OAN's Brooke Mallory
5:44 PM – Thursday, January 4, 2024
In one of the deadliest terrorist attacks to hit Iran in decades, Wednesday's suicide bomber targeted a memorial service for an Iranian commander killed in a 2020 U.S. drone strike.
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The attack took place as tensions remain throughout the Middle East. The Islamic State group, ISIS, claimed responsibility for Thursday's attack.
Experts monitoring the organization attested to the fact that this message was shared online by jihadists. These people likely wanted to take advantage of the instability in the region due to the ongoing conflict between Hamas and Israel in the Gaza Strip.
At least 84 people were killed and 284 injured in Wednesday's attack in Kerman.
It was aimed at a memorial service for Revolutionary Guards commander Qassem Soleimani, who is revered as a national hero by the country's theocrats and considered by the U.S. military to be a dangerous enemy who helped terrorists kill American soldiers in Iraq. It was something.
The road where one bomb exploded on Wednesday appeared to have patches of missing asphalt, indicating the device had been loaded with shrapnel to maximize its lethality. The clotted blood of the wounded man remained elsewhere.
“The moment I turned around to say to my husband's sister, 'Let's go to the square,' the bomb exploded,” Mahdi Sazmand, 38, said from her hospital bed. She said, “And if she had been ten paces, she would have been right on top of the bomb.''
According to the Islamic State group, the two attackers were Omar al-Mowahed and Seif Allah al-Mujahed. The report further stated that the men used explosive vests to carry out the attack. In addition, in the debate he scorned Shiites, whom the Islamic State considers heretics.
The indictment, unlike previous statements, does not say which local branch of the militants carried out the attack. However, Aaron Y. Zelin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said that while recent claims came from accounts directly associated with the group, some earlier claims did not identify regional divisions. There were some things that weren't there.
Zelin said the group likely wanted Iran to attack Israel and escalate the war with Hamas into a regional crisis that the Islamic State could exploit.
“This falls under the modus operandi of IS, especially since it was an attack that caused such a large number of casualties,” Zerin said. “They're like the Joker. They want to see the world burn. They don't care how it happens as long as it benefits them.”
Islamic State claims that at least 18 people were killed and more than 50 injured in June 2017 attacks on the parliament building and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's mausoleum in Tehran.
In addition, the organization reported two additional attacks.
The terrorist organization declared itself a caliphate in 2014 and previously controlled large parts of both Iraq and Syria, but was eventually driven back by U.S.-led forces.
Over the next few years, they launched major attacks, but the situation was chaotic. For example, the Islamic State is believed to have become more powerful in neighboring Afghanistan after the Taliban overthrew the Western-backed Afghan government in 2021.
The claims came at the same time as radicals separately called on their followers around the world to target Christians and Jews in revenge for the massacres in the Gaza Strip. The group also attacked Palestinian factions allied with Iran, claiming that the Iranian government was only exploiting the situation to project an image of support for the Palestinian people.
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