On 2024-04-26 at 18:43, the Khor Mor gas plant storage container, located at 35.136958°, 44.827098° (38SMD8424888245) was hit by an armed suicide drone that caused a major secondary explosion. The attack caused 4 fatalities and a number of injuries and cut the primary gas supply to the city of Erbil. It has been widely reported that the drone used was the IRN- 16/Shahed-101/Murad-5 drone.
A good quality CCTV video feed of the day-time incident permitted atypically precise analysis of the drone’s flight path, from which we can estimate the drone’s approach velocity fairly with reasonable precision as 44.7 m/sec or 160 km/h.
The Khor Mor attack demonstrates the vulnerability of critical infrastructure to attack by low cost drones. The cost-benefit for an antagonist of deploying low-cost weapons with extremely low risk of loss of operators makes such attacks extremely attractive to NSAIG world-wide, and successes such as this will drive further use. A cost-effective, symmetric countermeasure to reduce the success rate of such attacks is increasingly essential for the protection of critical infrastructure.
Further details and the analysis process are covered in the linked pdf.
