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Bellingcat has geolocated footage of multiple Tomahawk cruise missiles travelling through Iraqi airspace towards Iran, either in violation of its airspace or with Iraq’s consent.
Bellingcat identified at least 20 individual cruise missiles and geolocated them over Iraqi Kurdistan including alongside Mount Piramagrun, in the Zagros Mountain range, and approximately 50 km southeast of the city of Kirkuk.
Modern Tomahawks can travel up to 1600 km, and are used for precision strikes. At the start of the war, the US had a carrier strike group in the Mediterranean and the Arabian Sea, as well as some independently deployed destroyers.
The US is the only participant in the war known to possess Tomahawks, which can be launched by ships or submarines. US President Donald Trump said at a press conference on Monday that Iran “also has some Tomahawks”. Official government reports on Iran’s military balance don’t support this claim.
Considering the distance of US vessels to the geolocated missiles, the missiles seen in the videos were most likely fired from the Mediterranean Sea, Sam Lair, a research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, told Bellingcat.
Red Sea launches would be pushing the maximum range, and US Navy ships were not known to have been in the Persian Gulf at the start of the war, Lair said.
Brian Finucane, a senior adviser with the US Program at the International Crisis Group, told Bellingcat that without the consent of Iraq and Syria, the intrusion of Tomahawk missiles into their airspace “would violate its sovereignty and international law”.
We asked the US State Department and Department of Defense as well as the foreign ministries of Iraq and Syria, if the US had an agreement with Iraq or Syria to utilise their airspace for cruise missiles targeting a third country. The Department of Defense told Bellingcat they “had nothing to provide” while neither the Iraqi nor Syrian ministry had responded at the time of publication.
On Tuesday, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani spoke with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and stressed that Iraqi airspace and territory should not be used for any military action targeting neighbouring countries, the prime minister’s media office said.
Bellingcat geolocated at least eight videos showing Tomahawk missiles over Iraq. The videos show at least 20 individual Tomahawk missiles, based on the longest uninterrupted video we reviewed.
