If Israel did retaliate against Iran, the location of the response is anything but trivial. The province of Isfahan, located in the center of the country, which was the subject of a drone offensive launched by the regime of Benjamin Netanyahu on the night of Thursday to Friday April 19, according to several American media, is home to numerous nuclear, military and industrial installations.
If the Isfahan nuclear site is “completely safe”, according to a report from the Iranian National Space Agency shared by the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), three explosions were reported near one of the military air bases in the region. In 2023, a government “munitions factory”, located in its capital Isfahan, had already been the subject of an attack for which the Iranian regime had accused Israel.
Nuclear research and uranium refining
The province is home to one of the country’s main nuclear sites, with those of Natanz, Fordo and Bushehr, a port city where the only nuclear power plant is located. Built in 1982, it is composed of a uranium refining plant and a zirconium production plant (alloy necessary to assemble nuclear fuel in nuclear reactors), as well as a nuclear research center. Supervised by the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, it already had three nuclear research reactors, supplied by China.
But Iranian authorities have recently focused their development efforts on this site, with the announcement in February of the construction of a new nuclear research reactor in Isfahan. The new 10 megawatt research reactor will serve as a powerful source of neutrons intended in particular for testing nuclear fuels and materials, as well as for the production of industrial radioisotopes and radiopharmaceuticals, according to the IRNA agency. None of these installations were hit by the drones this Friday, according to Iran’s national space agency.
Iran has again accelerated its nuclear research and production since 2023, five years after the unilateral withdrawal of the Americans from the international nuclear agreement and the implementation of heavy economic sanctions against the Islamic Republic. Tehran has always maintained that its nuclear activities are peaceful and denied wanting to build an atomic bomb.
Air military base
According to the Iranian Fars news agency and despite contrary reports from some other Iranian state media, three explosions were heard near the Shekari air base, in the northwest of Isfahan province. It is not the only one in the region: other military sites are located in the province, as well as in the Zagros mountains, to the west, without our exact location being known.
In September 2023, the Shahid Babaei air base, in the Isfahan region, also attracted the attention of the international community for having received an unspecified number of Russian training aircraft, Yak-130s, as part of the “arms contracts of the Islamic Republic with the Russian Federation”, according to the Tasnim news agency. Both Russia and Iran were then subject to international sanctions that restrict trade.
In addition to its military base, Isfahan hosts several industrial-military complexes: the headquarters of HESA (the industrial aircraft production company of Iran) which produces an airliner (the IrAn-140) as well as several models Shaded combat aircraft and combat and reconnaissance drones. But also a munitions production factory of the Ministry of Defense, already attacked by drones in January 2023, making it a particularly sensitive and monitored area.