In the early hours of June 7, a group of six people — five men and one woman — launched coordinated terrorist attacks against two sites in Tehran, hitting the Iranian Parliament and the mausoleum of the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Witnesses at the Parliament described attackers who were armed with assault rifles and wearing suicide vests, randomly targeting bystanders on a Wednesday morning. By the time that security forces were able to neutralize the attackers, at least 12 civilians lay dead, with another 42 reported wounded. The atrocity was claimed almost immediately by the Islamic State, in an online statement that also included video footage taken from the scene of the attacks. While the Middle East has been ravaged by over a decade of terrorist attacks from ISIS, Al Qaeda, and other terrorists groups, Iran has largely escaped deadly incidents like the one that struck Tehran on Wednesday. In a statement responding to the incident, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps suggested that “mercenaries” working on behalf of Saudi Arabia and the United States were responsible, vowing to take revenge. Along with targeting civilians in a city long considered to be safe from terrorism, however, the Islamic State’s first attack in Iran also seemed designed to further aggravate tensions in the Persian Gulf region. On his recent visit to Saudi Arabia, President Donald Trump endorsed the virulently anti-Iranian stance of the ruling Saudi monarchy and seemed to go out of his way to fan regional tensions rather than temper them. Trump’s messages on that trip were reasonably interpreted by many as giving a green light for Saudi leaders to take aggressive action against Iran. But while there is no evidence to suggest a direct Saudi role in the terrorist attack in Tehran, even the suspicion of Saudi involvement during a period of high tension between the two countries could have major consequences.

An armed man stands in a window of the Parliament building in Tehran, Iran, June 7, 2017. Photo: Omid Vahabzadeh/Fars News Agency/AP

“If this attack had happened at any other time, Iran would probably deal with it internally and their response would not be that different from how other countries have responded to ISIS attacks,” said Afshon Ostovar, an assistant professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School and author of “Vanguard of the Imam: Religion, Politics and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.” “But coming on the heels of this sort of mounting pressure from their rivals across the Gulf, the timing is very ripe for some kind of Iranian reaction. There are probably people within the [Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps] who do believe that it was the Saudis who were behind this somehow.” While it’s unclear what kind of retaliation the IRGC might employ, its reaction would not necessarily have to involve attacking the Saudi homeland. Over the past several years, Iran and Saudi Arabia have been waging a brutal proxy war across the Middle East, with active conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. Iran could easily escalate in any one of these conflict zones, targeting Saudi allies or personnel. A major escalation in any of these conflicts would be even more dangerous because the United States is increasingly an active belligerent in all these countries, having escalated its direct support for Saudi-allied forces since Trump’s election. In recent weeks in Syria, U.S. forces have even targeted Iranian-backed militia groups with airstrikes on three separate occasions, attacks that by some accounts killed scores of fighters. While these groups have not yet reacted by targeting American forces, it’s not implausible for this to happen in the near future, in Syria or another country, if tensions continue to rise. “This is the first time the U.S. and Iranian-backed groups have been at the knife’s edge of conflict in Syria,” said Ostovar. “If the IRGC does retaliate and the conflict in the region intensifies, you could eventually see things like green-on-blue attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq by [Iranian-backed militias], a development that would seriously complicate the campaign against ISIS.” Why Jihadis Are Striking Iran Now The growing threat of terrorism in Iran is another factor that could escalate conflict in the Middle East, even after ISIS is driven out of its last territorial holdings in Iraq and Syria. Over the past decade, Iran was largely insulated from terrorist attacks, a respite that some claim stems from older arrangements made by Iran with Al Qaeda leaders in the years after the 9/11 attacks.

Photo: Ebrahim Noroozi/AP