The local government of Kerman, Iran, claimed this weekend that it had definitively identified and arrested all suspected terrorists involved in the bombing of an event to mark the anniversary of the death of Iranian terror mastermind Qasem Soleimani on January 3.
Soleimani, the late head of the elite Quds Force foreign terror unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), was eliminated from the battlefield by a U.S. drone strike on January 3, 2020, in Iraq. He was in the country for meetings with the head of several Iran-backed militias in the region and died alongside Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the head of the Iraqi terror organization the Hezbollah Brigades.
Iran typically hosts lavish memorial events featuring throngs of thousands of people to commemorate the drone strike and threaten attacks on the United States. Iranian officials have regularly threatened to kill former President Donald Trump and recently demanded $50 billion in redress for the drone strike.
On January 3, 2024, the Iranian Islamist regime organized a mass event in Kerman, where Soleimani’s tomb is located, to honor the terrorist. Two explosions, which occurred with enough time between them to target first responders after the first blast, occurred outside the cemetery, killing 89 people and injuring nearly 300 others.
The Islamic State (ISIS), a Sunni jihadist organization that opposes Shiite terror hubs such as Iran, claimed responsibility for the attack. While the Islamic State has a history of taking credit for attacks it had no part in organizing, Iranian authorities have also said they believe ISIS to be the responsible party.
Mehdi Bakhshi, Kerman’s city prosecutor, confirmed on Iranian television on Saturday that suicide bombers executed the terrorist attack and claimed that Iranian law enforcement authorities had identified and apprehended 32 people involved in the planning of the attack.
“Thirty-two people have been arrested in [connection with] Kerman [terrorist] crime case and are going through preliminary interrogations,” Iran’s state-run Mehr News Agency quoted Bakhshi as saying, adding that the investigations into those individuals led to the discovery of another 16 bombs in Kerman province prepared for future attacks. Bakhshi insisted that the 32 arrested were all the individuals connected to the Soleimani funeral bombing.
The Iranian government has not made public at press time the identity of the suicide bombers directly responsible for the attack. Bakhshi did confirm this weekend, however, that one of the bombers was a Tajik national.
People and Iranian emergency personnel at the site where two explosions in quick succession struck a crowd marking the anniversary of the 2020 killing of Guards general Qasem Soleimani in the southern Iranian city of Kerman on January 3, 2024. (Sare Tajalli / ISNA / AFP)
Iranian leaders welcomed a senior member of the government of Tajikistan on Monday – Tajik National Assembly Chairman Rustam Emomali – but reports about his meeting with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi did not indicate that the president inquired about his country’s potential role in the Soleimani funeral bombing.
Bakhshi, the Kerman official, also stated in his interview this weekend that police in Kerman had arrested another 23 “Daesh terrorists” in “recent months” preparing suicide bombings, without offering details.
Mehr referred to the group responsible for the attack as “the US-backed Daesh Takfiri group.” “Daesh” is an Arabic-language acronym for the Islamic State; “takfiri” is a term used for Muslims who falsely denounce other Muslims as apostates and refers to the Islamic State’s rejection of Shiite Islam.
The Iranian government maintains that the Islamic State is an American proxy terrorist organization and has blamed both America and Israel for the attack on Soleimani’s memorial event. Regime-orchestrated crowds condemning the attack on January 3 chanted “death to America” and “death to Israel” despite no evidence implicating any organization or group being public at the time. ISIS took credit for the attack after the “death to America” rallies.
“Iranian President Ebrahim Raeisi says the cause of the terrorist bombings in Kerman can be traced back to the grudge that Zionists hold against top anti-terror commander General Qassem Soleimani,” the Iranian state-run outlet PressTV reported on January 5, “as he jeopardized the plans to establish another Israel in the region by creating and backing Daesh terrorist group.”
Raisi went on to claim that “the enemy,” by which he meant America and Israel, “wanted the puppet group of Daesh to rule in Iraq and Syria.” In reality, the United States, along with allied Kurdish militias, brought down the ISIS “caliphate.” President Trump ordered a military operation in 2019 that resulted in the capture and death of the “caliph” of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
The “evidence” PressTV used for the claim that the United States is a partner in ISIS terrorism was a comment former President Donald Trump made during the 2016 election in which he called his predecessor, Barack Obama, the “founder of ISIS.” Trump meant that Obama’s foreign policy created the conditions responsible for al-Qaeda in Iraq to ultimately evolve into the Islamic State terrorist organization and has never claimed that ISIS is a U.S. government or Israeli-backed organization.