Coordinated attacks kill 12 people in Iran

Two incidents the worst such strikes in the nation in years.

Assailants carrying rifles and explosives, some of them disguised as women, stunned Iran on Wednesday with audacious attacks in Tehran on the parliament building and tomb of the Islamic republic’s revolutionary founder, the worst terrorist strike to hit the nation in years.

At least 12 people were killed and 42 wounded in the pair of assaults, which lasted for hours and clearly took Iran’s elite security forces by surprise. The six known attackers were killed, official media said, and five suspects were reported detained.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps blamed Saudi Arabia and the United States for the assaults even as responsibility for them was asserted by the Islamic State. If the claim is true, it would represent the group’s first successful attack in Iran, which is predominantly Shiite Muslim and regarded by the Sunni militants as a nation of heretics. Iranian-backed forces are helping battle the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Tensions in the Middle East were already high following a visit by President Donald Trump last month, in which he exalted and emboldened Saudi Arabia, Iran’s regional rival. Saudi Arabia and several Sunni allies led a regional effort on Monday to isolate Qatar, the tiny Persian Gulf country that maintains good relations with Iran.

In a statement, the Revolutionary Guards Corps said: “The public opinion of the world, especially Iran, recognizes this terrorist attack — which took place a week after a joint meeting of the U.S. president and the head of one of the region’s backward governments, which constantly supports fundamentalist terrorists — as very significant,” a reference to Saudi Arabia’s ruling monarchy.

The statement also acknowledged the Islamic State’s claim of responsibility. But it also was possible that a range of others with grievances against Iran may have been responsible.

Expressions of sympathy from world leaders for the victims poured in after the assaults. But hours elapsed before a condolence statement from the Trump administration, which has called Iran the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.

“The United States condemns the terrorist attacks in Tehran today,” the State Department said. “We express our condolences to the victims and their families, and send our thoughts and prayers to the people of Iran. The depravity of terrorism has no place in a peaceful, civilized world.”

Eleven of the victims died at the parliament building, and one at the mausoleum of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, father of the 1979 revolution. Four of the assailants were killed at the parliament, and two at the mausoleum. Five were men, and one mausoleum assailant was a woman.

The attacks started around 10:30 a.m., when men armed with assault rifles and suicide vests — some of them dressed as women — descended on the parliament building, killing at least one guard, and wounding and kidnapping other people. That standoff lasted until midafternoon.

The Islamic State released a graphic, 24-minute video showing a bloodied man lying on the ground in parliament while a gunman in the background shouted in Arabic, “Thank God! Do you think that we are going to leave? We will remain here, God willing.”

The assault on the mausoleum — about 10 miles south of the parliament building — began shortly before 11 a.m. and lasted for about an hour and a half, state news media reported.

The attacks, the first in Tehran in more than a decade, came just over two weeks after Trump, with Saudi Arabia and its allies, vowed to isolate Iran. Iran has dismissed those remarks, made at a summit meeting in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, as a scheme by Trump to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia.

While terrorist attacks have become relatively commonplace in Europe and in most of the Middle East, Iran had remained comparatively safe. During May’s election campaign, President Hassan Rouhani often pointed to that fact, lauding the country’s security forces and intelligence agencies for their vigilance.

The coordinated terrorist attacks on Wednesday brought such feelings of security to an end, one analyst said. “Today, it was proved that we are vulnerable too,” the analyst, Nader Karimi Joni, said.