[ad_1]
Iran’s top nuclear scientist was killed in an ambush near Tehran on Nov. 27, in a brazen attack that threatens to increase tensions between Iran and the United States and their close ally Israel.
The assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, seen by Western intelligence services as the dark mastermind behind Iran’s past covert nuclear weapons program, may also undermine US President-elect Joe Biden’s goal to revive diplomacy with Iran when I enter the White House in January.
Iran immediately blamed Israel for the assassination, while suggesting that the United States also played an indirect or direct role.
The killing occurred when a truck with explosives hidden under a load of wood exploded near a car carrying Fakhrizadeh in the town of Absard, near Tehran, Iranian state media reported. When Fakhrizadeh’s sedan stopped, at least five gunmen attacked the car with rapid fire and engaged in a shootout with the scientist’s bodyguards.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said there were “serious indications of (an) Israeli role” in the assassination.
“The terrorists today assassinated an eminent Iranian scientist. This cowardice, with serious indications of Israel’s role, shows a desperate warmongering of the perpetrators,” Zarif wrote on Twitter.
He also asked the European Union to “put an end to its shameful double standards and condemn this act of State terror.”
Israel declined to immediately comment on Fakhrizadeh’s assassination. The Pentagon, the White House, the State Department and the CIA also declined to comment.
The New York Times, citing a US official and two other intelligence officials, said Israel was behind the attack on the scientist, although it was unclear what knowledge, if any, the United States might have had of the operation.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu named Fakhrizadeh in a 2018 filing revealing a trove of stolen documents about Iran’s alleged covert nuclear activities, saying, “Remember that name.”
Israel has long been suspected of carrying out a series of targeted assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists and other sabotage operations against Iran using agents of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), an opposition group in exile.
Iranian officials said the country would retaliate for the attack on the nuclear scientist.
The Supreme Leader’s military adviser, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, vowed to “strike like thunder at the murderers of this oppressed martyr.”
“In the final days of the political life of their … ally (Trump), the Zionists seek to intensify pressure on Iran and create a full-blown war,” Hossein Dehghan tweeted.
Michael Mulroy, a senior Pentagon official during the Trump administration, said Fakhrizadeh’s assassination would delay Iran’s nuclear program and that alert levels should be raised immediately in countries where Iran could retaliate.
The assassination is likely to complicate the Iran file for the incoming Biden administration, which has vowed to return to diplomacy with Iran after four years of hardliners under Trump.
Trump exited the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 and imposed sanctions on Iran, in a move that has exacerbated tensions and prompted Iran to step up its nuclear program.
In January, Trump ordered a US drone strike in Baghdad that killed Major General Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s most powerful military commander. Iran retaliated by firing missiles at an Iraqi base that housed US troops, bringing the two countries to the brink of war.
With less than two months remaining in office, the Trump administration is expected to step up its “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran in what critics say is a policy designed to undermine the options of the new Democratic administration.
Analysts said the assassination of Fakhrizadeh, who headed the Defense Ministry’s Research and Innovation Organization, was unlikely to halt Iran’s nuclear program, nor was that the point of the assassination.
“Fakhrizadeh was to Iran’s nuclear program what Soleimani was to its power network. He was instrumental in its development and in creating an infrastructure to support it, ensuring that his death does not fundamentally alter the course of Iran’s nuclear program, ”wrote Ariane Tabatabai, an Iran expert at the Washington-based German Marshall Fund. On twitter.
The goal behind the assassination “was not to hamper the nuclear program, but to undermine diplomacy,” Ellie Geranmayeh of the European Council on International Relations said on Twitter.
He noted that recent high-level visits by US officials to Israel and the Gulf states “raised the flags that something is brewing” to “provoke Iran and complicate Biden’s diplomatic push.”
John Brennan, a former CIA director when Biden was vice president of Barack Obama’s presidency, described the assassination as a “very reckless and criminal act.”
“Iranian leaders would do well to await the return of responsible American leadership on the world stage to resist the temptation to answer against the perceived culprits,” he wrote on Twitter.
Fakhrizadeh led Iran’s so-called Amad program which, according to Israel and the West, was a military operation evaluating the feasibility of building a nuclear weapon. Tehran has long maintained that its nuclear program is peaceful.
The International Atomic Energy Agency says the Amad program ended in 2003. IAEA inspectors are currently monitoring Iranian nuclear sites as part of Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, which Iran has gradually defaulted following the withdrawal of states. United.
With reports from AFP, AP, dpa and Reuters.
