On the morning of November 29, two Iranian scientists involved in Iran's
nuclear development program were attacked. One was killed, and the other was
injured. According to Iranian media, the deceased, Dr Majid Shahriari, was
heading the team responsible for developing the technology to design a nuclear
reactor core, and Time magazine referred to him as the highest-ranking
non-appointed individual working on the project.
Official reports indicate that Shahriari was killed when assailants on
motorcycles attached a "sticky bomb" to his vehicle and detonated it seconds
later. However, the Time magazine report says that an explosive device
concealed inside the car detonated and killed him. Shahriari's driver and wife,
both of whom were in the car at the time, were injured.
Meanwhile, on the opposite side of town, Dr Fereidoon Abassi
was injured in a sticky-bomb attack reportedly identical to the one officials
said killed Shahriari. His wife was accompanying him and was also injured (some
reports indicate that a driver was also in the car at the time of the attack).
Abassi and his wife are said to be in stable condition. Abassi is perhaps even
more closely linked to Iran's nuclear program than Shahriari was, since he was
a member of the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and was named in a
2007 United Nations resolution that sanctioned high-ranking members of Iran's
defense and military agencies believed to be trying to obtain nuclear weapons.
Monday's incidents occurred at a time of uncertainty over how global powers and
Iran's neighbors will handle an Iran accused of pursuing nuclear weapons
despite its claims of developing only a civilian nuclear program and asserting
itself as a regional power in the Middle East. Through economic sanctions that
went into effect last year, the United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia,
China and Germany (known as the "Iran Six" or the "P-5+1") have been pressuring
Iran to enter negotiations over its nuclear program and outsource the most
sensitive aspects of the program, such as higher levels of uranium enrichment.
The November 29 attacks came about a week before Saeed Jalili, Iran's national
security chief, will be leading a delegation to meet with the Iran Six from
December 6-7 in Vienna, the first such meeting in more than a year. The attacks
also came within hours of the WikiLeaks release of classified United States
State Department cables, which are filled with international concerns about
Iran's controversial nuclear program.
Because of the international scrutiny and sanctions on just about any hardware
required to develop a nuclear program, Iran has focused on developing domestic
technologies that can fill the gaps. This has required a national initiative
coordinated by the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) to build the
country's nuclear program from scratch, an endeavor that requires thousands of
experts from various fields of the physical sciences as well as the requisite
technologies.
And it was the leader of the AEOI, Ali Akhbar Salehi, who told media on
November 29 that Shahriari was "in charge of one of the great projects" at the
agency. Salehi also issued a warning to Iran's enemies "not to play with fire".
Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad elaborated on the warning, accusing
"Zionist" and "Western regimes" of being behind the coordinated attacks against
Shahriari and Abassi. The desire of the UN Security Council (along with Israel
and Germany) to stop Iran's nuclear program and the apparent involvement of the
targeted scientists in that program has led many Iranian officials to quickly
blame the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel for the attacks, since
those countries have been the loudest in condemning Iran for its nuclear
ambitions.
It seems that certain domestic rivals of the Iranian regime would also benefit
from these attacks. Any one of numerous Iranian militant groups throughout the
country may have been involved in one way or another, perhaps with the
assistance of a foreign power. A look at the tactics used in the attacks could
shed some light on the perpetrators.
Modus operandi
According to official Iranian reports, Abassi was driving to work at Shahid
Beheshti University in northern Tehran from his residence in southern Tehran.
When the car in which he and his wife were traveling was on Artash Street,
assailants on at least two motorcycles approached the vehicle and attached an
improvised explosive device (IED) to the driver's-side door. The device
exploded shortly thereafter, injuring Abassi and his wife.
Images reportedly of Abassi's vehicle show that the driver's side door was
destroyed, but the rest of the vehicle and the surrounding surfaces show very
little damage. A few pockmarks can be seen on the vehicle behind Abassi's car
but little else to indicate that a bomb had gone off in the vicinity. (Earlier
reports indicating that this was Shahriari's vehicle proved erroneous.) This
indicates that the IED was a shaped charge with a very specific target.
Evidence of both the shaped charge and the utilization of projectiles in the
device suggests that the device was put together by a competent and experienced
bomb-maker.
An eyewitness account of the attack offers one explanation why the device did
not kill Abassi. According to the man who was driving immediately behind
Abassi's car, the car abruptly stopped in traffic, then Abassi got out and went
to the passenger side where his wife was sitting. The eyewitness said Abassi
and his wife were about two meters from the car, on the opposite side when the
IED exploded. Abassi appears to have been aware of the attack as it was
underway, which apparently saved his life. The eyewitness did not mention
whether he saw the motorcyclists attach the device to the car before it went
off, but that could have been what tipped off Abassi. If this was the case, the
bomb-maker may have done his job well in building the device but the assailants
gave themselves away when they planted it.
In the fatal attack against Shahriari, he also was on his way to work at Shahid
Beheshti University in northern Tehran in his vehicle with his wife, according
to official reports. These reports indicate that he definitely had a driver,
which would suggest that Shahriari was considered a person of importance. Their
car was traveling through a parking lot in northern Tehran when assailants on
at least two motorcycles approached the vehicle and attached an IED to the car.
Eyewitnesses say that the IED exploded seconds later and that the motorcyclists
escaped. Shahriari was presumably killed in the explosion while his wife and
driver were injured.
