Iran attack shows vulnerability it fails to admit to having
For years, Iran justified its military presence in Iraq and Syria, to its own people and the world, as a strategy for keeping terrorist groups at bay. Iranian officials frequently boasted that fighting terrorists directly or through proxy militias in the region meant they didn’t have to fight them at home.
That sense of security was shattered Wednesday, with the deadliest terrorist attack since the 1979 founding of the Islamic Republic — two suicide explosions in the city of Kerman that killed 88 people, including 30 children, and injured more than 200. The Islamic State group, a mortal enemy of Iran, claimed responsibility.
Yet, even after the statement by the terrorist group, Iranian officials and pundits close to the government insisted — as they had in the immediate aftermath of the attack — that another enemy, Israel, was to blame. Tasnim News Agency, the media arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, went as far as claiming that “Israel ordered ISIS to take responsibility for the attack.” And Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, speaking at a ceremony in Kerman honoring the victims Friday, said Iran would retaliate and blamed both Israel and the United States.
Whatever the officials really think, blaming Israel and the United States is far more convenient, some analysts and opponents of the government say, than admitting that the state cannot protect its people from terrorism. The attack punctures the image of Iran as capable of flexing its might in wars around the region without suffering such large-scale retaliation at home.
The ministry of intelligence said Friday that 12 people in six provinces had been arrested in connection with the attack but did not elaborate on their identities or affiliations. It said one of the suicide bombers was from Tajikistan, but the identity of the second one was not yet confirmed. The statement also said security agents had discovered the place in Kerman where the attackers had stayed and arrested two of their accomplices.
The statement said police discovered two suicide vests, remote control devices for detonating explosives, grenades, thousands of pieces of shrapnel to use in suicide bomb vests and wires and explosive devices that, officials said, suggest the attackers were planning other attacks. The Islamic State group issued a statement Friday threatening more attacks and saying Kerman’s explosions marked “the beginning of our war,” with Iran.
It is not clear how widely Iranians accept allegations of Israeli responsibility. But if Iran’s leaders were hoping to unite the public against a common enemy, they did not appear to be succeeding. Many ordinary Iranians, both critics and supporters of the Islamic Republic, were instead venting 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 or other actors such as the Islamic State group to strike. Israel has carried out numerous strikes over the years against Iran’s military and nuclear facilities, and assassinations of its nuclear scientists and others, but those attacks have been narrowly targeted, not the indiscriminate mass killings claimed by the Islamic State group.