Hossein Taeb, who serves as head of intelligence for the elite Revolutionary Guards, revealed what was described as a “Hebrew-Arab"—a reference to Israel and neighboring Arab nations—plan several years in the making to assassinate Major General Qassim Soleimani, leader of the top Iranian forces’ expeditionary Quds Force. The conspiracy allegedly involved the hiring of a three-person team tasked with detonating over 1,100 pounds of explosives in an underground tunnel beneath a prayer hall dedicated to Soleimani’s late father in Kerman province.
The attackers planned to enter Iran during Fatimiya and Muharram—Islamic periods of mourning for the deaths of the Prophet Muhammad’s daughter, and her son, Imam Hussein, respectively—knowing where Soleimani annually attended the congregation. Taeb said that “with this vicious act, they were trying to launch a religious war and say it was an act of domestic vengeance,” as quoted by the Guards’ official news service.
Taeb said that Iran had been monitoring the militants even during their training abroad and that with “divine exhortation and meticulous intelligence work,” they were captured last month. He claimed that the would-be assassins were so confident in their plan they reported guarantees of success directly to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Soleimani is an Iran-Iraq War veteran with decades of experience in operations beyond the Islamic Republic’s territory, especially in advising and training allied Shiite Muslim militias, which have grown powerful and influential in Lebanon, Iraq and Syria. Such groups have played a major role in battling Sunni Islamist insurgencies led by Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State militant group (ISIS), but were also considered a major threat by Israel and its ally, the United States.
In an unprecedented television interview aired Tuesday with the office of Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Soleimani described his role in assisting Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah to narrowly escape Israeli airborne assassination attempts that nearly killed him too during Lebanon and Israel’s 2006 war. Nasrallah, who was also interviewed, appeared in a photo Tuesday alongside Soleimani and Khamenei.
That same day, Soleimani addressed current U.S.-Iran frictions at a national gathering of Revolutionary Guards leaders. Relations between the longtime foes have deteriorated significantly since President Donald Trump’s exit from the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran in spite of its support by other major powers, and the U.S. has since increasingly sanctioned Iran and declared the Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization.
As tensions flared over the summer, the Revolutionary Guards shot down a spy drone they claimed had entered Iranian territory near the Strait of Hormuz—an account disputed by the Pentagon. Soleimani said the event had shown “the dignified corps defeated the largest and most well-equipped army in the world, the U.S. Army, and showed the world its futility,” according to the semi-official Tasnim News Agency.
Soleimani has been a top target of Israeli forces for some time and Netanyahu has expanded his country’s own semi-secret regional assassination campaigns in recent years. Israeli forces have conducted hundreds of strikes against alleged Iran-associated targets backing the Syrian government in its eight-year war against rebels and jihadis.
This campaign is widely believed to have been extended to Lebanon and Iraq, where a commander of the Iran-supported Popular Mobilization Forces was killed in an unclaimed August strike on his convoy near the Al-Qaim crossing with Syria. Israel has accused Soleimani and other Revolutionary Guards commanders of using allied positions across these neighboring countries to transport personnel and equipment capable of targeting the country, a task potentially made easier with the recent reopening of the border between Al-Qaim and Al-Bukamal.
Two days before Soleimani’s speech, Revolutionary Guards commander Hosseini Salami threatened Israeli directly Monday, telling military leaders that “this deviant regime must be removed from the geography of the world and this is no longer a dream, but an achievable goal,” as cited by Tasnim’s report on the Guards’ press release.
Israel has also joined the U.S. along with top European powers and Saudi Arabia in blaming Iran for targeting Saudi oil facilities last month in strikes claimed by Yemen’s Zaidi Shiite Muslim movement Ansar Allah, or the Houthis, which they claim was backed by Tehran. Iran has denied these claims and has called for closer regional cooperation with Arab states and the lifting of unilateral U.S. sanctions to restart diplomacy.
