WSJ (“U.S. Secretly Alerted Iran Ahead of Islamic State Terrorist Attack“):
The U.S. secretly warned Iran that Islamic State was preparing to carry out the terrorist attack early this month that killed more than 80 Iranians in a pair of coordinated suicide bombings, U.S. officials said.
The confidential alert came after the U.S. acquired intelligence that Islamic State’s affiliate in Afghanistan, ISIS-Khorasan, known as ISIS-K, was plotting to attack Iran, they said.
American officials said the information passed to Iran was specific enough about the location and sufficiently timely that it might have proved useful to Tehran in thwarting the attack on Jan. 3 or at least mitigating the casualty toll.
Iran, however, failed to prevent the suicide bombings in the southeastern town of Kerman, which targeted a crowd that was commemorating the anniversary of the death of Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds force. Soleimani was killed in a January 2020 drone attack near the Baghdad airport ordered by then-President Donald Trump.
“Prior to ISIS’s terrorist attack on January 3, 2024, in Kerman, Iran, the U.S. government provided Iran with a private warning that there was a terrorist threat within Iranian borders,” a U.S. official said, using an acronym for Islamic State. “The U.S. government followed a longstanding ‘duty to warn’ policy that has been implemented across administrations to warn governments against potential lethal threats. We provide these warnings in part because we do not want to see innocent lives lost in terror attacks.”
Officials with Iran’s mission to the United Nations didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Despite the American warning, some Iranian hard-liners have suggested that Islamic State perpetrators were linked to the U.S. and Israel. At a ceremony in Kerman honoring the victims, Maj. Gen. Hossein Salami, the most senior Revolutionary Guard commander said Islamic State “has disappeared nowadays,” arguing the jihadists “only act as mercenaries” for U.S. and Israeli interests.
CBS News (“Biden administration warned Iran before terror attack that killed over 80 in Kerman, U.S. officials say“) reports that it was told the same thing, using exactly the same words, which leads me to believe that this was some sort of written release. The report adds:
The American officials declined to offer details about the nature or further specificity about the timing of the warning, the intelligence underlying it, or any response they may have received from Tehran. It could not be determined if Iranian officials took any steps to try to thwart the attacks, the deadliest in decades, based on the U.S. warning.
In recent weeks, President Biden has acknowledged that the U.S. delivered private messages to Iran in regard to attacks conducted by Houthi militias based in Yemen. He did not make mention of any communication regarding the Afganistan-based ISIS-Khorasan, or ISIS-K, terror attack in Iran. Messages are typically delivered via intermediary countries, given the lack of direct diplomatic contact between the US and Iran.
[…]
Administration officials have repeatedly cited the Iranian government as a key fomenter of instability in the region, including in the heated aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas extremists. The Islamic Republic of Iran, led by Shiite clerics, provides funding and weapons for Hamas, and the US considers it to be the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism.
“I would not interpret any kind of change in policy based on anything out there,” State Department deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel said Thursday. Patel declined to confirm any warning was issued but said the U.S. continues to have an “adversarial” relationship with Iran.
The “duty to warn” policy strikes me as a good one. By definition, terrorist attacks target civilians, so we ought to seek to thwart them whenever possible even when the target state is an adversary. Beyond that, it simply makes sense for adversaries to cooperate on matters of mutual interest.
What’s more interesting to me is this coordinated campaign to get the word out, via an unnamed “official,” using the exact language in multiple reports. I don’t imagine the American public, which typically pays next to no attention to foreign affairs, is the target audience.
