On Wednesday morning, assailants entered the Iranian Parliament building and the Mausoleum of Ayatollah Khomeini – founder of the Islamic Republic – armed with assault rifles and explosive vests. Iranian authorities report that both sites have now been retaken and the attackers killed, but the assault has left at least 12 dead and 40 wounded in the worst terrorist attack in Tehran since the turbulent times of Iran’s 1979 Revolution. ISIS’ Amaq news agency quickly claimed responsibility for the attack and circulated a 24-second video of the parliament siege.
In response to the attack, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif told reports that the terrorist incident will “strengthen the resolve of the Iranian nation against terrorism,” while Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani downplayed the assault as “not a major issue.” Meanwhile, some prominent Iranian political figures, including officials from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), have accused the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and other rivals of complicity in the attacks.
The Cipher Brief’s Fritz Lodge spoke with Alex Vatanka, a Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute, about what these attacks mean for the ISIS threat in Iran, regional dynamics between Iran and its neighbors, and U.S. Middle East policy.
The Cipher Brief: How rare is this kind of attack in Iran, and from what you’ve seen, how organized and sophisticated were the attackers?
Alex Vatanka: What happened Wednesday is a major surprise to the citizens of Tehran. I was talking to folks in Tehran and people are horrified that something like this could happen in the capital to such famous sites – the Parliament and the Mausoleum of the late founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini – which are very well defended.
You really have to go back to the early 1980s to come up with examples of such attacks happening in the Iranian capital. Terrorist attacks of this nature do happen occasionally in Iran, but in far-flung places like the border with Pakistan, the province of Baluchistan, or in Iranian Kurdistan.
This has captured people’s attention in Iran, but the question now is what they will do about it. One of the slogans of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has been that ‘we fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria so we don’t have to fight them here,’ but now ISIS has apparently found a way of penetrating this IRGC wall. The IRGC and Iranian intelligence services have been talking for years about how they have prevented ISIS attacks on the homeland and ISIS recruitment, and then this happens.
This is potentially a turning point for Iran. It provides an opportunity for Iranians to step back and draw some lessons from this that we might not expect them to. We expect them to simply continue on the same path, provide more tough language and talk about how all of this is going to be avenged. But they could also begin to ask themselves what caused this. What would make ISIS want to come to Iran and hit the parliament? Why target the mausoleum of the founding father of the Islamic Republic? If you ask those questions, the logical conclusion is that Iran is in Iraq, it is in Syria, and it is openly fighting ISIS.
When you look at that context, this attack is a reaction to what Iran is doing outside of its borders in the Arab world. Once you get yourself into the position where you are a player – or even a kingmaker – in all these conflicts, you will have a long list of adversaries who are looking to hurt you. And, since the Arab world will likely remain unstable for decades to come, the question for ordinary Iranians is how far should Iran go?
This could be a moment for soul-searching amongst Iranian politicians and officials. They will never say it publicly because that would be tantamount to admitting defeat but this attack will raise questions. There is no doubt that this event will start a debate within Iran about the extent to which they are willing to pursue this aggressive foreign policy, or what they call the doctrine of “forward defense.”
TCB: What about the dynamics between Iran’s Shi’a majority and Sunni minority? Do you think that this attack is proof that ISIS recruiting efforts in Iran – for instance, the recruiting video in Farsi released in March – have been somewhat successful within the Sunni population? Should we anticipate more attacks like this?
Vatanka: I wouldn’t pay too much attention to that yet. In the short term, the evidence doesn’t point to any successful mobilization by ISIS within Iran’s very significant Sunni minority – we’re talking somewhere around eight million people. At the most, ISIS has recruited a few hundred, and that’s no more than the group has recruited in western European countries.
Overall, I would say that the Sunnis of Iran have shunned ISIS’ message. There is no evidence to suggest that ISIS will find fertile ground there. That’s not to say that Sunnis do not have a list of their own grievances against the central government in Tehran, they do, and we’ve seen some Sunni radical jihadist elements operate in Iran over the last two decades or so, but we’re talking about small groups of people. Sunni militancy in Iran has historically not been of a very sectarian nature, it’s actually more likely to be focused on leftist, nationalist ideologies. I don’t think ISIS will turn this equation around, it is simply not an attractive option for Iranian Sunnis, and it is also widely perceived to be on the decline.
Iran needs to worry less about how many Iranian Sunnis will join ISIS and more about the bigger picture of Iran’s role fueling sectarianism in the region. This is a fire that is already burning around Iran’s borders, but it has the potential to get more intense and have more of an impact inside Iran itself.
TCB: Have a significant number of Iranians traveled to Iraq or Syria to fight with ISIS?
Vatanka: There have been a number of reports but they provide little evidence or sources. You will see some ISIS videos where there are Farsi speakers, but they do not tend to come from Tehran. You can hear from the dialect that they come from the border regions of Iran. Overall, there is very little evidence of ISIS being able to recruit significant numbers of Iranian Sunnis.
TCB: In response to the attacks, Iranian news agencies and some politicians have suggested that Saudi Arabia, the U.S., and a number of other adversaries may have been involved in these attacks. What do you think is behind these accusations, and does the recent diplomatic crisis between Qatar and other major Arab powers play a role?
Vatanka: The accusations against Saudi Arabia are a knee-jerk reaction. This is a tit-for-tat relationship. If an attack happens in Saudi Arabia, they will blame Iran, and as we see now, the same is true from the Iranian side. For now, I would just put this down as part of the geopolitical rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, it is simply too early to say what happened exactly and who may have had a role.
The timing on Qatar is compelling, but we have to be careful about falling into the trap of putting too much emphasis on any connection between these events. The fact is that ISIS seems to be on its last legs right now, and Iran is a key player in the fight against ISIS. For the last few years, ISIS might not have wanted to open up a front against Iran, but it looks like they have decided that now is the time to do it. We’ve seen a change in ISIS’ approach to Iran for months now – certainly we’ve seen many more attempts by ISIS to bombard the Iranian population with propaganda. That tells me that this attack was in the pipeline way before we got to the point of the Qatari-Saudi split, or even President Trump’s recent visit to Saudi Arabia.
TCB: Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was recently re-elected against strong opposition from more hardline conservative candidates. How do you think this attack will affect Iranian politics, and the position of Rouhani in particular?
Vatanka: This will not be good news for Rouhani, because when something like this happens, it encourages the IRGC to trumpet its role as the guardian of the nation. They will not say, ‘we failed in preventing this,’ they will say, ‘if we weren’t here you would have ten of these a week.’
They will try to turn this into a security/military issue, they will argue for a more assertive and aggressive foreign policy that stands up to Saudi Arabia, stands up to Iran’s other foreign rivals, and pushes the fight further outside of Iran’s border.
This is how the IRGC will spin the attack. Whether Rouhani has the political capital to push back and perhaps rethink some aspects of Iranian foreign policy remains to be seen. Some people in Rouhani’s camp are already pointing out that Iranian policy in the Arab world is a potentially generational commitment and asking whether Iran wants to be in Syria or Yemen in ten, twenty, thirty years’ time. These are all legitimate questions that are being asked, but in the heat of the moment right now, the IRGC will say no, that these policies must continue or even accelerate.
