Washington —
More than a week after Iran experienced its deadliest terror attack in decades, its Islamist rulers said one of the suicide bombers trained in Afghanistan with the Islamic State group that claimed responsibility for the attack.
Iranian leaders have vowed to retaliate against the IS perpetrators of the January 3 suicide bombings that killed at least 90 people in the city of Kerman as they attended a memorial for top Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani on the fourth anniversary of his death in a U.S. drone strike.
In a published Thursday, Iran’s intelligence ministry identified one of the two bombers as a 24-year-old citizen of Tajikistan named Bazirov Israeli and said he received several months of training at an IS camp in Afghanistan’s northeastern province of Badakhshan that borders Tajikistan. It said that following his training, smugglers helped him cross the border into southeastern Iran’s Sistan Baluchistan province near Saravan city.
The intelligence ministry statement marked the first time that Iran publicly identified neighboring Afghanistan as source of the Kerman attack. It also said Tehran considers the pursuit of justice against the perpetrators "beyond the borders of [Iran]" as a "right and definite duty."
However, Iran’s options for retaliatory strikes in Afghanistan are limited by its diplomatic relationship with the Taliban Islamist government of Afghanistan, according to a U.S. researcher who tracking IS activity worldwide. Iran and the Taliban see the IS group and the United States as their common adversaries.
The researcher, Aaron Zelin of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, discussed the challenge posed to Iran by IS in the latest edition of VOA’s Flashpoint Iran podcast.
The following transcript of Zelin’s January 9 interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
What part of the IS group was responsible for the Kerman attack?
The Islamic State Khorasan Province, which is based in Afghanistan, was most likely involved in planning and executing the attack, especially since the previous two IS attacks within Iran in the last year or so also were traced back to ISKP. Plus, many of the arrests that Iran has carried out against IS over the last few years have been related to ISKP networks.
How is it possible to trace an attack like this to ISKP?
It is a combination of things. One is information directly coming from the Iranian government. Two is from IS claims through its media outlets. They provide a certain level of detail. And three is the ethnic background of the attackers. Tajiks have been involved in many ISKP attacks, not only in Iran, but in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the region.
What have you learned about the motives of the IS group in attacking Kerman?
The IS group historically has been extremely anti-Shiite and anti-Iran. Part of this ideology is that they are against the veneration of saints and mausoleums and the like. So it makes a lot of sense that they would target [a ceremony at the burial place of Qassem Soleimani in Kerman], since so many people were there, creating a mass-casualty attack.
And they wanted to send a message of vengeance against Soleimani, who previously had been fighting IS in Iraq and Syria, and all of his supporters.
How was IS able to hit back at Tehran in such a dramatic way with the worst bombings that Iran has seen since its 1979 Islamic Revolution?
Part of it is that over the last few months, Iran has been more focused on Israel, post the October 7 attack by Hamas, and on coordinating the various Iranian proxies in Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, etc. Therefore, it is plausible that Iranian intelligence assets have focused less on the threat of IS, which might have been able to go under the [Iranian] radar. Every few months, Iran usually arrests some type of IS cell trying to conduct an attack locally. The Kerman attack is the third IS attack within Iran in the last 15 months.
What can Iran do going forward against IS beyond just continuing to carry out arrests?