Terrorism in Iran exposes a vulnerability it is unwilling to admit
For years, Iran justified its military presence in Iraq and Syria, to its own people and the world, as a strategy to keep terrorist groups at bay. Iranian officials often boasted that fighting terrorists directly or through proxy militias in the region meant they did not have to fight at home.
That sense of security was shattered Wednesday with the deadliest terrorist attack since the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979: two suicide bombings in the city of Kerman that killed 88 people, including 30 children, and injured more than 200. The Islamic State, a mortal enemy of Iran, claimed responsibility.
But even after the terrorist group’s declaration, Iranian officials and experts close to the government continued to insist—as they had in the immediate aftermath of the attack—that another enemy, Israel, was to blame. Tasnim News Agency, the media arm of the Revolutionary Guards, went so far as to claim that “Israel ordered ISIS to take responsibility for the attack.” And President Ibrahim Raisi said Friday at a ceremony in Kerman honoring the victims that Iran would retaliate, blaming both Israel and the United States.
Whatever officials really think, it is far more convenient to blame Israel and the United States, say some analysts and government opponents, than to admit that the state cannot protect its people from terrorism. The attack shatters the image of Iran as a country capable of deploying its power in wars in the region without suffering such large-scale retaliation at home.
The Intelligence Ministry said on Friday that 12 people had been arrested in six different provinces in connection with the attack, but did not provide details on their identities or ties. It said one of the suicide bombers was from Tajikistan, but the identity of the second had not yet been confirmed. The statement also said that security officers discovered the place in Kerman where the attackers had been staying and arrested two of their accomplices.
The statement said police discovered two suicide vests, remote-control devices for detonating explosives, grenades, thousands of shrapnel for use in vests and wires for suicide bombings and explosives that, officials said, suggest the attackers were planning other attacks plans were. ISIS issued a new statement on Friday threatening more attacks, saying the Kerman explosion marked “the beginning of our war” with Iran.
It is not clear to what extent the Iranians accept the accusations of Israeli responsibility. But if Iran’s leaders hoped to unite the public against a common enemy, they seemed unable to do so. Many ordinary Iranians, both critics and supporters of the Islamic Republic, instead vented their anger at the government.
Conservatives loyal to the ideology of the clerics who rule the country said Iran’s timid response to Israel’s security breaches had emboldened it and other actors such as Islamic State to strike. Israel has carried out numerous attacks on Iran’s military and nuclear facilities over the years, and assassinations of its nuclear scientists and others, but these attacks have been on a very limited scale, and not on the indiscriminate mass killings carried out by the Islamic State were claimed.
“The opinion among the revolutionaries is overwhelmingly disturbed and dissatisfied. We are currently being attacked and then we do nothing,” Aboozar Nasr, a 44-year-old entrepreneur in the religious city of Qom, said in a telephone interview. He called himself a conservative follower of the hardline government.
“If policy shows restraint, officials should stop the threatening rhetoric,” he said. “It sounds empty and fake.”
Iran supports and helps arm Hamas, the Palestinian group that led the October 7 attack on Israel and which has retaliated with a devastating bombing campaign and an invasion of the Gaza Strip. It also arms Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, who have stepped up attacks on Israel during the war with Hamas.
The Houthis have also attacked ships in the Red Sea and blocked ships bound for Israel from entering the waterway, disrupting international shipping, while Iranian allies have launched attacks on US bases in Syria and Iraq almost daily.
During multiple town hall-style discussions on social media platforms, speakers from different cities and different political factions in Iran have wondered why and how – given the surge in tensions in the region – the security forces had failed to foresee the threat of an attack and taken more action. precautions to prevent this.
“The Islamic Republic is always bluffing. The only thing the country knows how to do is bully its own people. They are not able to guarantee the security of this country,” Mohsen, a 39-year-old engineer, said in a telephone interview from Tehran. Out of fear of retaliation, he asked that his last name not be used.
Wednesday’s suicide bombings hit a memorial to Major General Qassim Suleimani on the anniversary of his 2020 killing by a US drone strike in Iraq. General Suleimani had presided over the crucial role played by Iran and its allies in the military defeat in Syria and Iraq of the Islamic State, a Sunni Muslim extremist group that Iran’s Shiite Muslim majority views as heretics. But the US accused him of orchestrating attacks on the US military in the region, allowing Iran to gain dominance in post-war Iraq, and of arming militant groups fighting Israel.
Islamic State also took responsibility for a 2018 attack on an Iranian military parade that killed 25 people — and the government vowed revenge against the United States, Gulf Arab states and Israel. ISIS also claimed two separate attacks by gunmen who raided a Shia shrine in Shiraz in 2022 About a dozen people were killed in 2023.
Several women interviewed in Tehran said this week’s terrorist attack reinforced their underlying feelings that they are not completely safe in public spaces in Iran. They said women who defy the hijab rule and do not cover their hair already risked a violent confrontation with security officers and fines.
“After the recent attacks, I decided not to go to crowded places. The fear of insecurity is always there,” Arezou, a stay-at-home mother in Tehran, said in an interview.
For the Iranian leadership, the threat of large-scale terrorist attacks adds to their growing list of challenges, both domestically and internationally. The economy is still in shambles due to US sanctions, mismanagement and corruption. The prospects for a return to a deal with the West to limit Iran’s nuclear program, which would provide sanctions relief, appear bleak.
Faced with months of mass demonstrations in 2022 demanding the end of clerical rule, the government responded with brutal violence, killing hundreds of demonstrators – just as it did in 2019 to suppress the protests.
The war between Israel and Hamas poses new challenges to the Iranian leadership, with allied militias actively involved in the fighting. Iran has avoided direct involvement or consequences on its own soil.
But in the past two weeks, a senior Revolutionary Guard commander and Hamas’s deputy political leader, one of the group’s liaisons to Hezbollah and Iran, were killed in Beirut, both in attacks widely blamed on Israel; and the United States killed a senior commander of an Iraqi militant group close to Iran in a drone strike in Baghdad.
“The Islamic Republic is very aware that these attacks together could be a trap to spread the war to Iran,” said Sasan Karimi, a Tehran-based political analyst. “Everyone is furious. They want to respond with restraint and calculation to avoid a strategic mistake that could jeopardize their hold on power in their own country and region.”
Even as war rhetoric escalated, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, instructed military commanders to pursue “strategic restraint” and avoid direct military confrontation with the US at all costs, according to two Iranians familiar with the internal debates.
Still, some hardliners are calling on Iran to make a strong show of force.
“The new killing campaign before it reaches a tragic turning point must result in a concerted attack or our hands will remain on the trigger. Every day we cry for more martyrs. This is not war, this is deterrence,” said Mahdi Mohammadi, adviser to Iran’s parliament speaker and former commander of the Revolutionary Guards. in a message on X.
On Thursday, General Ismail Ghani, General Suleimani’s successor as head of the Revolutionary Guard’s powerful Quds Force, visited the cemetery in Kerman where the suicide bombing took place. Dressed in black instead of a military uniform, he knelt at General Suleimani’s grave, placed his hands on the gravestone and prayed.
A large crowd around him chanted, “Revenge, revenge.”
Leily Nikounazar reporting contributed.