Bomb Blasts Destroy Shehab-3 Ballistic Missile Launchers

The Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's provocative rhetoric and actions in Lebanon on Oct. 13-14 drew no diplomatic or military responses from the United States or Israel. However, DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military and intelligence sources reveal that, the day before it began, Tuesday, Oct. 12, three blasts struck an Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps base in a remote part of southwestern Iran near the town of Khorramabad.
Tehran reported 18 soldiers killed in these explosions.
Our sources reveal that Iran lost the main depot of its Shehab-3 medium-range ballistic missile launchers, the backbone of the missile arsenal it had stocked for striking US targets in Iraq and Israel.
The dead soldiers were laid to rest in funerals on Thursday, the day Ahmadinejad told a Shiite audience in the South Lebanese town of Bin Jbeil that Zionism was destined to disappear and America's hold on the Middle East about to end.
The Revolutionary Guards said the blasts had been caused by a fire spreading to an ammunition store at the base. According to our sources, the incident unfolded in reverse order – first three blasts one after the other in the underground bunkers holding the launchers, then a big fire spread across the base and reached the ammunition store causing it to blow up.
Sabotage in one form or another leaving no clues to its perpetrators is becoming a regular preface to especially confrontational Iranian actions. It also happened a month before the August 21 inauguration of Iran's first nuclear reactor at Bushehr when the Stuxnet virus struck its nuclear and military control systems.
Notwithstanding Tehran's denials the invasive worm is still at work.
Now, the day before the Iranian president descended on Lebanon to demonstrate its conversion into Iran's front line against Israel, most of the Islamic Republic's stock of medium range ballistic missile launchers went up in smoke bringing the Iranian military machine to a gradual halt.
The attack on this IRGC base was the third of its kind in three weeks.
On Sept. 22, a bomb blast at an Iranian military parade in Mahbad, northwest Iran, killed 12 soldiers and injured seventy.
On Oct. 7, gunmen attacked Iranian security guards at Sanandaj in Iranian Kurdistan, killing at least five.
Then, on Oct. 9, the Baluchi separatist Jundallah claimed responsibility for abducting Amir Hossein Shirani in the city of Isfahan, claiming he had been employed at the local nuclear plant. This was vehemently denied by Tehran and confirmed by DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence sources.
Jundallah has in the past abducted government officials in Baluchistan. Until now its operations were confined to the area wedged between the Pakistan and Afghanistan borders. Its move into Isfahan in central Iran is an alarming new development for the regime in Tehran.
Summing up these events, our Iranian experts note that the Islamic regime is being battered increasingly by combined assaults on security inside Revolutionary Guards Corps bastions, a cyber attack deep inside its nuclear and military systems, terrorist strikes, kidnaps of nuclear personnel and a declining economy and currency. This regime's stability cannot remain unaffected – especially if these assaults increase.