Assassination of the “father of the Iranian bomb”: the shadow war in the Middle East reactivates

The year started with thunder in the Middle East: On January 3, a US drone killed Qassem Soleimani at Baghdad International Airport. The general of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard commanded the Quds Brigades, the unit responsible for the regime’s operations abroad in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, as well as terrorist attacks in other countries. The year comes to a close with the death of an equally important Revolutionary Guard: Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.

Soleimani was the architect of the Iranian strategy of waging a shadow war in the region with the help of allied militias, especially in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, but also increasingly in Yemen. He was the mastermind behind the “Axis of Resistance” against Israel and the United States.

Maximum pressure, maximum resistance

And the driving force behind Tehran’s increasingly aggressive reaction to Donald Trump’s exit from the nuclear deal in May 2018 and the “maximum pressure campaign” with the drastic tightening of US financial and oil sanctions. The Tehran regime called its response “a campaign of maximum resistance.”

Fakhrizadeh described Western intelligence agents as the “father of the Iranian bomb” or the Oppenheimer of Tehran, referring to J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the development of the first nuclear weapons during World War II as part of the secret project of Manhattan in the United States. According to the Tehran government, Fakhrizadeh was the victim of an attack on his car on Friday. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), since the late 1980s he has been in charge of several projects that are “relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device,” a very cautious description of the military nuclear program.

Mysterious explosions and suspected sabotage

The killings of these two prominent figures of the Iranian regime show Iran’s vulnerability, but they are only the ghoulish climaxes of a covert war in the region that is reignited with the assassination. The Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called on Saturday for a “decided punishment” for the perpetrators and those behind them. President Hassan Rohani announced that the Iranian nation will react to Fakhrizadeh’s death “in due course” and will not fall for the “Zionist conspiracy”. Like Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Sarif, who spoke of “state terrorism,” he blamed Israel.

There had already been a series of mysterious explosions in Iran in the summer, which can be more plausibly explained as sabotage by the secret services. In June, a building related to the ballistic missile construction program was blown up at the Parchin military base, near the capital. The Iranians spoke of a “gas explosion” and US and Israeli intelligence officials denied they had anything to do with it.

A few days later, an explosion at the site of the Natans uranium enrichment plant destroyed a room where Iranian scientists were working on developing new and more powerful gas centrifuges. With these machines, the fissile uranium isotope 235 can be concentrated: for fuel rods in power plants up to three to five percent, for nuclear weapons up to more than 90 percent. The Iranian government soon spoke of the sabotage itself.

Iran relies on asymmetric attacks

Meanwhile, Iran is trying to attack American targets in the region through militias controlled or supported by the Revolutionary Guard, to attack Israel or the United States’ Arab allies, most notably Saudi Arabia. On Tuesday, Yemen’s Houthi militias fired a kind of cruise missile at the oil plants of the Saudi state company Aramco near Jeddah. Riyadh responded with heavy airstrikes against Yemen’s capital Sanaa on Friday.

As with the drone and cruise missile attack on Aramco in Abqaiq and Khurais in September 2019, which caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage, it is likely that the weapon was built with Iranian help, if not. Revolutionary Guards controlled the use. On Wednesday, a tanker struck a mine in the Red Sea off the Saudi coast, an incident reminiscent of similar acts of sabotage in the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf of Oman that escalated tensions last year. The United States and other Western countries saw the Revolutionary Guard working here as well.

Airstrikes against targets in Lebanon and Syria

In July and August, Israel’s air force bombed Hezbollah targets in Lebanon after the army said there were attempts to infiltrate the border area to target Israeli soldiers and an exchange of fire in the second incident. Israeli warplanes regularly attack Revolutionary Guard facilities in Syria; In the last week alone, they launched three waves of attacks on targets near Damascus and Albu Kamal on the Iraqi border. More than 20 militiamen are said to have died, as well as officers of the guard.

This shadow war is now at a point where it could turn into an open military conflict. After Soleimani’s death, Iran was content with a rocket attack on a US base in Iraq, which had primarily a symbolic effect. A little later, however, the Revolutionary Guard shot down an airliner with more than 180 occupants near Tehran because they expected an American attack.

Iran’s leadership has reason to look forward to the handover in Washington and to hope for better relations under new President Joe Biden. President Rohani was still confident Wednesday that the problems with the United States under Biden could be “easy to resolve” if he kept his campaign promises and brought the United States back to the nuclear deal. However, the hardliners in Tehran do not want an understanding with the United States, but instead expel them from the region. Also, Donald Trump will be in office for more than 50 days, and what will happen until then is fully open.

Published: 11/28/2020, 2:57 pm