Two explosions minutes apart Wednesday in Iran targeted a commemoration for a prominent general slain in a U.S. drone strike in 2020, killing at least 103 people and wounding over 141 others as the Middle East remains on edge over Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for what Iranian state media called a “terroristic” attack shortly after the blasts in Kerman, about 510 miles southeast of the capital, Tehran.
While Israel has carried out attacks in Iran over its nuclear program, it has conducted targeted assassinations, not mass-casualty bombings. Radical Islamic extremist groups from the Sunni sect, including the Islamic State group, have conducted large-scale attacks in the past that killed civilians in Shiite-majority Iran, though not in relatively peaceful Kerman.
Iranian state television quoted Babak Yektaparast, a spokesman for the country’s emergency services, for the casualty figure.
The blasts struck an event marking the fourth anniversary of the killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Revolutionary Guard’s elite Quds Force. who died in a U.S. drone strike in Iraq in January 2020. The explosions occurred near his grave site in Kerman,
Authorities said some people were injured while fleeing afterward. Footage suggested that the second blast occurred some 15 minutes after the first. A delayed second explosion is often used by radical Islamic terrorists to target emergency personnel responding to the scene and inflict more casualties.
People could be heard screaming in state TV footage.
Kerman’s deputy governor, Rahman Jalali, called the attack “terroristic,” without elaborating. Iran has multiple foes who could be behind the assault, including exile groups, Islamic terror organizations, and state actors. Iran has supported terror groups Hamas as well as the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthi rebels.
Soleimani was the architect of Iran’s regional military activities and is hailed as a national icon among supporters of Iran’s theocracy. He also helped secure Syrian dictator Bashar Assad’s government after the 2011 Arab Spring protests against him turned into a civil, and later a regional, war that still rages today.
Relatively unknown in Iran until the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Soleimani’s popularity and mystique grew after American officials called for his killing over his help arming militants with penetrating roadside bombs that killed and maimed U.S. troops.
A decade and a half later, Soleimani had become Iran’s most recognizable battlefield commander, ignoring calls to enter politics but growing as powerful, if not more, than its civilian leadership.
Ultimately, a drone strike launched by the Trump administration killed the general, part of escalating incidents that followed America’s 2018 withdrawal from the Tehran nuclear deal.
Soleimani’s death has drawn large processions in the past. At his funeral in 2020, a stampede broke out and at least 56 people were killed and more than 200 were injured as thousands thronged the procession.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.