May 20, 2022
Over two days in Ramadan, four clerics have been murdered in mosques, two shot to death and the other pair stabbed to death.
The fatal stabbings occurred April 5 inside the Shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad, the holiest site inside Iran. One other cleric was injured.
The shootings occurred two days earlier in a local mosque in Gonbad-e Kavus.
No detailed motives have been confirmed in either case.
In the shootings, the two clerics who were killed were both Sunnis. In the Mashhad stabbings, the three victims were all Shiite.
The regime has devoted a great deal of attention to the killings of the two Shiite clerics, but state media gave very attention to the killings of the two Sunni clerics.
Authorities in Gonbad-e Kavus, where the majority of the population are Sunni Turkmen, said the suspected shooter was arrested. They said “personal motives” were behind the attack, a common description when the authorities want to block speculation of political intent.
The most common interpretation of the attacks by officials, however, was that opponents of the regime were trying to cause friction within the Islamic community as part of an effort to bring down the Islamic Republic or least hobble it.
In Mashhad, prosecutor Mohammad-Hossain Darroudi described the assailant at the shrine as a “foreign” national. Later he was named as Abdul-Latif Moradi, 21, an Afghan national of Uzbek ethnicity and a Sunni who entered Iran a year ago and lived in a poor neighborhood in Mashhad. Officials said six other suspects were arrested for allegedly aiding the man with the knife. They included two brothers of the assailant.
State media identified the clerics killed at the shrine as Mohammad Aslani and Sadeq Darai. They said Aslani held the Shiite rank of hojatoleslam, one level below ayatollah and thus a fairly senior clergyman.
The Islamic Propaganda Organization said the three clergymen who were stabbed all worked in poor neighborhoods of Mashhad, including the one where the assailant lived. It is likely they were trying to convert the Sunni Afghans who crowd those neighborhoods to Shiism, although the Islamic Propaganda Organization did not say that.
President Raisi quickly involved himself in the case, ordering an official investigation and declaring, before the investigation began, that the killing was conducted by “takfiris” a term used by the regime to describe extremist Muslims to include the Islamic State and Wahabis, the sect that rules in Saudi Arabia under the inspiration of the United States. He carefully avoided saying the killer was “directed” by the United States.
He said, “Those who showed enmity were from the takfiri movement. The colonialists and hypocrites should not be allowed to use ethnic and religious issues to foment discord between Muslims and the people of our country and neighbors.”
Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi later condemned the West in general and the United States in particular for declining to condemn the attack in Mashhad, saying that “proved” Westerners are supporters of such acts. Vahidi did not include the killings of the two Sunni clerics, which by his logic would suggest he supported those murders.
Violent acts at the Mashhad shrine are rare. However, one of the biggest terrorist attacks in Iranian history occurred at the shrine in 1994. At the time, the government held the Mujahedin-e Khalq responsible for the bombing that killed 26 people. But later evidence suggested the bombing was more likely carried out by Al-Qaeda.
