Michael Lipin
VOA News
January 14, 2024

WASHINGTON — More than a week after Iran experienced its deadliest terror attack in decades, its Islamist rulers said one of the suicide bombers trained in Afghanistan with the Islamic State group that claimed responsibility for the attack.

Iranian leaders have vowed to retaliate against the IS perpetrators of the January 3 suicide bombings that killed at least 90 people in the city of Kerman as they attended a memorial for top Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani on the fourth anniversary of his death in a U.S. drone strike.

In a statement published Thursday, Iran’s intelligence ministry identified one of the two bombers as a 24-year-old citizen of Tajikistan named Bazirov Israeli and said he received several months of training at an IS camp in Afghanistan’s northeastern province of Badakhshan that borders Tajikistan. It said that following his training, smugglers helped him cross the border into southeastern Iran’s Sistan Baluchistan province near Saravan city.

The intelligence ministry statement marked the first time that Iran publicly identified neighboring Afghanistan as source of the Kerman attack. It also said Tehran considers the pursuit of justice against the perpetrators “beyond the borders of [Iran]” as a “right and definite duty.”

However, Iran’s options for retaliatory strikes in Afghanistan are limited by its diplomatic relationship with the Taliban Islamist government of Afghanistan, according to a U.S. researcher who leads a project tracking IS activity worldwide. Iran and the Taliban see the IS group and the United States as their common adversaries.

The researcher, Aaron Zelin of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, discussed the challenge posed to Iran by IS in the latest edition of VOA’s Flashpoint Iran podcast.

The following transcript of Zelin’s January 9 interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

VOA: What part of the IS group was responsible for the Kerman attack?

Aaron Zelin, Washington Institute for Near East Policy senior fellow: The Islamic State Khorasan Province, which is based in Afghanistan, was most likely involved in planning and executing the attack, especially since the previous two IS attacks within Iran in the last year or so also were traced back to ISKP. Plus, many of the arrests that Iran has carried out against IS over the last few years have been related to ISKP networks.

VOA: How is it possible to trace an attack like this to ISKP?

Zelin: It is a combination of things. One is information directly coming from the Iranian government. Two is from IS claims through its media outlets. They provide a certain level of detail. And three is the ethnic background of the attackers. Tajiks have been involved in many ISKP attacks, not only in Iran, but in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the region.

VOA: What have you learned about the motives of the IS group in attacking Kerman?

Zelin: The IS group historically has been extremely anti-Shiite and anti-Iran. Part of this ideology is that they are against the veneration of saints and mausoleums and the like. So it makes a lot of sense that they would target [a ceremony at the burial place of Qassem Soleimani in Kerman], since so many people were there, creating a mass-casualty attack.

And they wanted to send a message of vengeance against Soleimani, who previously had been fighting IS in Iraq and Syria, and all of his supporters.

VOA: How was IS able to hit back at Tehran in such a dramatic way with the worst bombings that Iran has seen since its 1979 Islamic Revolution?

Zelin: Part of it is that over the last few months, Iran has been more focused on Israel, post the October 7 attack by Hamas, and on coordinating the various Iranian proxies in Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, etc. Therefore, it is plausible that Iranian intelligence assets have focused less on the threat of IS, which might have been able to go under the [Iranian] radar. Every few months, Iran usually arrests some type of IS cell trying to conduct an attack locally. The Kerman attack is the third IS attack within Iran in the last 15 months.

VOA: What can Iran do going forward against IS beyond just continuing to carry out arrests?

Zelin: It is pretty limited beyond that, to be honest. The Kerman attack did not emanate from Iraq and Syria, where you still have Iran’s IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] force as well as its proxy networks fighting against IS on a low level. Next door in Afghanistan, the Taliban are fighting IS also on a daily basis. It is unlikely that Iran would want to impede on what the Taliban are doing, since they have had such burgeoning relations over the last couple of years since the Taliban took power. So, I think more intelligence sharing between the Taliban and Iran related to these threats, and continued local law enforcement, are the limits of Iran’s options for now.

VOA: How do you think the Kerman attack could affect the Iran-Taliban relationship?

Zelin: I do not think it will affect things that much. When there have been prior attacks on Iran by ISKP-related networks in Afghanistan, nothing has changed in terms of their relationship. It has only gotten stronger over time. Plus, days after this most recent attack, you saw Iranian Ambassador in Kabul Hassan Kazemi Qomi meet the Taliban Deputy Prime Minister Abdul Kabir. They were talking about various issues related to the relationship, including that they will not let a terrorist attack, like the one committed by IS, get between them, and that they have a shared interest in fighting IS.

And independently, the Taliban media also have talked about how they have provided details and warnings in the past to Iran about plots and attacks. So I think the relationship will continue to be fruitful from their perspective on both sides.

VOA: What do you think IS will do next vis-a-vis Iran?

Zelin: So long as IS has the assets, capabilities and opportunities to do an attack, they will continue to plot within Iran itself. This is now their third successful attack within the country over the last 15 months. But they also have plotted other attacks in the last few years, and the Iranian government has been able to stop them ahead of time. I cannot predict whether they will be successful again. But they will continue to try, no matter what.