Tayfun Missile: Turkish Army Receives New Block 2 Batch

The Turkish Land Forces Command has taken another batch of Roketsan Tayfun Block 2 short-range ballistic missiles into its inventory, the Ministry of National Defence announced at its weekly press briefing on October 22, alongside a new batch of Fırtına-2 self-propelled howitzers. Ministry spokesman Rear Admiral Zeki Aktürk described the quantity only as an unspecified number of missiles, in keeping with the ministry’s practice on every earlier handover of the weapon. The delivery is at least the third of 2026, following the Block 2’s first acceptance into service on May 20 and a second batch on June 25. The steady pace of handovers highlights how quickly Turkey is building a ground-launched ballistic missile arsenal of a class that very few NATO members field, designed and produced entirely by its own industry.

Neither the ministry nor Roketsan has published an official range for the Block 2, although Turkish press reporting has placed it at more than 500 kilometres, with several estimates exceeding 800 kilometres depending on the flight profile. The original Tayfun was first test fired in October 2022, when Turkish officials reported that it had struck a target 561 kilometres away in a flight lasting under eight minutes. The program has since grown considerably, with Roketsan having presented a far larger Tayfun Block 4 at the IDEF exhibition in Istanbul in July 2025. The company described the new missile as 10 metres long, 938 millimetres in diameter and weighing around 7,200 kilograms, while declining to give its range when asked by the defence publication Janes.

The deliveries come in a year in which Turkish airspace has been directly exposed to ballistic missile fire, with NATO air and missile defences having intercepted four missiles launched from Iran on March 4, 9, 13 and 30 during the wider Iran war. Tehran denied deliberately targeting its neighbour, while Ankara credited each interception to allied assets rather than to any Turkish-built system. The same October 22 briefing reported that live firings of the domestically developed SİPER long-range air defence system had been completed successfully at the Sinop firing range on October 21. Efforts to acquire Eurofighter Typhoon fighters from Qatar were also reported to be continuing, with Ankara awaiting a draft sales contract and training program from Doha.

The Tayfun places Turkey among a small number of states fielding indigenous ballistic missiles in this range class. The most widely used comparable system is Russia’s Iskander-M, which carries a declared range of 500 kilometres and was fired at Kiev as recently as the night of October 21. The Turkish missile has also carried political weight since President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told a youth gathering in Samsun on December 11, 2022 that Greek concerns the Tayfun could reach Athens were justified, linking the threat to Greece’s armament of its Aegean islands. Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias called the remarks unacceptable coming from a NATO ally when he responded in Brussels the following day.