February 2, 2024
The Wall Street Journal has reported that the United States told Iran the Islamic State was planning a terrorist attack before two suicide bombers set off bombs in Kerman January 3.
Sometimes terror warnings are vague and imprecise and don’t provide enough information to allow a government to take counter-measures.
But in this case, The Wall Street Journal said, the information “was specific enough about the location and sufficiently timely that it might have proved useful to Tehran in thwarting the attack.” Other news reports said the warning said the attack would come on the anniversary of the death of Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleymani at his tomb in Kerman.
In fact, it is possible the Islamic Republic did use the information to try to thwart the attack. Iran said the two suicide bombers saw that security around Soleymani’s tomb was too tight for them to be able to get near the tomb and so they set off their suicide vests well outside the cemetery. The security at the tomb may have been tightened because of the US warning.
The United States gave the warning to Iran under a decades-old policy followed by both Republican and Democratic administrations declaring they have a “duty to warn” of terror targets, whether the targets are in friendly or unfriendly countries, in order to save innocent lives. (In other words, the United States might not warn Iran if the targets were regime officials.)
It isn’t known how many times the United States has warned other countries about planned terror attacks that US intelligence has learned about. But The Wall Street Journal noted that in December 2019 Russian President Vladimir Putin thanked President Donald Trump for sharing intelligence that helped Russia thwart a terror plot in St. Petersburg. News reports said this warning of the Kerman attack was not the first such warning the US had given Iran.
The Islamic Republic later denied The Wall Street Journal story, through a “sources said” report carried by the state news agency. Oddly, that story said that “even if” what the Americans said was true, it would only mean the US had shared its intelligence to try to “protect itself against Iran’s response.”
After The Wall Street Journal report appeared in print, US officials confirmed that it was accurate to reporters.
Iran may have denied the story because it made the Iranian government look bad. However, the fact that the government tightened security around the tomb and forced the IS-KP terrorists to detonate their bombs outside the cemetery doesn’t show that Iran ignored the US warnings.
Many Western commentators wrote that the US warning might have been an effort by Washington to get closer to Iran. But given that this is a decades-old policy and warnings have been provided before to Iran, there did not appear to be any political content to the warning at all.
While the Kerman bombing has been claimed by the Islamic State-Khorasan Province the branch of the Islamic State based in Afghanistan hardliners in Iran have sought to blame the double-bombing on the United States and Israel. Iran has said 95 people died in the attack.
Islamic State-Khorasan Province has carried out several attacks in Iran, most notably against Shiite mosques. It also was behind the bombing at Kabul Airport the day US troops were withdrawing from Afghanistan in August 2021 that killed 13 American troops and about 170 Afghans.