Jan 4, 2024
The Associated Press
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Two bombs exploded, killing at least 95 others, commemorating a prominent Iranian general killed in the United States in a drone strike in 2020, Iranian officials said, as the Middle East remains tense. for the 2020 War between Israel and Hamas. Gaza.
No one promptly claimed responsibility for what appeared to be the deadliest militant attack on Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iran’s leaders have vowed to punish those responsible for the blasts, which injured at least 211 people.
The explosions came minutes after Wednesday and rocked the city of Kerman, about 800 kilometers southeast of the capital, Tehran. The second explosion sent shrapnel flying into a screaming crowd fleeing the first blast.
The previous death toll of 103 was revised down after the government learned that some names had been repeated on a casualty list, Iranian Health Minister Bahram Einollahi told state television. However, as many of the injured are in critical condition, the death toll may rise.
The gathering marked the fourth anniversary of the killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Revolutionary Guard’s elite Quds Force, in a U.S. drone strike in Iraq. The explosions occurred near his grave site as long lines of people gathered for the event.
Iranian state television and officials called the attacks bombings, promptly giving clear details of what happened. The attacks come a day after a deputy leader of the Palestinian militant organization Hamas was killed in a suspected Israeli attack in Beirut.
The first bomb exploded at around 3:00 p. m. On Wednesday and the second explosion exploded about 20 minutes later, Iranian Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi told state television. He said the second blast killed and injured the largest number of people.
Images and videos shared on social media appear to match the accounts of officials, who said the first explosion occurred about 765 meters from Soleimani’s grave at the Kerman Martyrs’ Cemetery, near a parking lot. The crowd then rushed west down Shohada Street, where the moment occurred. The explosion occurred approximately 1 km from the tomb.
A delayed second explosion is often used by militants to inflict more casualties by targeting emergency personnel responding to an attack.
Iranian state television and the official IRNA news firm quoted emergency officials as saying the death toll. Officials said Thursday would be a day of national mourning.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said the attackers would face “a severe response,” though he did not name any suspects imaginable. Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi added: “Undoubtedly, the perpetrators and leaders of this cowardly act will soon be known and punished. “. »
Iran has many enemies who can simply be this attack, adding exile groups, militant organizations, and state actors.
While Israel has carried out attacks in Iran because of its nuclear program, it has carried out targeted assassinations, not bombings with many casualties. A U. S. State Department spokesman, Matthew Miller, said U. S. officials had “no reason” to believe Israel was concerned about Wednesday’s attack on Iran. This was echoed by National Security Council spokesman John Kirthrough at the White House, who said that “our thoughts are with all those who suffer through no fault of their own and their families. “
Sunni extremist groups, including the Islamic State group, have carried out large-scale attacks abroad that have killed civilians in Shiite-majority Iran, but not in the nonviolent Kerman region.
Iran has also been the scene of mass protests in recent years, including the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in 2022. The country has also been the target of attacks by exile teams dating back to the unrest surrounding the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Iran itself has been arming militant teams for decades, adding Hamas, the Lebanese Shiite defense force Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthi rebels. As Israel wages its devastating war in Gaza following the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks that killed 1,200 people, Hezbollah and the Houthis introduced attacks on Israel that they said came here on behalf of the Palestinians.
Israel is suspected of launching Tuesday’s attack that killed a deputy Hamas leader in Beirut, but the attack limited casualties in a densely populated community in the Lebanese capital. Last week, a suspected Israeli strike killed a Revolutionary Guard commander in Syria.
A Houthi spokesman, Mohammed Abdel-Salam, tried to link the bombings to “Iran’s attacks on resistance forces in Palestine and Lebanon,” though he did not blame anyone in particular for the attack. Some Iranian officials have also hinted at Israeli and U. S. involvement without offering evidence, which is not unusual after militant attacks.
In Beyrouth, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah called those who died in the attacks “martyrs who died on the same path, the same cause and the same war as those led” by Soleimani.
The government of neighboring Iraq expressed condolences to the victims, and the European Union issued a statement offering “its solidarity with the Iranian people.” Even Saudi Arabia, a longtime regional rival which reached a détente with Iran last year, offered its sympathies.
Soleimani was the architect of the activities of Iran’s regional army and is hailed as a national icon among supporters of Iran’s theocracy. He also helped protect Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government after the 2011 Arab Spring protests against him escalated into a civil and then regional war. which is still raging today.
Soleimani had been relatively unknown in Iran until the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. His popularity and mystique grew after American officials called for his killing over his help in arming militants with penetrating roadside bombs that killed and maimed U.S. troops.
A decade and a half later, Soleimani had become Iran’s most recognizable battlefield commander. He ignored calls to enter politics but grew as powerful, if not more so, than its civilian leadership.
Ultimately, a drone strike launched by the Trump administration killed the general, part of escalating incidents that followed America’s 2018 unilateral withdrawal from Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers.
Soleimani’s death has already sparked giant processions. At his funeral in 2020, a stampede broke out in Kerman and at least 56 other people were killed and more than two hundred injured as thousands of people thronged the procession.
Until Wednesday, the deadliest attack suffered by Iran since the revolution: the truck bombing of the Islamic Republican Party’s headquarters in Tehran in 1981. The attack killed at least 72 people, including the party leader, 4 government ministers, 8 deputy ministers and 23 parliamentarians.
In 1978, just before the revolution, an arson attack at the Rex Cinema in Abadan killed scores of people.
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