'The Iranian people are moving forward, and today’s fumbling with firecrackers will not affect the will-power of the people… the terrorists are too small to affect the will of the Iranian people and the authorities.’ There is something to be said for this imperious fly-whisk response, delivered by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, in reaction to yesterday’s double-suicide attack on Tehran, which cost at least 12 innocents their lives and caused dozens of injuries. Whatever therapeutic good it may do for the survivors of attacks on our own soil, there is for the IS barbarians and their would-be emulators a dangerous validation in our flags at half mast, our interrupted sporting programmes, and our wall-to-wall media coverage. Rather than congratulate ourselves on staying calm and carrying on, why don’t we just stay calm and carry on? There won’t be any such rigmarole in Tehran over the next few days.
Iran has been sending men, money and proxies in order to kill Sunni supremacists in Iraq and Syria, and is engaged more broadly against Sunni foes in Afghanistan and Yemen. Some blowback was probably inevitable. IS had advertised their intention to launch a big attack on their Iranian Shia enemies, not only by making several foiled attempts since 2015, but also, this March, bringing out a video (not one of IS’s more polished efforts) in which Khamenei was personally threatened by a man speaking Persian in a Baluch accent. Most Sunnis in Iran are Baluch, Kurdish or Turkmen.
For all the firecracker talk, some hard questions are going to be asked of the country’s security services, whose prestige has gone down several notches with this penetration of two iconic sites. How did a total of six attackers manage to get into the parliament building, symbol of the country’s semi-democratic workings, and also (concurrently) into the mausoleum of the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, where they were able to generate much mayhem before dying themselves?
Wednesday’s attack was the first major terrorist action on Iranian soil by IS. The cod caliphate is defined above all by its hatred of the Shias and its conviction that they need to be killed. There is no such reciprocal arrangement among the Shias. Even at its most extreme, Shia doctrine does not prescribe death for Sunnis tout court. Nine percent of Iran’s population is Sunni, and while being a Sunni Iranian may be uncomfortable – there is discrimination – it is not life-threatening. The discriminatory protection that Iran affords to its Sunnis is similar to the conditions it has created for its Jewish population, which, at around 9,000, is the biggest in the Middle East outside Israel. The IS video criticised Iran for being too kind to its Jews.
A lot has happened politically since the last terrorist attack in Tehran – the assassination of a nuclear scientist, by Israel, it is assumed, in 2012. The immoderate President Ahmadinejad has given way to the moderate Hassan Rouhani, and Iran has signed away its nuclear programme for a generation in return for the lifting of sanctions. Back in 2015, when the nuclear deal was being negotiated, a chorus of naysayers predicted that Iran would renege on its side of the deal. Now even Rex Tillerson concedes that the Iranians have kept their word.
All the while, Iran’s involvement in the Syrian imbroglio has grown from coy expressions of support for Assad’s regime, to logistics and advice, to boots on the ground, hubris, and a big stake in the endgame. Hizbollah, now entrenched in the north of the country, will be hard to dislodge even after peace eventually comes. Not everyone in the Rouhani camp approves of Iran’s support for a secular tyrant in Damascus, but Syria is essential to what Khamenei regards as the country’s strategic depth.
As Iran is starting to recognise, however, perhaps the biggest recent game-changer has come in Washington DC, where Obama, who believed that Iran and Saudi Arabia should share influence, has been replaced by a Saudi apologist. Donald Trump’s message of condolence yesterday was barbed; while grieving for ‘the innocent victims of the terrorist attacks,’ it ran, ‘we underscore that states that sponsor terrorism risk falling victim to the evil they promote.’ We know what Trump’s view of Iran is, because he elucidated it last month, lumping Iran and IS together as ‘evil’.
The Ottomans had a pretty shrewd idea of what divided a Catholic and a Huguenot; why can’t the leader of the free world get his head around the difference between a death-cult and a serious state that pursues its interests –sometimes using violence – but is also amenable to negotiation and diplomatic amenities? Trump delivered himself of this gem, furthermore, while in Riyadh, in the bosom of the Wahhabi establishment that bears much responsibility for the spread of the jihadi ideology, and whose treatment of women and minorities make the mullahs of Iran look like Elon Musk.
Iran’s revolutionary Guard has said that it was ‘significant’ that the attack on Tehran came so close on the heels of the Trump/Saudi love-in, a pro-forma insinuation that does, however, express how linked foreign conflict and domestic vulnerability seem to have become. The morning after the attack there is a sense, however blithely the Iranian authorities shrug it off, that Mosul and Aleppo have come to Tehran.
Christopher de Bellaigue is the author of the Islamic Enlightenment