The official account of the attack is contradicted by the Time magazine report,
which cites a "Western intelligence source with knowledge of the operation" as
saying that the IED that killed Shahriari detonated from inside the vehicle.
Images of what appears to be Shahriari's vehicle are much poorer quality than
the images of Abassi's vehicle, but they do appear to show damage to the
windshield and other car windows. The car is still very much intact, though,
and the fact that Shahriari's driver and wife escaped with only injuries
suggests that the device used against Shahriari was also a shaped charge,
specifically targeting him.
Capabilities
Attacks like the two carried out against Abassi and Shahriari require a high
level of tradecraft that is available only to well-trained operatives. There is
much more going on below the surface in attacks like these that is not
immediately obvious when reading media reports. First, the team of assailants
that attacked Abassi and Shahriari had to identify their targets and confirm
that the men they were attacking were indeed high-level scientists involved in
Iran's nuclear program. The fact that Abassi and Shahriari held such high
positions indicates they were specifically selected as targets and not the
victims of a lucky, opportunistic attack.
Second, the team had to conduct surveillance of the two scientists. The team
had to positively identify their vehicles and determine their schedules and
routes in order to know when and how to launch their attacks. Both attacks
targeted the scientists as they traveled to work, likely a time when they were
most vulnerable, a modus operandi commonly used by assassins worldwide.
Third, someone with sufficient expertise had to build IEDs that would kill
their targets. Both devices appear to have been relatively small IEDs that were
aimed precisely at the scientists, which may have been an attempt to limit
collateral damage (their small size may also have been due to efforts to
conceal the device). Both devices seem to have been adequate to kill their
intended targets, and judging by the damage to his vehicle, it appears that
Abassi would have received mortal wounds had he stayed in the driver's seat.
The deployment stage seems to be where things went wrong for the assailants, at
least in the Abassi attack. It is unclear exactly what alerted him, but it
appears that he was exercising some level of situational awareness and was able
to determine that an attack was underway.
It is not at all surprising that someone like Abassi would have been practicing
situational awareness. This is not the first time that scientists linked to
Iran's nuclear program have been attacked, and Iranian agencies linked to the
nuclear program have probably issued general security guidance to their
employees (especially high-ranking ones like Abassi and Shahriari).
In 2007, Ardeshir Hassanpour was killed in an alleged poisoning that STRATFOR
sources attributed to an Israeli operation. Again, in January 2010, Massoud
Ali-Mohammadi, another Iranian scientist who taught at Tehran University, was
killed in an IED attack that also targeted him as he was driving to work in the
morning. While some suspected that Ali-Mohammadi may have been targeted by the
Iranian regime due to his connections with the opposition, Abassi and Shahriari
appear much too close to the regime to be targets of their own government
(however, nothing can be ruled out in politically volatile Tehran). The
similarities between the Ali-Mohammadi assassination and the attacks against
Abassi and Shahriari suggest that a covert campaign to attack Iranian
scientists could well be underway.
There is little doubt that the November 29 attacks struck a greater blow to the
development of Iran's nuclear program than the previous two attacks. Shahriari
appears to have had an integral role in the program. While he will likely be
replaced and work will go on, his death could slow the program's progress (at
least temporarily) and further stoke security fears in Iran's nuclear
development community.
The attacks come amid WikiLeaks revelations that Saudi King Abdullah and US
officials discussed assassinating Iranian leaders, accusations that the United
States or Israel was behind the Stuxnet computer worm that allegedly targeted
the computer systems running Iran's nuclear program and the return home of
Shahram Amiri, an Iranian scientist who alleged that the United States held him
against his will earlier in the summer.
The evidence suggests that foreign powers are actively trying to probe and
sabotage Iran's nuclear program. However, doing so is not that simple. Tehran
is not nearly as open a city as Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, where
Israeli operatives are suspected of assassinating a high-level Hamas leader in
January 2010. It is unlikely that the United States, Israel or any other
foreign power could deploy their own team of assassins into Tehran to carry out
a lengthy targeting, surveillance and attack operation without some
on-the-ground help.
And there is certainly plenty of help on the ground in Iran. Kurdish militants
like the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan have conducted numerous assassinations
against Iranian clerics and officials in Iran's western province of Kordestan.
Sunni separatist militants in the southeast province of Sistan-Balochistan,
represented by the group Jundallah, have also targeted Iranian interests in
eastern Iran in recent years.
Other regional militant opposition groups like Mujahideen-e Khalq, which has
offered intelligence on Iran's nuclear program to the United States, and Azeri
separatists pose marginal threats to the Iranian regime. However, none of these
groups has demonstrated the ability to strike such high-level officials in the
heart of Tehran with such a degree of professionalism. While that is unlikely,
they have the capability and a history of eliminating dissidents through
assassinations. Furthermore, the spuriousness of many contradictory media
reports makes the attacks suspicious.
It is unlikely that any foreign power was able to conduct this operation by
itself and equally unlikely that any indigenous militant group was able to pull
off an attack like this without some assistance. The combination of the two,
however, could provide an explanation of how the attacks targeting Shariari and
Abassi got so close to complete success.
(Published with permission from STRATFORr,
a Texas-based geopolitical intelligence company. Copyright 2010 Stratfor.)
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