Even as gun battles raged outside their chamber, punctuated by the occasional shot from snipers stationed across the road, Iran’s members of Parliament seemed defiantly cheerful. Some posted selfies, while others waved to television cameras as they waited for rescue. Five Islamic State jihadists, reported to have been dressed in women’s clothes, had stormed the building, taking 18 lives. Up the road, suicide bombers tried to obliterate the mausoleum of the patriarch of Iran’s Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
“This is a minor issue,” House Speaker Ali Larijani proclaimed.
It wasn’t.
Last week’s murderous bombings in Kerman, which claimed nearly a hundred lives, targeted mourners gathered to commemorate the killing of General Qasem Soleimani, assassinated by a United States drone in 2020. The architect of a long-running campaign to push back the influence of the US and its ally, Saudi Arabia, in the region, General Soleimani was also a central figure in the defeat of the Islamic State, and its so-called caliphate.
For years, the Islamic Republic has also been waging a grim war in its heartland against the Islamic State. In 2018, the Islamic State attacked a military parade in Ahvaz, killing at least 29 people. The Islamic State also raided the Shia shrine of Shah Cheragh in Shiraz in both 2022 and 2023.
As counterterrorism expert Chris Zambelis has noted, “The tactical, operational, and logistical elements associated with the attacks are suggestive of the presence of a relatively sophisticated militant network in Iran.”
Islamic State versus Islamic Republic
Even though the world’s largely forgotten the savage conflict waged by the Islamic State after the collapse of the caliphate, the war continues—pitting its jihadists against governments in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria and, as regional security experts remind us, large swathes of Africa. Together with the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, the Islamic State claimed almost a thousand lives in Pakistan last year. Islamic State attacks dropped sharply in 2023, but the group has also engaged in significant territorial expansion, demonstrating it still has resources.
Israel’s attacks on Iranian logistics bases, conducted after the Gaza war broke out, are intended to cut off supplies to Hezbollah’s arsenal in Lebanon. They also weaken the militaries primarily confronting the Islamic State.
This imbalance could have profound consequences for the primal conflict in the Middle East, which drove the rise and growth of the Islamic State.
Fawaz A Gerges, an international relations expert who has studied the birth of the Islamic State, notes that the birth of the jihadist organisation centred around Shia-Sunni and Arab-Persian identity fractures in the Middle East. “At the beginning of hostilities in Syria and Iraq,” he observes, “al-Nusra and ISIS obtained funds, arms, and a religious cover from neighbouring Sunni states, precious social and material capital that proved decisive.”
The first so-called caliph of the Islamic State, Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri—also known by the pseudonym Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—in his early speeches legitimised his group as a guardian of the Sunni interest, Gerges observes.
Although global attention was largely focused on jihadist groups in Iraq, at least five organisations inside Iran were receptive to Baghdadi’s message: the Harakat-e-Ansar-e-Iran-Harakat-e-Islami Sistan, Wilayat Khorasan Iran, West Azerbaijan Islamic Movement, and the Jaish al-Adl Iran.
The Iranian groups had a long history of brutal conflict with Tehran. In 2010, the execution of Abdolmalek Rigi and his brother Abdolhamid Rigi, the leaders of the ethnic-Baloch jihadist group Jundullah, led to suicide bombings in Zahedan, targeting worshippers celebrating the birthday of Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad.
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Tango with the Taliban
Forged by Iraqi prisoners in the horrific conditions of the US-run Camp Buca, the spectacular rise of the territorial caliphate was a response to the chaos left behind by the destruction of Saddam Hussein’s regime. The anarchy tipped the balance of power against the ethnic-Sunni Arab minority in Iraq and opened the way for an Iran-backed Shia chauvinist regime. This, in turn, helped give legitimacy to leaders of the nascent jihadist movement.
“In summer 2003,” Gerges writes, “Zarqawi’s network repeatedly targeted the Shi’a population during its gatherings in pilgrimages, weddings, funerals, markets, and mosques. The Shi’a responded by forming vigilante groups and militias”.
Iran, together with Russia—joined later by a multinational American, European and Arab force—battled the caliphate. But Tehran faced threats to its east, too, as the Islamic State idea spread to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
For a time, from 2013-2014, Iranian intelligence courted the Taliban. Iran, political scientist Parisa Abbasi writes, hoped this would help wield influence in a post-American Afghanistan, and gain anti-Shia formations operating from Afghanistan and thus secure its eastern flank with Pakistan.
The intelligence services of Saudi Arabia, many international security experts claim, responded by backing the Islamic State. The Islamic State, Saudi intelligence decided, would act as a tool for pressure on the Taliban, pushing them to seek patronage from Islamabad alone.
In the meanwhile, pro-Islamic State feelings grew among Iran’s own minorities. The political scientist Jamileh Kadivar, who studied the biographies of 16 convicted Iranian Islamic State operatives, concluded the life stories of the men were “very different from each other”.
The process of their radicalisation included political and economic marginalisation, subjugation, discrimination, as well as ethnic and religious grievances. The so-called Khilafah state’s propaganda on social media played a role, but so did networks of family, friends, mosques and other religious institutions in the provinces of Khuzestan, Sistan and Balochistan.
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The nuclear genie unbottled
The Islamic State’s war in Iran could have far-reaching consequences. Estimates by the US defence department suggest Iran could make enough fissile material for a single implosion-type device within two weeks. There is, of course, a considerable difference between producing enough fissile material and having a deliverable bomb. The US’ own Congressional Research Service notes that “Iran does not yet have a viable nuclear weapon design or a suitable explosive detonation system.”
Among the reasons Iran has not reached for nuclear weapons is that the country does not consider itself as facing an existential threat. Large-scale economic support from China, and the military backing of Russia in Syria, have given Tehran resilience in the face of long-running US sanctions, which were imposed after the Islamic revolution.
Iran, moreover, has honed the skills needed to deter the West from war, using proxies like Yemen’s Houthi insurgents to demonstrate it can target energy and shipping infrastructure across the Persian Gulf region and the Red Sea. And even though Israel has waged a dogged secret war against Iran’s nuclear programme and military commanders, Tehran has deterred its scope by threatening attacks on Israeli embassies and citizens overseas.
An escalation of Islamic State’s war within Iran—coming on the back of months of protests demanding greater cultural and political liberalisation—could, however, change Tehran’s calculus. Should the regime feel its survival is at risk, it would be likely to take the risks involved in seeking security of nuclear weapons, like North Korea or Israel itself. Likely, other states in the Middle East, like Saudi Arabia, would then feel compelled to follow.
Ever since 9/11, the world has lost successive opportunities to avoid that worst-case outcome. As political scientists Dina Esfandiary and Ariane Tabatabai have argued, the war against the caliphate offered an opening to involve Iran in a collective regional security order. After 9/11, it is now well known that Iran even offered to abandon its nuclear programme and help crush al-Qaeda in return for an end to sanctions. The offer was spurned by the administration of former US President George Bush, which sought regime change instead.
The decades since have shown stabilisation of the Middle East is impossible without Iran—the savageries of its regime notwithstanding. Last week’s bombings—and the increasing instability it will engender in Tehran—show the time available to engage in serious dialogue is not infinite.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)