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Tehran has spent decades preparing for — and welcoming — a U.S. ground invasion, a senior Iranian official has claimed, as fresh explosions rocked the region on the eighth day of renewed U.S.-Iran strikes.
Seyed Mohammad Marandi, an Iranian American academic identified as a regime “mouthpiece,” also boasted that Tehran had just launched a “new missile” while decentralizing and burying its arsenal deep underground to withstand sustained American air campaigns.
“The Americans are planning an invasion. I’m not saying it will necessarily happen. I’m not saying it will necessarily happen in the next few days. But they have plans for an invasion,” Marandi, a former advisor to Iran’s nuclear negotiation team, said in an interview with political analyst Glenn Diesen.
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“Whether they carry them out or not, we’ll see. But the Iranians, as you pointed out, the focus of Iranian strikes is on Bahrain and Kuwait, and that’s because that’s where most American assets have been placed for a ground invasion,” Diesen said.
Marandi’s comments came as the conflict expanded across western and southern Iran in the run-up to Saturday.
Iran also launched missile and drone salvos targeting U.S.-linked facilities in Jordan, Kuwait and Bahrain.
Jordanian officials confirmed they intercepted 10 missiles early Saturday, while authorities in Kuwait reported casualties and severe damage to a domestic power and desalination plant.
In response, U.S. airstrikes struck bridges, a key road tunnel, surveillance outposts and reinforced underground weapons storage facilities.
Multiple explosions also rocked the city of Khorramabad in Iran’s Lorestan province. Iranian state media claimed the blasts were caused by U.S. missiles launched from regional bases in Kuwait, according to reports.
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Khorramabad houses the Imam Ali Missile Base, one of Tehran’s primary underground silo facilities engineered to store and deploy liquid-fueled Shahab-3 medium-range ballistic missiles, according to Washington’s Nuclear Threat Initiative.
The complex was damaged by Israeli airstrikes during the 2025 campaign targeting Tehran’s military and nuclear infrastructure.
Marandi also detailed what he described as a resilient, subterranean network central to Tehran’s military strategy.
“When Iran wants to fire missiles or drones, they don’t put them inside buildings or in piles somewhere. They take out whatever they need,” Marandi said. “They fire them, and then they go back to their bases, or they take out different missiles and drones, spread them out in different areas, put them apart from one another so that the Americans cannot bomb them in large numbers.”
He added: “Everything has been spread out in Iran and placed underground.”
The latest escalation between the U.S. and Iran ended a recently signed memorandum of understanding (MOU) to establish a 60-day ceasefire and facilitate nuclear talks.
The key issue has centered on control of the Strait of Hormuz, with the strategic waterway turning into the conflict’s main battleground.
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President Donald Trump ordered renewed airstrikes within weeks of the truce, or MOU, being implemented, and on July 14, he floated the possibility of launching a ground campaign.
According to Marandi, Iran’s military command is actively counting on a ground scenario and has since introduced a new weapon to the theater.
“Iran has that advantage, and of course, it has been accumulating missiles and drones for decades now, and it is doing so even now,” Marandi claimed.
“They, I think, last night introduced a new missile to the war,” he said of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRCG).
“The Iranians are hitting very hard, and they are prepared for a land war. They’ve been preparing for decades.”
Marandi concluded by claiming that Tehran views a U.S. ground operation as the most direct path to ending the conflict on its own terms.
“The Iranians — we discussed this during the 40-day war before on your show — when I said that the Iranians actually want the Americans to carry out a land invasion, and the same is true now, because they felt that if there was a land invasion, they would win,” he told Diesen.
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