Toophan
series of Iranian anti-tank missiles
The Toophan (Persian: طوفان "typhoon", rarely Toofan) is an Iranian SACLOS anti-tank guided missile reverse-engineered from the American BGM-71 TOW missile. The Toophan 1, an unlicensed copy of the BGM-71A TOW missile, began mass production in 1988 and the Toophan 2, a BGM-71C ITOW variant, was publicly shown in 2000.
The Toophan comes in at least 11 variants, many of which are poorly documented, including variants with laser guidance, thermobaric warheads, and tandem-warheads with increased penetration. The Toophan is manufactured jointly by the Aerospace Industries Organization of Iran and Iran Electronics Industries.
It is normally deployed from ground-based tripods, but can also be mounted on fighting vehicles and helicopters. Like the BGM-71 TOW missile, the Toophan is a large, rugged, powerful, and reliable anti-tank guided missile deployed by small teams against tanks, armored vehicles, buildings, and other targets. The Toophan forms the backbone of the Iranian Armed Forces' ATGM inventory and is procured in large quantities in a variety of variants.
The Toophan has been exported to the governments of Iraq and Syria and to a large number of non-state actors in the Middle East, and has been used in the Iran–Iraq War, the 2006 Lebanon War and the Iraqi, Syrian, and Yemeni Civil Wars.
Development
Iran was among the earliest countries to import the TOW missile, as far back as 1971. Extensive repair and assembly facilities were set up at the Iran Electronics Industries (IEI) by the Texas-based Emerson Energy Systems, as well as Hughes Missile Systems, to repair TOW and FGM-77A Dragon missiles.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Toophan” as series of Iranian anti-tank missiles. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2918628. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1988, 2000, 2006 and 1971.
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This entry incorporates text from “Toophan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.