Wednesday Terror Attack On Tehran A Surprise Peek Into Political Fault Lines Wednesday’s attacks in Iran seem not to have been spontaneously inspired by ISIS, but carefully planned to hit a nerve and grab international attention.
By Megan G. Oprea
June 8, 2017 In an exceedingly rare occurrence, Iran was the target of a coordinated terror attack on Wednesday morning that left at least 12 dead and many more injured. ISIS was quick to claim responsibility for the dual bombings of two symbolic locations in the heart of Tehran, making it the first Islamic State attack in the majority-Shiite Islamic Republic since the group emerged in 2014. Iran subsequently announced that the attackers were Iranian nationals who had joined ISIS.
Iran is looking to place the blame anywhere but on domestic unrest among its Sunni minority. But Iranian Sunnis should expect a harsh crackdown in the weeks and months to come, whether they were involved or not.
The first attack happened at Iran’s parliament, where it appears four men entered the building dressed as women, opened fire, took hostages, and detonated at least one suicide bomb. All four attackers are believed to have been killed. The other attack, involving a female suicide bomber, was launched at the Ayatollah Khomeini mausoleum, a de facto shrine to the founder of the Islamic Republic. Iranian security services say they foiled a third attack, although few details are known.
The locations were carefully selected to strike at the heart of the country. The first, a symbol of Iran’s government, reveals its vulnerability. The second targeted the soul of the country’s revolutionary past. Iran is exceedingly proud that it was able to overthrow the shah in its 1979 revolution and thereby shrug off American influence. In other words, Wednesday’s attacks seem not to have been randomly or spontaneously inspired by ISIS, but carefully planned to hit a nerve and grab international attention.
ISIS’s Increasing Interest in IranSurrounding countries have been the targets of Islamic State terror attacks over the last several years but no plot had yet been successfully carried out in Iran, although Iranian officials claim to have foiled several ISIS schemes.
But in recent months, ISIS has ramped up its propaganda in Iran, including publishing, for the first time, four issues of its magazine, Rumiyah, in Persian, and putting out a Persian-language video calling on Iranian Sunnis to rise up against the Shiite government. These aren’t the first instances of Persian-language ISIS propaganda, but they represent a significant increase after years of failing to inspire Iran’s Sunni population to join the Islamic State’s movement.
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Megan G. Oprea is editor of the foreign policy newsletter INBOUND. She holds a PhD in French linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin. You can follow her on Twitter here.http://thefederalist.com/2017/06/08/wednesday-terror-attack-tehran-surprise-peek-internal-fault-lines/
