Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Humiliated by Attack, Vow to Retaliate

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Soldiers in dress uniform lay prone in the street. Others, apparently heavily armed, faced the assailants, then threw themselves to the ground without firing back. Some just ran for their lives.

Captured on video and widely shared on social media, the attack over the weekend on a military parade in Iran by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps was a humiliating blow, and on Monday the elite military unit and its allies vowed revenge against Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United States and even the United Arab Emirates.

Iran’s critics, including the United Arab Emirates and the United States, responded unsympathetically, stopping short of describing the attack as terrorism, even though it was claimed by the Islamic State group, among others.

The Revolutionary Guards were most likely not carrying loaded weapons, in keeping with practice at most military parades, but that did not lessen the regional embarrassment of an attack that killed 25 — including some children and other civilians who had been among the spectators, according to Iran’s state news agency, IRNA.

A widely posted image on Facebook showed members of the Revolutionary Guards military band, wearing tricolor sashes and carrying musical instruments, hiding in a drainage ditch — described by many commenters as a sewer — during the attack. “They have returned to where they came from,” crowed a Syrian critic, Fadila Kashan.

In a speech Monday at a funeral ceremony for the victims of the attack in Ahvaz, Iran, the deputy commander of the Revolutionary Guards, Hossein Salami, said, “You have seen our revenge before,” according to the news agency Al Ahed, which is run by the pro-Iranian organization Hezbollah in Lebanon. “You will see that our response will be crushing and devastating, and you will regret what you have done.”

The Ahvaz National Resistance, a little-known group with roots among the Arab minority of Iran, claimed responsibility for the attack Saturday, as did the Islamic State. It was the worst attack inside the country since an Islamic State-claimed assault on Parliament in 2017.

Ahvaz is the capital of Khuzestan province in southwestern Iran, where many of the country’s Arab minority live. The Islamic State posted another video that it said showed three of its fighters preparing the attack, according to IRNA. Two of the fighters were speaking Arabic with an Iraqi accent.

Iranian news accounts said there had been four assailants, who disguised themselves in Iranian uniforms and attacked from behind the viewing bleachers at the parade. They said two of the assailants had been killed and the other two captured.

The intelligence minister, Mahmoud Alavi, suggested that a larger group had been behind the attack, saying, “A large part of this network has already been arrested,” state news outlets reported.

Iranian officials were quick to focus blame on Gulf countries, as well as the United States and Israel.

A prominent academic in the emirate of Abu Dhabi, Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, added fuel to that fire by saying the attack had been part of an effort to bring the fight against the Iranian government inside the country. Abdulla, a retired professor at Zayed University, has frequently been described as an adviser to the Emirati government and as close to the crown prince of Abu Dhabi.

His statement, in a Twitter post Saturday, suggested support for the attack. “A military attack against a military target is not a terrorist act,” he said.

Iran has strong business ties with parts of the Emirates, despite troubled diplomatic relations. The Iranian Foreign Ministry summoned an Emirati envoy to complain about Abdulla’s remarks.

“The chargé d’affaires was warned that the United Arab Emirates would be held accountable for individuals affiliated with official Emirati agencies that show clear support for terrorist acts,” the ministry said in a statement.

Analysts said the Revolutionary Guards were bound to react strongly, particularly because of the humiliating nature of the attack. The Guards often operate independently of the Iranian government and its slightly more moderate leaders.

“They’re going to go for a strong reaction to remedy the horrible image this attack has given them, the imagery that they are running away, falling down on the ground and so on,” said Ahmad Moussalli, a regional expert and professor of political science at the American University of Beirut. “They could correct that with a heavy military blow somewhere.”

He said that he doubted the Revolutionary Guards would risk a direct military confrontation with the Emirates or Saudi Arabia, and that the response would more likely occur in Syria or Iraq. The attack, though embarrassing, Moussalli said, “shows that the Gulf and the United States is targeting Iran now, and gives Iran a pretext to flex their military power.” The Emirates were not the only regional power cheering on internal resistance to the Iranian regime recently.

Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, suggested a year ago that it was time to turn from external pressure on Iran to internal pressure. The crown prince, in repeated interviews in the United States this year, also likened Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to Hitler, saying at one point, “I believe the Iranian supreme leader makes Hitler look good.”

Saudi Arabia had also bitterly opposed the nuclear deal Iran signed with the United States and other world leaders, and it had cheered the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the agreement.

President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, fueled claims of a U.S. campaign against Iran when he addressed an “Iranian uprising summit” in New York on Saturday — hours after the attack in Ahvaz — saying that a leadership change in Iran was inevitable because of U.S. sanctions.

“I don’t know when we’re going to overthrow them,” Giuliani said, according to a Reuters report. “It could be in a few days, months, a couple of years. But it’s going to happen.” The meeting had been called by Iranian exiles in the United States.

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki R. Haley, insisted that the Trump administration was not seeking a leadership change in Iran. In response to President Hassan Rouhani’s criticism of the United States, she said in an interview with CNN: “He can blame us all he wants. The thing he’s got to do is look in the mirror.” In the United Arab Emirates, Abdulla doubled down on his critical comments. “If Iran is capable of carrying out its threats, let them start by retaliating against the Israelis, who launched more than 200 raids on its military bases and its Revolutionary Guard facilities in Syria,” he said in a Twitter message on Sunday.

After attacks in Tehran last year, the Revolutionary Guards said that Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United States were responsible, but most government officials blamed terrorists. This time, Iranian leaders described the attack not as terrorism, but as an act of foreign aggression — a significant difference, said Hussein Allawi, a national security analyst at Al Nahrain University in Iraq.

“The Iranian authorities denied that a terrorist organization did the operation,” he said “and instead it accused states in the Middle East of carrying out the operation, even though signs of terrorism in the operation were clear.”

Despite the bellicose language from the supreme leader and the Revolutionary Guards in Iran, other officials seemed to adopt a more cautious reaction, at least initially.

Speaking at the funeral for the Ahvaz victims on Monday, the deputy commander of Iran’s regular army, Brig. Gen. Nozar Nemati, said it was too early to say whether Western intelligence agencies had been involved in the attack and suggested it may have originated closer to home.

“They are the same people who were followers of Saddam at the onset of the war and they are pursuing the same goal,” IRNA quoted him as saying. He was referring to former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who fought a bitter war in an attempt to destroy Iran in the 1980s.