Kicking off all over the Gulf. If Saudi are concentrating on Qatar they'd better watch their flank.....
12 dead as Isis terrorists attack Iranian parliament and Ayatollah’s shrine
Islamic State claimed responsibility today for an assault on the heart of the Iranian Islamic republic, in which attackers killed 12 people as they stormed the national parliament and the shrine of the late supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Security guards, members of the Revolutionary Guard and a gardener at the shrine were among those killed. The assailants, some dressed in the flowing black chador robes of Iranian women, were shot dead or blew themselves up, according to initial reports. That was only after some managed to enter the parliament’s administrative building, roaming the corridors and shooting people. Dramatic pictures showed workers and in some cases children, probably brought in to work by parents because of the Ramadan and summer holiday season, being lowered to the ground through open windows to escape.
Isis released a video on one of its affiliated news agencies, Amaq, apparently filmed by the attackers inside the parliament building. “Do you think we will leave? We will remain, God willing,” a voice is heard saying. “We will remain” is an Isis slogan, but has taken on a new significance as the group faces the loss of its territories in Iraq and Syria to a combination of US-backed groups, Iraqi and Syrian regime forces, and Iranian-backed militias.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, however, immediately accused Saudi Arabia of being behind the attack.
Last month, the kingdom’s deputy crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, warned that Iran was trying to take over the Middle East and threatened to take direct action. “We will not wait until the battle is in Saudi Arabia, but we will work so the battle is there in Iran,” he said. That was followed by a summit in Riyadh attended by President Trump in which Sunni Muslim nations heard calls to take on “Iran-backed terrorism”.
In a statement promising revenge, the Revolutionary Guard said: “This terrorist attack happened only a week after the meeting between the US president and the backward leaders who support terrorists. The fact that Islamic State has claimed responsibility proves that they were involved in the brutal attack.”
The attacks began mid-morning and were clearly co-ordinated. Four men assaulted the heavily protected parliament complex, killing four of the guards and injuring 25 other people immediately. A fifth person died later in hospital. The attackers then managed to enter the building, firing pistols and rifles and taking hostages, killing a further two members of the Revolutionary Guard and three others. One man came back out and started firing into the street, but was forced back inside by police. It took several hours before police and the Guard managed to control the situation, shooting all four attackers dead.
The Fars news agency said “three or four” other insurgents had attacked the mausoleum of Ayatollah Khomeini, the firebrand anti-western cleric brought to power by the 1979 revolution, who died in 1989.They opened fire, killing a gardener and one other and injuring a number of bystanders. One of the attackers, who was dressed as a woman, then triggered a suicide explosive vest. Photographs showed a large yellow flash outside the building.
Abdolrahman Fazli, the interior minister, said the country’s security council, which is headed by President Rouhani, had been summoned.
The attack outside on the crowd of onlookers suggested a sectarian element to the action. Isis promotes Sunni extremism, regarding Shia Muslims, the majority in Iran, as apostates. Al-Qaeda has rarely if ever carried out attacks against the Islamic Republic, a fact put down by many to the number of its members who fled to Iran from neighbouring Afghanistan in 2001, and remained there either at semi-liberty or under house arrest. The last major terrorist incident in Iran was a 2010 bomb attack on a mosque in Balochistan in the southeast of the country by a breakaway radical Sunni group, Jundullah.
There have been no attacks by Isis, which broke off from al-Qaeda in 2013 following a dispute over leadership of the group’s faction in the Syrian conflict. However, in March it issued a Persian-language video saying it was time to conquer the country and bring it within the Sunni fold.