011, one of them reportedly about 1,900 kilometers out into the Indian Ocean. Then the Sejjil went almost a decade without a public test, until it appeared in the Great Prophet 15 exercise in January 2021.

About 2,000 kilometers with a 700-kilogram warhead. Range falls as the payload grows: with a warhead of about 1,500 kilograms the missile is estimated to reach only about 1,000 kilometers.

Some reports in June 2025 put the range at 2,500 kilometers. No test on the public record has shown that distance, and the longest reported flight was about 1,900 kilometers.

Two thousand kilometers is more than Iran needs to strike Israel. Tehran is about 1,600 kilometers from Tel Aviv, so the Sejjil can be fired from deep inside the country, including from central and eastern provinces, and still reach Israel. Riyadh, Doha, Abu Dhabi and every US base in the Gulf are well inside its reach.

Iran says the Sejjil comes down at about 13 times the speed of sound. That figure is an Iranian claim from June 2025, but it fits the physics of any missile that flies 2,000 kilometers: the warhead falls back through the atmosphere at several kilometers a second, and the flight from Iran to Israel takes roughly 12 minutes.

In 2026 the Sejjil picked up the nickname “dancing missile,” from the claim that its warhead weaves to dodge interceptors. Iran has shown no evidence of a maneuvering warhead on the Sejjil, and the idea that it carries several independently aimed warheads also remains an unverified Iranian media claim.

Solid fuel lets Iran hide the missile fully fueled and fire it quickly. Iran’s older Shahab-3 and Ghadr missiles burn liquid fuel that has to be loaded shortly before launch, which keeps the launcher in the open for longer, where drones and aircraft can find it. A solid-fuel Sejjil can wait inside a tunnel and roll out ready to fire.

The weak point is production. Large solid rocket motors are made in heavy industrial mixers that are hard to build and that Iran has had to import. Satellite images taken after Israel’s strikes on October 26, 2024, showed solid-fuel mixing buildings destroyed at the Parchin and Khojir military complexes near Tehran. Iran has since started rebuilding those sites, and every new mixer it obtains adds to its capacity to build big solid-fuel missiles like the Sejjil.

Yes, twice according to Iran, both times against Israel. The first was on June 18, 2025, during the twelve-day war, when the Revolutionary Guards said a new wave of their True Promise 3 operation included the Sejjil. The Israeli military said the missiles in that wave were intercepted, and fragments lightly damaged a car on a highway.

The second came on March 15, 2026. The Revolutionary Guards said they fired the Sejjil alongside Khorramshahr, Kheibar Shekan, Qadr and Emad missiles at what they called Israeli command centers and military infrastructure. No damage has been publicly tied to a Sejjil in either attack, and no one outside Iran has confirmed how many were fired.

Yes. The Sejjil is a medium-range missile, the class that Israel’s Arrow 2 and Arrow 3 and the US THAAD system were built to stop. Arrow 3 and THAAD try to hit the warhead high up or above the atmosphere; Patriot batteries defend the last few kilometers. The June 2025 Sejjil wave was intercepted, by Israel’s account.

Every missile of this range arrives that fast, so the Sejjil’s real advantage is earlier in the flight: a solid-fuel launcher can fire within minutes of leaving cover, which gives defenders less warning, and each one fired still uses up costly high-altitude interceptors. How the layers divide the work is set out in our guide to Iron Dome, Patriot and THAAD, and what each high-altitude shot costs is in how much a THAAD missile costs.

It is the longest-range solid-fuel missile Iran is known to have in service. The Shahab-3 flies about 1,300 kilometers on liquid fuel. The Ghadr flies about 1,950 kilometers on liquid fuel. The Emad flies about 1,700 kilometers on liquid fuel. The Kheibar Shekan flies about 1,450 kilometers on solid fuel, by Iran’s own figure. The Khorramshahr flies about 2,000 kilometers on liquid fuel, with a heavier warhead than the Sejjil.

So the Sejjil matches the reach of Iran’s heaviest liquid-fuel missile while keeping the speed of launch of its solid-fuel ones. Iran’s claimed hypersonic Fattah missiles, compared in our list of which countries have hypersonic missiles, fly shorter distances. All of them belong to the ballistic missile force that the US and Israel have tried to destroy since February.