How will Iran retaliate over Israel’s assassination on Friday of its top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh?
For a start, Tehran is escalating its breach of the 2015 JCPOA nuclear accord. On Sunday, the Iranian parliament passed legislation that would dramatically shorten the window needed to stockpile sufficient weapons-grade uranium to enable a nuclear warhead. This is likely to pose President-elect Joe Biden with his first major foreign policy challenge of 2021.
But Iran will also seek more obvious and bloody retaliation against Israel. The mechanism of the Israeli Mossad’s assassination of Fakhrizadeh encapsulates its deeply personal struggle with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Note that Israel did not use a roadside bomb or airstrike to eliminate Fakhrizadeh. It used operations officers and agents on the ground and the tactic of a face-to-face motorcade ambush. The intent was to send a very personal message to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps associated hardliner elite around Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. And to their supporters in the Iranian nuclear and defense industry. The message that Israel is on the ground inside Iran, operating with relative freedom against the regime’s most securely guarded interests. Israel wants Khamenei’s inner circle to fear their every waking moment.
Iran will want to emulate the bloody quality of what Israel has done to Fakhrizadeh.
While it’s possible that Iran will pursue some short term retaliation, such as using the Lebanese Hezbollah to launch rockets at northern Israel, action of this kind will represent only the first course of its response. A guidepost here is offered by Iran’s retaliation against the United States following the January airstrike that killed the IRGC’s Quds Force commander, Qassem Soleimani. While Iran’s immediate response entailed the firing of ballistic missiles into a U.S. military base in Iraq, the regime will not rest until it has avenged Soleimani with American bodies. Despised by Iran as the primary source of the Trump administration’s maximum pressure strategy against it, for example, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will need to retain a Diplomatic Security Service protective detail after he leaves office in January.
Israel’s diplomatic facilities around the world have already been put on alert notice. The Shin Bet security service, responsible for protecting Israeli ambassadors and at-risk diplomats abroad, will also strengthen its physical protection efforts. Israel will also request bolstered host nation security details for its diplomatic representatives, and in the short-medium term, will reduce the public events these officials engage in (although COVID-19 will make this less obvious). Considering Iran’s insistence, absurd as it is, that Fakhrizadeh was just a civilian scientist, Shin Bet is also likely to offer new security recommendations to high profile Israeli scientists and researchers living abroad. The fear, here, will be that Iran will seek retaliation that it could then present as a moral tit-for-tat response. Particular attention is likely to be given to the protection of Israelis in South America and Europe, where Iran’s intelligence apparatus and allied terrorist capabilities are strongest.
The unfortunate basic point, however, is that Iran won’t rest until it has spilled Israeli blood.
