FORDOW, Iran — In the heart of the desert on the road to the Shiite holy city of Qom, Iran secretly built a nuclear facility called Fordow a number of years ago. It is an underground enrichment plant constructed on a former Revolutionary Guards’ base that stirred controversy when its existence was announced by the Iranians in 2009.

Although the facility is located beside the tiny town of Fordow, the Fordow River and the Fordow mountains, this is not the reason behind the name of the facility. Rather, it is because the village of Fordow had the highest percentage of fighters killed in the eight-year Iraq-Iran War, or what’s known there as the Sacred Defense Era. Linking the site to such an important point in Iran’s collective history adds to its significance in the Iranian consciousness in one respect, but not the most important one.

Less than 30 miles from Fordow lies Qom, the site of the tomb of “Infallible Fatima,” the sister of the Shiite's eighth imam, Ali al-Reza (al-Reda in Arabic), the only Shiite imam who lived and is buried in Iran. The city is regarded as the “Oxford” of Shiite studies, along with Najaf, in neighboring Iraq, but it assumed even more importance after the 1979 Islamic revolution when it was regarded as the capital of political Shiism because of the debates and fatwas flowing from it. More than 55,000 students from 77 different countries study in hundreds of schools there. In a few years, some of them will be counted among the ummah’s new generation of ayatollahs.

According to an Al-Monitor source in Tehran, “Fordow wasn’t built near Qom for no particular reason. On the contrary, there is one and only one reason for that — to create a symbolic sacredness between the holy city and the nuclear program and to send a message to the world in general and the West in particular that Iran’s nuclear program possesses the same holiness as Shiism in Iran.”