A Rare Islamic State Attack in Iran
A Rare Islamic State Attack in Iran
The Shah Cheragh shrine in the city of Shiraz in southern Iran, containing the tomb of Ahmed bin Musa, the brother of the eighth Shi’i Imam, Ali bin Musa al-Reza (r. 799-818), was attacked on 26 October by a gunman, who killed at least fifteen people and wounded about forty. The Islamic State (IS) quickly claimed the attack and the evidence of IS’s responsibility is decisive. It has been an important political fact in the aftermath, however, that so many Iranians, within the country and in the diaspora, believe the Islamic Republic is responsible for this atrocity as a means of trying to demoralise the ongoing anti-regime protest movement and/or give itself a pretext for a November 2019-style lethal crackdown—and there is some evidence they are not completely wrong.
THE ISLAMIC STATE’S ATTACK
Within hours of the attack on the shrine in Shiraz, IS had claimed the attack through its Amaq News Agency in a statement that reiterated its claim to responsibility for another attack, the 22 September 2018 assault against the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) parade in the city of Ahvaz, which killed twenty-five people.
The only other IS attack there has been in Iran was on 7 June 2017, when two IS suicide bombers blew themselves up at the mausoleum of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic Revolution in 1978-79 and founder of the Islamic Republic that followed, and gunmen shot up the nearby Majles (parliament). The twin attacks killed at least twelve people and wounded forty-two.
The aftermath of the 2018 Ahvaz attack was quite similar to what happened after the Shah Cheragh attack, in terms of the doubt that IS was really responsible, and the waters were muddied further when the separatist Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz (ASMLA) initially took responsibility, only to repudiate the claim soon after. The reality of what had happened was not complicated, however.
Following the exact template developed at the height of the foreign attacks campaign, IS waited until its operatives—whether suicide bombers or (as in the Ahvaz case) inghimasiyeen (kamikaze-style attackers)—were dead, since with rare exceptions IS does not acknowledge its operatives who get arrested, and then released the video of the attackers giving their bay’a (oath of allegiance) to the “caliph”, demonstrating conclusively that the attackers were IS’s agents: as well as making clear a terrorist’s allegiance, the bay’a videos are proof of practical prior contact between the attacker and IS Centre, and IS’s blessing for an attack.
In many cases, the IS guides—the IS media and intelligence officials who solicit and process the bay’a videos—will provide other kinds of support, which can include everything from ideological persuasion to waverers that God really wants them to go ahead with the attack, money and weapons for those who lack them (a classic case is the IS cell in Hyderabad, India, rolled up in June 2016), and step-by-step instructions as an operative carries out their attack. The true “lone wolf”—a dubious category in general—is very rare when it comes to IS.
Despite the usual conspiratorial rhetoric from Iran’s regime blaming the Ahvaz attack on America operating through her “mercenary countries” (Gulf states)—it is an article of faith within Iran’s leadership and its imperial legions across the Middle East that IS “takfiris” are mere puppets of the Americans and Jews—the actual Iranian response was telling: a series of missile launches against IS targets in eastern Syria, albeit rather close to U.S. bases.
The day after the Shah Cheragh attack, on 27 October, IS released the 362nd edition of Al-Naba, its weekly newsletter, which had the Shiraz atrocity on the front page. Al-Naba revelled in an attack on the “Magians” (Zoroastrians) inside one of their “marqad shirki” (idolatrous/polytheistic shrines/temples). This rampage by “a lone mujahid from the caliphate soldiers” was said to have caused sixty casualties—twenty dead and forty wounded (which is about right)—and it was framed as “revenge” for “the Companions” (Al-Sahaba) of the Prophet Muhammad, those who by the Tradition had joined Muhammad’s cause while he was alive. In IS’s view, the Muslim (i.e., Sunni) duty to take this “revenge” on the “rejectors” (rafida) of the first caliphs (i.e., Shi’is) continues “generation after generation”. As Al-Naba noted, this had been the framing in the Amaq statement released right after the murders in Shiraz. Al-Naba gloated about the apparent confusion of the Iranian authorities after the attack—at first “talking about ‘three attackers’,” before “the narrative began to change and gradually shrink!”—and concluded by promising more attacks were to come.
On 29 October, once IS was sure their operative was dead—as mentioned, the situation was slightly confusing before that, since the clerical regime was claiming it had arrested two people related to the attack and was seeking a third—IS released a picture of the attacker, who was named as “Abu Aisha al-Umari”:
There was surveillance video of the shooter during the Shah Cheragh attack and it is quite clearly Abu Aisha. The use of “Aisha” is meant to continue the theme of revenge for the Sahaba: it is the name of the Prophet Muhammad’s youngest wife,1 who was, according to Tradition, involved in a rebellion against the then-Caliph, Ali, the first Imam of Twelver Shi’ism.2 The editorial in Al-Naba 363 continued this theme of the “religious-historical enmity” (adawa deeniya tarikhiya) against the Shi’is, referring to “the shirk of the Rafida and their war against Islam and defamation of its Imams, such as Abu Bakr and Umar and the rest of the Companions”.
