By Tim Anderson*
Iran’s missile strike on ISIS in the Syrian city of Deir Ezzor was a measured response to the 7 June ISIS attacks on Tehran's parliament. It was a message for Riyadh and Washington: further aggression against the Islamic Republic will be met with force. Tehran was demonstrating its reach.
While the target, coordinated with Damascus, was ISIS terrorists, General Ramazan Sharif of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (IGRC) made it clear that the message was especially for ‘the Saudis and Americans’. Iran knows very well they were the masterminds of the Tehran attacks, and that provocation was a large part of the exercise.
In early May Saudi Prince Mohammed Bin Salman al-Saud threatened attacks on Tehran. A few weeks later his ISIS group attacked Iran’s parliament and the mausoleum of Imam Khomeini, leaving 18 dead and 50 injured. Ten days later Tehran sent six medium range missiles into ISIS strongholds in Deir Ezzor.
In the middle of this, President Trump’s 20 May visit to Riyadh - the centrepiece of which was a massive weapons sale - seems to have emboldened the wahhabi kingdom. In a short space of time Saudi proxies attacked Tehran and the kingdom moved against Qatar.
The pretext? Doha’s Emir was getting too close to Iran. Tensions had long been there, due to Qatar’s commitment to the ideologically similar but strategically competitive Muslim Brotherhood. Riyadh’s move against Qatar immediately damaged Saudi relations with Muslim Brotherhood patron President Erdogan of Turkey.
That rift, in turn, helped catalyse large scale surrenders amongst the Saudi and Qatar proxies. In mid-June Damascus reported that gunmen in 47 Idlib towns, in one day, had joined the Syrian Government's peace plan. Riyadh’s strong point is not a strategy.
When Prince Salman threatened ‘we will work to have the battle in Iran rather than in Saudi Arabia’; Iran’s defence minister, Brigadier-General Hossein Dehghan warned that if Riyadh did anything stupid ‘we will leave no area untouched except Mecca and Medina’. In fact, despite the bloody provocation, Tehran did not move against Riyadh.
The missile strikes on Deir Ezzor will have little direct impact on ISIS or Riyadh. However as medium range strikes - across Iraq and over the heads of US forces - they are a rebuff to Washington, which has tried to portray ballistic missile launches as some sort of breach of Iran’s 2015 nuclear agreement. They also show the Saudis that the same class of missiles could be used against Riyadh.
There has been speculation that groups only loosely related to the ISIS gangs in Syria were responsible for the 7 June atrocity in Tehran. Perhaps other Saudi-backed factions, such as Ansar al-Islam or the MEK were responsible. That level of detail is important for Iranian security.
However, in political terms ISIS is only a brand name. One group of mercenaries can be substituted for another. Tehran knows that the Wahhabi regime, with Washington’s weapons and Washington’s ‘green light’, is the toxic player that must be brought to heel in the region.
*Professor Tim Anderson is a distinguished author and senior lecturer of political economy at the University of Sydney, Australia. Author of the 'The Dirty War on Syria', he has been largely published on various issues particularly the Syrian crisis.
The views, opinions and positions expressed on Op-Ed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions or positions of Khamenei.ir.
Comment