Iran is mourning those killed in a suicide bombing targeting a commemoration for a general who died in a US drone strike, as the death toll in the attack rose to at least 89.
Despite the so-called Islamic State (IS) claiming responsibility for the attack, the wider tensions shaking the Middle East during Israel’s war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip became intertwined with the funeral in the usually peaceful city of Kerman, about 510 miles south-east of the capital, Tehran.
The top commander of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard linked the attack to the US.
Gen Hossein Salami said: “If you are a man, fight with us. Why do you kill oppressed and defenceless women and children?”
Iranian state television also sought to link America to the attack. At one point, it re-broadcast comments from 2016 from then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, who wrongly accused then-president Barack Obama of being the “founder” of the extremist group.
Critics have blamed Mr Obama’s decision to pull troops from Iraq in 2011 for allowing the group, once an affiliate of al-Qaida, to thrive and ultimately hold vast swathes of Iraq and Syria in its self-declared caliphate by 2014.
US troops under both Mr Obama and Mr Trump then battled alongside allied forces to retake that territory.
In Wednesday’s attack, one suicide bomber killed himself, then another 20 minutes later as people and emergency workers tried to help the wounded.
The attack targeted a commemoration for Guard Gen Qassem Soleimani, killed in 2020 by a US drone strike as he led its expeditionary Quds Force.
Gen Soleimani had been part of the Iranian response to the Islamic State group in Syria, while focusing on keeping embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad in power. He also had extensive ties to proxy groups around the wider Middle East, including Hamas.
But the US, which killed Gen Soleimani as part of wider tensions over its collapsed nuclear deal with world powers, saw Gen Soleimani as the mastermind behind deadly roadside bombings targeting American soldiers in Iraq.
The two attacks killed at least 89 people and wounded about 280 others, Iranian authorities said.
IS claimed the attack on Thursday in a statement that named the two bombers and described it as part of a new campaign linked to Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip.
On Friday, the intelligence ministry said in a statement published by its website, vaja.ir, that one of the two suicide bombers was a Tajik national. It said the other’s nationality was not clear yet.
The statement added that on Thursday the base of the bombers was identified on the outskirts of Kerman. It said nine people from the terrorists’ team network and its associates had been identified and arrested in six provinces.