IS simultaneously released a bay’a video from Abu Aisha:
In evidentiary terms about the Shah Cheragh attack, this is case closed.
This is not to say there are no interesting outstanding questions. For instance: What nationality was Abu Aisha? If the shooter was foreign, how did he get into Iran? There is a claim from Iranian state media that Abu Aisha’s real name is Hamid Badakhshan, potentially meaning he is from the province of that name in north-east Afghanistan. Was this attack organised from Afghanistan?
The Islamic State has been well-described as “a monolithic, entirely centralized, supranational organization; it does not have franchises, affiliates, or allies, only provinces of a supranational Empire, and its leadership controls all personnel, funding, and decision-making in every province”.3 As such, it would hardly be surprising if IS’s “Khorasan Province” or ISKP, was involved in an attack that we know from the bay’a video was directed from the Centre, especially since ISKP has gone from strength to strength since President Biden needlessly handed Afghanistan to Pakistan’s Taliban-Qaeda forces in 2021 and Western intelligence is essentially blind in the country now. An IS external attack using its ISKP node would be an important analytical data point.
And there is a question, however tentative, about what the Islamic Republic did (and did not) do during this attack.
A REGIME BUILT ON DECEPTION WONDERS WHY NOBODY BELIEVES IT
Some were indignant on behalf of the Islamic Republic about the “conspiracy theories” in the aftermath of the Shah Cheragh attack, but this seems misplaced: a regime that used deception to help itself into power and has used it ever since to sustain itself cannot really complain when people doubt its truthfulness.
The Islamic revolutionaries (and their Communist allies) fed grossly fabricated material to Amnesty International for the production of a 1976 report that did serious damage to the Shah’s government, which stood accused of “unprecedented” human rights violations—this at the exact moment of the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields in Cambodia. During the Revolution in 1978, journalistic questions had to be submitted on paper to Khomeini in Paris, rather than asked at a news conference, and they were then answered by aides like Abolhassan Banisadr, who carefully concealed the Imam’s true beliefs.4 (One should not give Banisadr too much credit: he was telling the Western press what it wanted to hear. Khomeini’s publicly available book, Islamic Government, explained exactly what he intended, but it only gained even minimal attention once it was all over.)
In August 1978, Khomeinists set fire to the Rex Cinema in Abadan, murdering 400 people, the worst act of terrorism to that point since the Second World War, and blamed it on the Shah.5 In the febrile atmosphere of that summer, the revolutionaries were widely believed—and still to come was the provocation in Jaleh Square,6 and Khomeini’s “moon trick”.
Since the Khomeinists came to power, they have been caught trying to develop nuclear weapons and to this day they shelter Al-Qaeda’s leadership, including Muhammad Saladin Zaydan (Sayf al-Adel), who might well be the next Al-Qaeda leader after Ayman al-Zawahiri’s demise in July. Zaydan was co-opted by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) twenty years ago. Strangely, an Al-Qaeda faction in Africa, Ansaru, recently admitted that Zaydan was “not under house arrest in Iran”, as has been so often claimed.
Though Iran uses IS as a foil to spread its influence—the Islamic Republic can look like the lesser evil, especially to Shi’is, when set against the Islamic State—IS’s reach and power cannot be understood without the assistance it has had from Iran’s clerical regime and Tehran’s dependency, Bashar al-Asad’s regime in Syria.7
Iran worked through Zaydan to assist the IS founder, Ahmad al-Khalayleh, the infamous Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in carrying out the terrorist attacks in Morocco and Saudi Arabia in the spring of 2003,8 for example, and this was after the IRGC had already given direct assistance to Zarqawi in setting himself up in Iraq a year before the invasion.9 Throughout the Iraq war in the 2000s, the Asad regime supported IS against the Americans and the elected Iraqi government; it is naïve to think the IRGC was not involved in this. And over the past decade, when Asad faced a domestic rebellion, Iran was fully complicit—indeed, in a command role10—as Asad empowered and manipulated the IS jihadists to discredit and destroy the opposition.
With this as the backdrop, when the Shah Cheragh shrine was attacked on the fortieth day of mourning after the murder of Mahsa Amini (and the 103rd anniversary of the last Shah’s birth), amid an intense ongoing protest movement, it was not that much of a stretch to believe the regime was complicit in such a cynical action. The regime then put out blatant disinformation, blaming the protesters for the attack and trying to implicate Azerbaijan, among other things. This attempt to use the attack to depict peaceful protesters as terrorists directed from outside—exactly as Asad had—to justify a violent crackdown only furthered the suspicions that the regime had some role in bringing about the attack.
