Turkey test-fired a locally made, short-range ballistic missile over the Black Sea on Tuesday, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Bloomberg reported that a mobile platform was used to fire the missile from an airport near the port city of Rize at around 7 a.m. local time, said the people, who asked to remain anonymous because they aren’t authorized to comment.

The projectile flew 561 kilometers (350 miles) before falling off the coast of the port of Sinop, the furthest any such weapon developed in the country has traveled, they said.

The secretive missile project dubbed Tayfun, or Typhoon in Turkish, has been underway for several years, the people said without elaborating. The Defense Industry Presidency, which oversees the development of locally made weapons, refused to divulge any information about the project.

Turkey took delivery of an advanced S-400 missile-defense system made by Russia, a top NATO foe, in 2019, two years after Ankara signed an agreement with Moscow to buy the system in the hope that the cooperation could help it develop its own ballistic-missile defense program. The US sanctioned Turkey and barred it from working on and receiving Lockheed Martin Corp.’s F-35 stealth jets in response.

Its export version is called Khan with a minimum range of 80 km and a maximum range of 280 km. It was tested and entered service in May 2017. The Bora-2 version with a longer range is under development.

Turkey’s growing defense industry is a cornerstone of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s assertive foreign policy over the last few years.

Turkey has reduced its dependency on arms imports, decreasing them by 59 percent in the five-year period of 2016-2020, as compared to 2011-2015.

According to the SIPRI Arms Transfers Database, Turkey was the 12th biggest exporter of major conventional weapons in the world over the period 2017-21, an increase of 31% compared to 2012-16.

Image courtesy: ANI