by Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress
By: Center For The Study Of The Presidency
Tags: News, Iran, Australian Politics, National Security, China

Iran’s Top Nuclear Scientist Killed Outside Tehran

Joshua C. Huminski

The Scene of the Assassination — Wikimedia Commons/Fars News Agency

On 27 November, Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was assassinated in Absard, east of Tehran. In an apparent ambush, the man who U.S. and Israeli officials describe as the mastermind of Iran’s nuclear program, was killed as he travelled with his wife and bodyguards. He was buried on Monday, was granted martyr status and given a full state funeral.

How Iran will respond remains unclear. At Fakhrizadeh’s memorial ceremony, Iran’s defense minister, Brig. Gen. Amir Hatami, warned “We chase the criminals to the end.” “No crime, no assassination and no stupid act will go unanswered by the Iranian people. They must know that they will be punished for their actions” Hatami said. For his part President Hassan Rouhani suggested that Iran may hold out until the end of the Trump administration and look to President Biden before acting. Speaking of Trump and Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Rouhani said, “Their pressure era is coming to an end and the global conditions are changing.”

Following the killing of Major General Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force, in Baghdad earlier this year, Iran launched a salvo of ballistic missiles at an American facility in Iraq. No lives were lost as there was forewarning of the attack. Iran later shot down a Ukrainian Air commercial aircraft it mistook for an American military plane, killing all aboard and possibly blunting their response.

What the assassination means for the incoming Biden administration is unclear (and is dealt with in far greater detail and expertise by Michael, below). In anticipation of a possible kinetic Iranian response, the United States withdrew some staff from its embassy in Baghdad as part of a “de-risking” effort. At least politically, Iran is already responding. The conservative-dominated parliament passed a law authorizing the country to increase its uranium enrichment beyond the levels approved under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the Iran nuclear deal — and to suspend international inspections, if sanctions were not removed by February 2021.

Undoubtedly the assassination will put pressure on the incoming Biden administration, but Iran finds itself in a difficult position. Tehran needs the sanctions to be withdrawn to stimulate the economy and consequently needs to be flexible on the nuclear program and attendant concessions, but domestic pressures mean it cannot allow the assassination (let alone the other killings, discussed below) to go without a response. Too much of a response will all but ensure that a nuclear deal will be off the table. Too little may not satisfy the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps or the public.

The assassination of Fakhrizadeh came after news broke that Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, who went by the nom de guerre Abu Muhammad al-Masri, al-Qa’ida’s number two, was killed in August in Tehran. Allegedly shot by Israeli agents, al-Masri was killed with his wife, the widow of Hamza bin Laden, Osama bin Laden’s son. No country claimed responsibility for the killing and, interestingly, al-Qa’ida never announced al-Masri’s killing. Iran, for its part, was also quiet about the assassination, but this is less surprising as Tehran is unlikely to want to advertise the presence of al-Qa’ida leadership in the country.

Shortly after Fakhrizadeh was killed, another IRGC commander was also killed in a drone strike near the Iraq-Syria border. The killing of Fakhrizadeh, the hit on al-Masri, and the strike on the IRGC commander all reflect poorly on the IRGC itself and the government in Tehran. The IRGC is looking more impotent and less effective and may feel compelled to demonstrate its capabilities in a more visible fashion if nothing else to demonstrate to the Iranian public that it is still a force with which to be reckoned.

That the assassination took place is not surprising. Indeed, it is a logical evolution of the campaign to stall Iran’s nuclear program. Over the last decade there have been numerous attacks against Iran’s nuclear scientists alongside a concerted effort to undermine the program from the equipment and process side e.g. Stuxnet and the centrifuges. While equipment is more easily replaced, personnel and knowledge are not. Nuclear physics is as near to rocket science as possible, and while Fakhrizadeh may have been more of a manager of the program at this stage in his career, his assassination sends a signal to other would-be nuclear scientists and engineers.

How the ambush was carried out is unclear. Initial reports suggested that at least 12 attackers were involved along with a car bomb, which resulted in a firefight with the bodyguards.

Iran’s Fars News Agency — connected to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps — later alleged that a remote-controlled machine gun, mounted on a pickup truck was used and then self-destructed.

This confusion over what actually happened is likely part of an internal battle between the various ministries within the Iranian government and the IRGC to avoid blame and responsibility for the security failure, and previous failures, as noted above. Neither the intelligence ministry nor the IRGC Intelligence arm want to take responsibility for Fakhrizadeh’s death and almost certainly both are seeking to leverage the crisis to advance their position vis-à-vis the other.

Ali Shamkhani, Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran told state TV that “This was a very complicated assassination that was carried out remotely with electronic devices.” He added, “We have some clues but surely the ‘Monafeghin’ group was involved and the criminal element behind it is the Zionist regime [Israel] and Mossad.” Monafeghin is a term used by the Iranian government to refer to the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), an umbrella bloc of Iranian opposition groups.

The use of a remotely operated weapons system is certainly not beyond the realm of possibility. Indeed, there are many such systems on the defense market today. These systems are typically used for area-denial, along borders, or other fixed locations where there are fewer variables and precision and timing are not as critical. One would also expect Iran to display the alleged system or parts of the system to accompany the claims. Iran was quick to display what was alleged to be a RQ-170 unmanned aerial vehicle that landed after a malfunction in the country.

Moreover, the margin for error and the countless variables that could go wrong in such a system would suggest that this is more Hollywood than reality. The suggestion of a Michael Bay-esque plot is more likely to be an attempt by Iran to deflect from the fact that there was either a foreign assassination team (or teams) in the country, that there are dissident Iranian groups operating domestically, and in either case that there was a massive security and intelligence failure on the part of the IRGC. This is to say nothing of the fact that it reports suggest Fakhrizadeh exited his bulletproof vehicle at the beginning of the ambush. Had he not done so, he would likely have survived the encounter.