It is still unclear who is responsible for the double bombing of a crowd in the south-eastern Iranian city of Kerman, but whoever is behind the outrage is clearly willing to risk igniting a regional war.
In Washington, officials have been pointing towards the possible role of Islamic State or some affiliated Sunni extremist group, and away from the partnership of Israel and the Iranian rebel group, the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MeK), who have reportedly been behind previous attacks deep inside Iran.
Those earlier attacks have mostly been targeted assassinations, often on scientists, or acts of sabotage. Wednesday’s bombing in Kerman does not fit the pattern, US and UK officials argue. It was aimed at mourners marking the fourth anniversary of the US drone killing of Qassem Suleimani, a commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and arch-foe of Israel and US – but the attack was a horrifically blunt instrument, leaving scores of civilians among the dead, so it would be a remarkable departure for MeK and the Mossad.
Outwardly at least, Iran’s leadership displayed no doubts over the perpetrators on Wednesday. The president, Ebrahim Raisi, flatly accused Israel, warning that it would pay “a regrettable price”. It will be impossible for the Tehran regime not to respond in some manner for the worst terrorist attack since the founding of Iran, but Raisi provided some wriggle room, and notably did not commit to immediate act of revenge, but rather one “at the right time and place”.
The conventional wisdom in Washington and Tel Aviv has been that Iran did not want a conflict with Israel and its western backers – at least not now. Its regional partners, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Houthi forces in Yemen, caused pain to Israel in solidarity with the suffering in Gaza, but Hezbollah’s cross-border rocket salvoes and the Houthi harassment of shipping have been calibrated, aimed below the threshold required to ignite an all-out regional war.
However, calibration is a delicate matter, especially when performed with high explosives. The risk of miscalculation started high and has kept rising.
Most of the drones and missiles launched by the Houthis at Red Sea shipping have been intercepted in recent days by a US-led taskforce. Miraculously, there have been no deaths on the targeted vessels. That run of luck may not continue, and there is already a school of opinion in the Pentagon that the Houthis are a threat to free navigation that has been allowed to fester too long.
In the early hours of New Year’s Eve, US helicopters sank three Houthi boats involved in a shipping attack, killing their crews. Direct strikes on missile sites and command centres in Yemen, previously avoided for fear of derailing the peace process there, are among the military options on the table. On Wednesday, the US and 11 of its global allies issued a warning to the Houthis that they would “bear the responsibility of the consequences” of further attacks on shipping.
“I don’t anticipate there will be another warning,” a senior administration official said. “The statement speaks for itself.”
Meanwhile, it is also impossible to know how the risk-benefit calculations in Tehran are being affected by the escalating course of events since the 7 October Hamas attack on civilians in southern Israel.
On 25 December a senior figure in the Revolutionary Guards was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Damascus, and then on Tuesday, a Hamas deputy political leader, Saleh al-Arouri, was killed in an apparent Israeli strike on Beirut. The Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, called Arouri’s assassination a “flagrant Israeli aggression on Beirut’s Dahiyeh”, referring to the southern suburb that his organisation’s stronghold, making clear he saw it as an attack on Hezbollah and Lebanon.
The Lebanese embassy in Washington assured the Biden administration that the killing would not trigger mass Hezbollah reprisals that could cause the simmering exchanges along the “blue line” disputed border between Israel and Lebanon to boil over, diplomats in Washington said. But the Lebanese government has not always been prescient in its assessments of Hezbollah intentions.
Another highly volatile element in the combustible mess is Israeli politics. Since 7 October, Israelis on the northern border are no longer prepared to tolerate an enemy presence on the other side of the fence. The US has now intervened twice, in the immediate wake of the Hamas attack in October and then again around Christmas, to head off an Israeli pre-emptive attack on Hezbollah and its estimated arsenal of more than 120,000 rockets.
It is clear, however, that when it comes to Gaza or Lebanon, domestic political concerns will trump US pressure on prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“Netanyahu is not listening as much as everyone hoped,” a European diplomat said. “For Netanyahu, the war is likely an opportunity to rectify and compensate for 7 October, but there are domestic politics in this calculation too.”
The mantra from Israeli government ministers however remains the same: if the international community does not do something about the Hezbollah presence on the border, Israel will take matters into its own hands.
The US and France have been in recent months looking at a possible diplomatic fix involving foreign forces and the Lebanese army acting as a buffer. Another option is to bolster the currently weak mandate of the UN force deployed along the blue line. Any hope of such a peaceful resolution look all the more forlorn, however, after the Arouri assassination and now the atrocity in Kerman.
• This article was amended on 4 January 2023 to remove a reference to the Mujahedin-e-Khalq group as “secular”.
