February 2, 2024
Two Tajik terrorists wearing suicide bomb vests detonated themselves outside the cemetery where Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleymani was buried four years ago, killing 95 people and injuring at least 286 in the bloodiest terrorist attack ever recorded in the Islamic Republic.
The double bombing in Kerman came on January 3, the fourth anniversary of Soley-mani’s assassination by the United States.
The Islamic Republic has put primary blame for the terrorist act on Israel, although many regime officials have also attributed the double attack to the United States. However, the Islamic State (IS) claimed full responsibility for the terrorism, saying it was carried out by the IS “Khorasan Province” subdivision, which is based in Afghanistan and has mostly attacked Shias in Afghanistan over the years. IS-KP has also claimed several major terrorist attacks in Iran over the years, including two on a mosque in Shiraz in 2022 and 2023 and another on a Pasdar base in Chahbahar in 2018.
Iranian officials have either ignored the IS claim or said that IS acted at the direction of the United States and/or Israel. However, IS is militantly anti-Israeli and anti-American. It was, in fact, created in 2004 with the primary mission of killing American troops to drive the United States out of Iraq.
Few in Iran seem to agree with the regime’s effort to blame Israel. Attacks on masses of people by suicide vest have long been a feature of IS terrorism, while Israel has been noted for decades for its targeted assassinations that kill single individuals seen as being a particular threat to Israel. In Iran, Israel is believed to have assassinated at least three nuclear scientists and a few Pasdar officers who have organized attacks on Israelis.
Iran initially announced that the double attack had killed 103 people. The next day it reduced that to 84, saying the explosives had had torn so many bodies into fragments that body parts from a single victim were first thought to have come from multiple victims. In succeeding days, as injured people died from their wounds, the death toll was raised to the current 95, of which 14 were Afghans. The dead ranged in age from an eight-year-old boy to a 67-year-old man. The victims included nine members of one family.
The regime has issued more details of the Kerman attack than it usually does after terror attacks in Iran. It said the first explosive was set off about 700 meters from Soleymani’s tomb at the cemetery attached to the Saheb al-Zaman Mosque and the second was ignited 20 minutes later about 1,000 meters from the tomb. It said both were set off outside the security perimeter that had been established that day for people visiting the tomb.
πOfficials said the killers saw security was tight and they would not be able to enter the tomb grounds to explode their vests there and kill only people who were supportive of Soleymani. Instead, they killed people who were just walking along streets outside the cemetery.
The government said the first bomber was a 24-year-old Tajik named Bazirov who had entered the country a short while before the attack. It said it had not yet identified the second bomber. IS said the two bombers were Tajik brothers.
The government said the first bomber had Israeli as well as Tajik citizenship. There were as many as 15,000 Jews in Tajikistan when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, but the number according to the latest census is just 36. No one can get Israeli citizenship without being Jewish and many of the Jews who have left Tajikistan have gone to Israel. But Iran did not explain why a Jew would wish to join the Islamic State—or why the Islamic State would agree to enroll a Jew in its ranks. Many found Iran’s official story to be preposterous.
The government said the chief organizer of the plot was a trained Tajik bomber, named Abdollah Tajiki, who entered Iran in mid-December, built the bombs for the two suicide killers and then left Iran two days before the double attack. Three days after the bombings, the government said it had arrested a total of 35 people found in six provinces for being involved in the terrorist act. That claim was meant to portray the security forces as skilled and capable and came in response to the growing body of criticism of the security forces for failing to prevent the attack in the first place.
Professionals generally did not believe the tale about 35 people being involved in the attack. First, it does not take that many people to pull off such an attack. And, second, if you have a large number involved, you increase the risk that someone will go to the authorities and rat on the plotters. It is always better to minimize the number who are involved in organizing a terrorist action.
While the 35 arrests for the attack may be mythical, the daily Hamshahri reported that at least eight people have been summoned to court for questioning the regime account that Israel was behind the attack. The most prominent person summoned was Sadeq Zibakalam, a commentator who wrote that Israel’s intelligence agencies don’t conduct mass casualty attacks but use targeted assassinations.
However, the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) said January 9 that at least 76 social media users had been arrested in the first week after the Kerman bombings and 108 others summoned to appear in court. HRANA also said 537 social media accounts were suspended in that week.
One regime official publicly acknowledged the growing criticism of the security agencies for failing to stop the attack. Intelligence Minister Esmail Khatib said, “We witnessed this heartbreaking tragedy and this sedition and enemy conspiracy, which brought shame upon us in front of the Supreme Leader, the people and the families of the martyrs.”
Despite all the criticism of the authorities, it is not easy to prevent terror plots from being carried out. In the United States, the police count on plotters making a mistake and exposing themselves, with the most common error being to try to bring extra people into the plot who then go to the police instead.
Iranian Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi tried to defend his agency by claiming that, while terrorists got away with the Kerman double-bombing, the Interior Ministry had thwarted “thousands” of other terror plots over the years. The ministry has not claimed that many foiled plots before and the claim sounded more like a public relations ploy than a true account.
A brief video clip posted on social media was reported to be security camera footage of one the bombs going off. (See photo above.) There was no way to be certain that was true. Many people post old footage of events and claim they are something current. There were two oddities about the latest video. First, the bomb blast was quite small and went off in an area with few people walking about, so it did not seem likely to cause casualties on the scale of those in Kerman. Second, the video showed a bus in the foreground making a left turn as the bomb went off. The bus did not stop or even pause, but just continued on its way as if nothing had happened.
Some of the social media commentary on the case point out that the Islamic Republic has long justified its military presence in Syria in part as a strategy designed to keep terrorist groups at bay. The Kerman attacks punctured the claim that Iran can send its operatives across the region without suffering any retaliation at home.
The worst terrorist attack in the history of Iran was the arson in 1978 during the revolution at the Cinema Rex in Abadan where 377 people died. The exit doors from the cinema had been locked, so few were able to escape the flames.