As it happens, these suspicions might not be entirely wrong. While it is clear that IS carried out the Shah Cheragh attack, Iran International reported earlier today that hacked documents from the Iranian state channel, Fars News Agency, suggest the IRGC had some prior knowledge of the attack and had even arrested some members of the network behind the attack weeks before it happened. Yet, the security forces did not prevent the atrocity. There is a need to be cautious: the channel is clearly an opposition one and without examining the documents, one cannot say for certain what, if anything, they show—it could be that they expose incompetence, rather than malice, for instance.
Whatever the truth of Shah Cheragh, it should be noted that it was Iran International that first reported what few now doubt: the fire at Evin prison in October was not (or not just) a prison riot, but was at the least enabled by the Islamic Republic to rid itself of troublesome opponents.
The bottom line is that a regime with this record, from the Rex Cinema to the present day, does not deserve the benefit of the doubt: on all matters, the Islamic Republic should be assumed guilty until it can prove otherwise.
REFERENCES
By Tradition, Aisha was nine-years-old when Muhammad, in his fifties at the time, consummated the marriage. This part of the Tradition is why some Islamists advocate for the age of consent and marriage to be nine for girls. The Islamists who seized Iran in 1979 initially inclined in this direction, but ultimately backed off and settled on thirteen.
The entire period of the four Rashidun Caliphs (632-61) that supposedly follows Muhammad and ends with Imam Ali’s rulership is murky.
Just for a start, it is not clear when Muhammad died: the Tradition says 632, before Palestine falls to the Arabs, but a contemporaneous source has a “Prophet” leading the Arab invasion in 634. Muhammad, indeed, disappears almost entirely from the 630s until his memory is revived from the top-down in the 690s under Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, quite probably because Muhammad has Moses as his role model, and Moses does not enter the Promised Land. (See: Tom Holland (2012), In the Shadow of the Sword: The Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World, pp. 352-53.)
There are some historians who discount the entire period of the Ridda Wars and the Rashidun Caliphate as a back-projection from the time in the early 660s when an Arab strongman, Muawiya, arose and began to assert something like independent rule over these territories. (See: Yehuda Nevo and Judith Koren (2003), Crossroads to Islam: The Origins of the Arab Religion and the Arab State, pp. 96-7.)
These specifics aside, it is quite clear that the Traditional account of the Rashidun period cannot be true, for a very simple reason: what we now call Islam had not yet come into being. The Ishmaelites held to some kind of Abrahamic monotheism, with its centre of gravity in Jerusalem.
Some scholars believe this was a Biblically “ecumenical” creed—lacking an overt doctrinal hostility to Ioudaismos and Christianity—and this is what enabled the Arab armies to capture the Fertile Crescent and North Africa without the kind of fierce resistance that might be expected from self-confident Jewish and Christian populations. In this telling, there was less an Arab “conquest” by armies directed from Medina, and something more like a domestic Byzantine collapse in the eastern provinces, after which Jews and Christians were largely able to accept the revivalist monotheism that came into their midst. (See: Fred Donner (2010), Muhammad and the Believers. At the Origins of Islam, pp. 103-12.)
Whatever one makes of this perspective, it is clear that a change of political allegiance would have troubled these populations little: these were areas that had just been through decades of seesawing war between Byzantium and Persia.
Oved Lobel, ‘The Graveyard of Empires: The Causes and Consequences of American Withdrawal from Afghanistan’, 4 August 2021, European Eye on Radicalization Report, p. 7. Available here.
Andrew Scott Cooper (2016), The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran, pp. 448-449.
Gholam Reza Afkhami (2009), The Life and Times of the Shah, pp. 458-59.
The stampede that led to troops firing on demonstrators in Jaleh Square on 8 September 1978, the infamous “Black Friday” episode, was precipitated by Palestinian-trained “guerrillas” from the Mojahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), the Marxist-Islamist cult Khomeini had strategically partnered with to use as the terrorist wing of his Revolution, and very likely operatives of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) itself, which had been deputised by Khomeini to train what would later become the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and Hizballah, firing from the surrounding rooftops and windows on Imperial security forces and probably into the crowd directly. (Seventy soldiers and policemen were killed in the melee in Jaleh Square, though this was suppressed by the Imperial government to avoid appearing weak.) The disaster had its desired effect—serious political damage to the Shah—and this was compounded when the horrible death toll of eighty-six was inflated to thousands and wild stories were spread of a wilful “massacre”, of the Shah in a helicopter sniping down protesters, Israeli commandos in Iranian uniforms, and on and on. (See: The Life and Times of the Shah, pp. 465-66; and, Darioush Bayandor (2018), The Shah, the Islamic Revolution and the United States, pp. 213-18.)
Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan (2016), ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (Updated Edition), p. xiii.
Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark (2017), The Exile: The Flight of Osama bin Laden, p. 210.
The Exile, pp. 201-02.
Sam Dagher (2019), Assad or We Burn the Country: How One Family’s Lust for Power Destroyed Syria, pp. 288-289.