Saturday, November 28, 2020

On Friday, Iranian state media and the country’s defense ministry announced that a shootout in a mountain resort area in Absard, a small town near the Iranian capital of Tehran resulted in the death of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.

According to reports, armed attackers bearing machine guns opened fire on the vehicle Fakhrizadeh was occupying. Reports also indicated a nearby vehicle had been detonated by a truck carrying explosives obscured by a pile of wood shortly before the machine gun attack. Fakhrizadeh and several of his bodyguards were injured and taken to the hospital, where Fakhrizadeh was pronounced dead despite doctors’ efforts to revive him.

Fakhrizadeh is believed to have led what was called the AMAD Project in the Iranian Ministry of Defense, which was aimed at developing a nuclear weapon. He was referred to by some as the “father” of the program. Although the project was abandoned in 2003, the US and Israeli governments speculate Tehran is attempting to rejuvenate the proram.

The United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency had at one point requested the Iranian government to grant access to Fakhrizadeh to interview him, but they refused, insisting he was simply a scholar working at Imam Hussein University. He was suspected by Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, of masterminding a “secret bomb program” in the country. Iranian military general Hossein Salami lamented, “assassinating nuclear scientists is the most violent confrontation to prevent us from reaching modern science”.

To date, no group has claimed responsibility for the attacks. In the days prior, Israel Defense Forces had been advised by the state to brace for a potential US strike against Iran. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on Twitter accused Israel for being responsible for the attack, and called for an international condemnation of the assassination. Iranian military advisor Hossein Dehghan swore vengeance on Fakhrizadeh’s assassins, saying “strike as thunder at the killers of this oppressed martyr.”

Fakhrizadeh’s death was initially met with silence from the Israeli government and the capital cities of states surrounding Iran. However, the day after the incident, Israeli cabinet minister Tzachi Hanegbi told Meet the Press that he had “no idea” who was responsible for the attack.

The Mossad has taken credit for the assassinations of ten other scientists, including four between 2010 and 2012, some of them Fakhrizadeh’s deputies. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had previously mentioned Fakhrizadeh in a 2018 news conference, stressing that people must “remember that name.”

The events come in the final weeks of the US presidency of Donald Trump, who reportedly had to be talked out of launching a strike on Iran’s uranium enrichment facility by his national security advisors. The assassination will likely complicate US-Iran relations, as well as any efforts to reenter the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal, an idea which has support from both Joe Biden and Tehran. The conditions of the deal put restraints on Iran’s atomic energy program in exchange for the US relieving certain sanctions on the Iranian economy. President Trump had previously pulled the US out of the deal in 2017. The assassination has been speculated to have been an attempt by opponents of the deal to sabatoge the possibility of the US ever reentering it.

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