2024-01-25T15:17:50+00:00
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/ It seems that the United States of America had prior knowledge of the suicide bombings that struck the Iranian region of Kerman, as the US administration secretly warned Iran that ISIS was preparing to carry out the terrorist attack that led earlier this month to the killing of more than 80 Iranians in two coordinated suicide bombings, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The secret alert came after the United States received intelligence that ISIS’s Afghan branch, ISIS-K, was planning to attack Iran, US officials said.
U.S. officials said the information passed to Iran was specific enough about the location and timely enough to prove useful to Tehran in thwarting the Jan. 3 attack or at least mitigating the number of casualties.
Iran’s action after warning
However, Iran failed to prevent suicide bombings in the southeastern city of Kerman, which targeted a crowd commemorating the death of Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force.
Soleimani was killed in a drone strike in January 2020 near Baghdad airport on the orders of then-President Donald Trump.
“Prior to the January 3, 2024, ISIS terrorist attack in Kerman, Iran, the US government provided Iran with a specific warning of a terrorist threat within Iranian borders,” a US official said.
“The U.S. government has a long-standing “duty to warn” policy that has been implemented across administrations to warn governments of potentially lethal threats. We provide these warnings in part because we do not want to see innocent lives lost in terrorist attacks.
Officials at Iran’s mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Despite the US warning, some Iranians have suggested that ISIS perpetrators are linked to the United States and Israel.
At a ceremony in Kerman to honor the victims, Major General Hossein Salami, the top commander of the Revolutionary Guards, said that ISIS “has disappeared these days,” and that the jihadists “are only working as mercenaries” for American and Israeli interests.
US officials declined to specify which channels were used to warn Iran or to disclose details of what was passed.
They did not mention whether this was the first time Washington had sent such a warning to the Iranian regime.
A US official said Iranian officials did not respond to the United States about the warning.
Several officials said it was not clear why the Iranians failed to thwart or repel the attack.
Duty to warn
The United States routinely shares warnings about potential terrorist activity with allies and partners. In some cases, it also warns potential adversaries.
In December 2019, Russian President Vladimir Putin thanked President Trump for sharing intelligence that helped the Kremlin thwart a plot in St. Petersburg.
The bombings in Kerman, which killed 84 Iranians and wounded hundreds more, were the worst terrorist attack inside Iran since the 1979 Iranian revolution.
ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack after the attack, saying that two of its members detonated explosive belts.
ISIS-K first emerged in Afghanistan in 2015 after ISIS fighters declared a caliphate in Iraq and Syria.
It was responsible for the August 2021 bombing near Kabul airport that killed 13 US soldiers and about 170 Afghan civilians as the US military withdrew from Afghanistan.
The group was a staunch enemy of the Taliban, and was greatly weakened during the US military presence in Afghanistan by attacks by US forces, Afghan government forces, and the Taliban itself.
With the departure of US forces, ISIS-K has grown stronger.
US officials say it is one of the most dangerous groups in the region, outranking al-Qaeda and with ambitions to strike targets in the West.
Biden administration officials confirmed shortly after the Jan. 3 attack in Iran that they had information that ISIS-K was the perpetrator.
But they did not reveal that the United States had advance intelligence about the attack or that they had informed the Iranians.
A U.S. intelligence community directive known as the “duty to warn” requires spy agencies to warn targeted victims, whether U.S. citizens or non-U.S. citizens, if they are the target of a terrorist attack.
There are exceptions, including if the intended victims are themselves terrorists or criminals, or if issuing a warning would endanger U.S. or allied government personnel, or intelligence or military operations.
In the case of Iran, Washington has alerted an adversary that has armed numerous proxies, including the Houthis in Yemen as well as militias in Syria and Iraq that have carried out more than 150 attacks on U.S. forces since mid-October.