Iran mourns victims in suicide blasts as death toll rises to 89
KERMAN, Iran — Iranian officials tried Friday to link Israel and the U.S. to an Islamic State group-claimed suicide bombing while speaking to a mass funeral for some of the 89 people killed in the attack, seeking to intertwine the assault with wider Middle East tensions from the Israel-Hamas war.
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and the top commander of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard sought to make the link without offering evidence for their claims. The gathered crowd in front of flag-draped caskets shouted in response: “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!”
“The enemy always sees the power of the Islamic Republic. The whole world is recognizing this power and this ability,” Mr. Raisi said, without directly naming any country. “Be sure, the initiative is in the hands of our powerful forces. The place and time will be determined by our forces.”
Iranian state television also sought to link America to the attack. At one point, it re-broadcast comments from 2016 from then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, who wrongly accused then -President Barack Obama of being the “founder” of the extremist group.
Critics have blamed Obama’s decision to pull troops from Iraq in 2011 for allowing the group, once an affiliate of al-Qaida, to thrive and ultimately hold vast swaths of Iraq and Syria in its self-declared caliphate by 2014. U.S. troops under both Obama and Trump then battled alongside allied forces to retake that territory.
Gen. Hossein Salami, the commander of the Guard, similarly sought to make the connection.
“They can only act as agents and mercenaries of American politics and Zionism,” Gen. Salami said. “But we give them this warning, … wherever you are, we will find you. You cannot avoid divine punishment by disappearing. If you live for 1,000 years, we will find you.”
In Wednesday’s attack, one suicide bomber killed himself, then another attacked 20 minutes later as people and emergency workers tried to help the wounded in Kerman, about 510 miles southeast of the capital, Tehran.
On Friday, the intelligence ministry said in a statement published by its website, vaja.ir, that one of the two suicide bombers was a Tajik national.