Two blasts struck the city of Kerman in Iran on Wednesday (January 3), leading to the deaths of at least 103 people. Many had gathered at a cemetery to mark the fourth anniversary of the killing of senior military commander General Qassem Soleimani.
The attack is one of the deadliest to have hit the country in around half a century. Indian Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said on X, “We are shocked and saddened on the terrible bombings in the Kerman City of Iran. At this difficult time, we express our solidarity with the government and people of Iran. Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of the victims and with the wounded.”
CNN reported that Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi blamed the Israeli government for the explosions. He said, “I warn the Zionist regime, do not doubt that you will pay a heavy price for this crime and the crimes you have committed,” in a televised speech from Tehran. He added that Israel’s punishment will be “regrettable and severe.”
The Middle East has been on the boil for a few months, with the Palestinian militant group Hamas’s October 7 strikes on Israel, the Israeli military’s ongoing offensive on the Gaza Strip that has killed more than 20,000 people, and attacks from Yemen-based Houthi rebels on ships passing through the Red Sea since November. What exactly happened in Iran on Wednesday and what ramifications does it have for the region at large? We explain.
What happened in Kerman, Iran, and who was Qassem Soleimani?
The first explosion took place around 3 pm in Kerman, located 820 kilometres from Tehran. As the crowd of people sought to escape, another bomb detonated 20 minutes later near the Saheb al-Zaman Mosque. The Iranian government stated that most of the victims died in the second bombing, amid chaos from the first blast.
Iran’s Tasnim news agency cited informed sources as saying there were two bags carrying bombs that seemed to have been set off by remote control. A crowd was present to mark four years since the 2020 US-ordered killing of General Soleimani.
Qassem Soleimani, 62, was in charge of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The IRGC is a wing of the Iranian military and is known to be responsible for undertaking foreign missions. It was designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation by the US in 2019.
According to the US government’s Counter-Terrorism Guide, “The IRGC-QF (another component of the IRGC) has plotted and conducted covert operations worldwide, and it provides guidance, training, funding, and weapons to Shia militant partners and proxies in other Middle Eastern countries.”
Soleimani was known to have participated in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which led to the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty and led to the establishment of a theocratic state in Iran. His profile rose in the early 2000s, for carrying out attacks in opposition to the American military presence in Iraq.
Why did the US launch strikes against Soleimani?
In recent years, Soleimani was believed to be the chief strategist behind Iran’s military ventures and influence in Syria, Iraq and throughout the Middle East. Around the time of his death, Iranian militias had struck an Iraqi military base, killing an American contractor in the process. The US retaliated with strikes in Iraq and Syria, in a bid to target militias.
Some criticised then US President Donald Trump’s decision to carry out the attack. “Soleimani was an enemy of the United States. That’s not a question,” Senator Christopher S Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, wrote on X. “The question is this — as reports suggest, did America just assassinate, without any congressional authorization, the second most powerful person in Iran, knowingly setting off a potential massive regional war?”
How could the Iran attacks affect the current situation in the Middle East?
The attacks in Iran came a day after a top Hamas leader, Saleh al-Arouri, was believed to have been killed in an Israeli drone strike in Lebanon. Israel is yet to claim responsibility for the attack but one Israeli and two US officials confirmed its role to the media organisation Axios.
Various players in the region are involved in the Israel-Hamas conflict, owing to long-existing regional, religious and ethnic alignments and rivalries. For instance, the Lebanon-based militant organisation Hezbollah has supported Hamas. Both Hamas and Hezbollah are believed to be backed by Iran, which has been engaged in a proxy war with Israel for decades.
Reuters reported that in a speech in Beirut on Wednesday, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said the group “cannot be silent” following the killing of al-Arouri. On Tuesday, the drone hit a Hamas office located in Beirut’s southern suburbs of Dahiyeh, a Hezbollah stronghold, and left six people dead. Nasrallah said his heavily armed forces would fight to the finish if Israel chose to extend the war to Lebanon.
Iran is also known to support the Houthis in Yemen and is against what it sees as Western interference in the region. This position puts it at odds with the US and its ally Saudi Arabia. As a result, cases of attacks in the neighbourhood have the potential to widen the ongoing conflict and include other groups and countries or elongate it.
“We remain incredibly concerned, as we have been from the outset of this conflict, about the risk of the conflict spreading into other fronts,” Matthew Miller, a State Department spokesman, told reporters on Wednesday.
A senior US official told The New York Times that attacks similar to the one against al-Arouri were likely in the future. “No one is safe if they had any hand in planning, raising money for or carrying out these attacks,” said the official, referring to Hamas’s October strikes on Israel.
