VIDEO COURTESY OF AP
Two bombs exploded within minutes of each other Wednesday in commemoration of a top Iranian general killed in a U. S. drone strike in 2020, killing more than a hundred people.
VAHED SALEMI / ASSOCIATED PRESS
People attend a commemoration for the late Revolutionary Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in a U.S drone attack in 2020 in Iraq, at the Imam Khomeini grand mosque in Tehran, Iran, today. Iran says bomb blasts at an event in the city of Kerman, honoring a prominent Iranian general slain in a U.S. airstrike in 2020, have killed more than 100 people and wounded over 200.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates >> Two bombs exploded within minutes of each other today in commemoration of a prominent Iranian general killed in a U. S. drone strike in 2020, Iranian officials said, killing at least 103 others as the Middle East remains tense in Israel’s Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for what appeared to be the deadliest militant attack on Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The explosions rocked the town of Kerman around 8:20 a. m. southeast of the capital, Tehran, and sent shrapnel into a screaming crowd fleeing the first blast. At least 211 other people were injured.
The gathering marked the fourth anniversary of the killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Revolutionary Guard’s elite Quds Force, in a U.S. drone strike in Iraq. The explosions occurred near his grave site as long lines of people gathered for the event.
Iranian television and state officials called the attacks bombings, without giving clear details of what happened. Ahmad Vahidi, the interior minister, told state television that the first bomb exploded around 3 p. m. and the other exploded about 20 minutes later. He said that at the time of the explosion he killed and injured as many people as possible.
Images and videos shared on social media appear to match officials’ accounts that the first explosion occurred about 765 meters from Soleimani’s grave at the Kerman Martyrs’ Cemetery, near a parking lot. The crowd then rushed west down Shohada Street, or Martyrs’ Street, where the second explosion occurred about 1 kilometer from the tomb.
Militants use a delayed explosion to cause more casualties by attacking the emergency corps of workers responding to an attack.
Iranian state TV and state-run IRNA news agency quoted emergency officials for the casualty figures, which rose rapidly in the hours after the explosions. Authorities declared Thursday would be a national day of mourning.
Iran has multiple foes who could be behind the assault, including exile groups, militant organizations and state actors.
While Israel has carried out attacks in Iran over its nuclear program, it has conducted targeted assassinations, not mass casualty bombings.
Sunni extremist groups including the Islamic State group have conducted large-scale attacks in the past that killed civilians in Shiite-majority Iran, though not in relatively peaceful Kerman.
Iran also has seen mass protests in recent years, including those over the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in 2022. The country also has been targeted by exile groups in attacks dating back to the turmoil surrounding its 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Iran itself has armed militant teams for decades, including Hamas, the Lebanese Shiite defense force Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthi rebels.
As Israel wages its devastating war in Gaza following the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks that killed 1,200 more people in Israel and saw more than 200 people taken hostage, Hezbollah and the Houthis announced attacks on Israel that they said came on behalf of the Palestinians.
Israel is suspected of launching an attack on Tuesday that killed a deputy Hamas leader in Beirut, but the strike limited casualties in a densely populated community in the Lebanese capital.
Mohammed Abdel-Salam, a spokesman for the Houthis, tried to link the bombings to “Iran’s resistance forces in Palestine and Lebanon. “
“All attempts by America and Israel to destabilize Iran’s security will fail,” Abdel-Salam wrote online, though he did not specifically blame anyone for the attack.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan offered his condolences for the “heinous terrorist attacks. “Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi will stop in Turkey on Thursday.
Soleimani was the architect of the activities of Iran’s regional army and is hailed as a national icon among supporters of Iran’s theocracy. He also helped protect Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government after the 2011 Arab Spring protests against him escalated into a civil and then regional war. which is still raging today.
Relatively unknown in Iran until the U. S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Soleimani’s popularity and mystery grew after U. S. officials called for his assassination for helping militants arm militants with roadside bombs that killed and maimed U. S. troops.
Fifteen years later, Soleimani was Iran’s most recognizable battlefield commander. He ignored calls to participate in politics, but he became as powerful, if not more so, than his civic leaders.
In the end, a drone strike introduced through the Trump administration killed the general, in an escalation of incidents that followed the U. S. unilateral withdrawal from Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers in 2018.
Soleimani’s death has drawn large processions in the past. At his funeral in 2020, a stampede broke out in Kerman and at least 56 people were killed and more than 200 were injured as thousands thronged the procession. Otherwise, Kerman largely has been untouched in the recent unrest and attacks that have struck Iran. The city and province of the same name sits in Iran’s central desert plateau.
Until Wednesday, the deadliest attack suffered by Iran since the revolution: the truck bombing of the headquarters of the Islamic Republican Party in Tehran in 1981. The attack killed at least 72 people, including the party leader, 4 government ministers, 8 deputy ministers and 23 parliamentarians.
In 1978, just before the revolution, an arson attack at the Rex cinema in Abadan killed scores of people.
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