Islamic State yesterday claimed responsibility for a deadly double attack in Tehran in which gunmen stormed the national parliament and a shrine to the late Ayatollah Khomeini.
Security guards, members of the Revolutionary Guard and a gardener at the shrine were among 12 people killed. At least 42 people were injured, according to Pirhossein Kolivand, Iran’s head of emergency planning.
All of the assailants, some dressed in the flowing black chador robes of Iranian women, were shot dead or blew themselves up.
President Trump issued a statement offering his condolences, but added: “We underscore that states that sponsor terrorism risk falling victim to the evil they promote.”
The gunmen who attacked parliament were able to enter the main administrative building, roaming the corridors and shooting people at random. Images released later showed workers and children — probably taken into the office by parents that day because of the Ramadan and summer holiday season — escaping through open windows and being lowered to the ground.
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Isis released a video online during the assault showing the body of one of the victims, with one of the attackers saying in Arabic: “Do you think we will leave? We will remain, God willing.”
“We will remain” is a common Isis slogan; one that has taken on a new urgency as the group loses ground in Iraq and Syria to a combination of US-backed groups, Iraqi and Syrian regime forces and Iranian-backed militias. However, the Revolutionary Guard, the Iranian regime’s paramilitary force, immediately accused Saudi Arabia, its regional foe, of being behind the attack.
Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi deputy crown prince, claimed last month that Iran was trying to take over the Middle East and threatened to take direct action. “We will not wait until the battle is in Saudi Arabia but we will work so the battle is there in Iran,” he said. That was followed by a summit in Riyadh attended by President Trump in which Sunni Muslim nations were urged to tackle “Iran-backed terrorism”.
The Revolutionary Guard promised retaliation for the Tehran attacks, saying it would “never allow the blood of innocents to be spilt without revenge.”
The co-ordinated attacks began mid-morning. Four militants stormed into the heavily protected parliament complex, killing four guards and injuring 25 other people immediately. A fifth person died later in hospital. Initial reports suggested that some of the attackers were dressed in chadors, posing as female visitors to parliament until they were challenged — at which point they opened fire.
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They fought their way into the building, taking hostages and killing another two members of the Revolutionary Guard and three others. One of the attackers detonated a suicide vest.
It took several hours before police and the Guard were able to overpower and kill them. At least two other militants attacked the mausoleum of Ayatollah Khomeini, the firebrand anti-western cleric brought to power by the 1979 revolution, and who died in 1989. One of the attackers — a woman, according to Fars — detonated a suicide vest.
Reza Seifollahi, an official in the country’s Supreme National Security Council, said the perpetrators were Iranian nationals. The interior ministry say six gunmen were killed.
The attack on crowds at the shrine suggested a sectarian element to the action, analysts said. Isis promotes Sunni extremism, regarding Shia Muslims, the majority in Iran, as apostates.
Al-Qaeda has rarely, if ever, carried out an attack against Iran; something attributed by observers to the fact that many of its members fled to the country from neighbouring Afghanistan in 2001, and remained there either at semi-liberty or under house arrest.
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The last big terrorist incident in Iran was a bomb attack on a mosque in Balochistan, in the southeast of the country, in 2010. It was carried out by Jundallah, a breakaway radical Sunni group.
There have been no previous big attacks on Iran by Isis, which broke off from al-Qaeda in 2013 after a dispute over leadership of the group’s faction in the Syrian conflict. However, in March the jihadists issued a Persian-language video saying it was time to conquer the country and bring it within the Sunni fold.
The speakers had a Balochi accent, suggesting they came from Iran’s substantial, often repressed Sunni minority. If the Arabic spoken in yesterday’s video suggests infiltration from nearby Arab states it will prompt an urgent inquiry into the breach of security.
