Israel is not the only target of Iranian assassination threats

Iranians follow a truck carrying the coffins of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and his bodyguard during their funeral ceremony in Tehran on Aug. 1. (Vahid Salemi/AP)

Israel is not the only target of Iranian assassination threats

Washington Post -Aug14th2024

By David Ignatius

August 13, 2024 at 7:35 p.m. EDT

As America anxiously awaits Iran’s threatened reprisal against Israel for the death of a top Hamas leader, few probably realize that Iran has for years been plotting a violent retaliation campaign against the United States as well, targeting senior former officials — perhaps including former president Donald Trump.

The Iranian campaigns, though vastly different in scale, both focus on revenge for assassinations by Israel and the United States of senior Iranian officials or proxies. After the humiliating loss of many top operatives, Iran evidently wants to demonstrate that the assassins will pay a price.

One obvious moral of the story: Assassination is a double-edged sword.

Israel has tried to combat Iran’s reprisals through threats of massive military retaliation; the United States has instead mainly used law enforcement prosecutions of alleged Iranian hit men. Neither approach has stopped the Iranians from seeking revenge.

Israel is now bracing for a threatened attack to avenge the death of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh during a visit to Tehran last month. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, publicly declared that he had a “duty to seek revenge for his blood” because Haniyeh was a guest of Iran.

Follow David Ignatius

The United States faces a continuing string of threatened reprisal killings to avenge the January 2020 assassination of Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s shadowy Quds Force. Like Haniyeh, Soleimani was a target of opportunity, killed by a U.S. drone attack while visiting Baghdad.

Trump, then the president, took credit the next day for what he called a “flawless precision strike that killed the number-one terrorist anywhere in the world.” Soleimani “was plotting imminent and sinister attacks on American diplomats and military personnel, but we caught him in the act and terminated him,” Trump said.

Khamenei personally vowed revenge for Soleimani, as he did with Haniyeh. On the anniversary of Soleimani’s death, Khamenei said that “those who ordered the murder” would be “punished.” Iran has conducted repeated assassination plots inside the United States ever since, without success, according to Justice Department documents.

Iran has applied similar methodology in most of these attacks. Iranians or their operatives who traveled to Iran have tried to recruit hit men from gangs or criminal groups. They’ve used complicated tradecraft to try to avoid detection in the United States, but, in each case, they have stumbled into the hands of the FBI.