After Pakistan fired at targets on Iranian territory in retaliation for attacks carried out by Iran on Pakistani territory, both states now say they want to defuse the situation. The military response was followed by a warning. On January 18, senior security sources in Pakistan said that the armed forces were on “extremely” high alert and that any further “misadventure” from the Iranian side would be met “forcefully.”
Pakistan fired at targets on Iranian territory, particularly in the border town of Saravan, after Iran targeted militants on Pakistani territory two days before. Iranian state television said that three women and four children, who were reportedly not Iranian nationals, had been killed in a village near the border.
Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry said it had carried out a “series of highly coordinated and specifically targeted precision military strikes” against “terrorist hideouts” in Sistan and Baluchistan, a province in southeastern Iran. It said the strikes were carried out “in light of credible intelligence of impending large-scale terrorist activities” and that several “terrorists” had been killed. Iranian state media reported the deaths of nine people.
Iran, for its part, not only conducted attacks on Pakistani territory but earlier this week also attacked targets in Syria and Iraq. Several Iranian missiles hit Erbil, the capital of the autonomous Kurdistan region in northern Iraq.
IRNA, Iran’s state news agency, reported that Revolutionary Guards paramilitary units had attacked “a spy headquarters” of Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency, as well as a “gathering of anti-Iranian terrorist groups.” According to Iraqi reports, at least four civilians were killed and six injured in the attack.
The Revolutionary Guards said that in occupied Syria, they had “identified and destroyed” the gathering places of commanders of the so-called Islamic State (IS) terror group by firing a series of ballistic missiles. Sara Bazoobandi from the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA) said the strikes were linked to blasts that occurred in early January in the Iranian city of Kerman, near the grave of the former Revolutionary Guards commander Qassem Soleimani, who was killed by the US in 2020.
Islamic State claimed responsibility for the January attack, which killed approximately 90 people. “The government has barely commented on the attack so far,” said Bazoobandi, who added that little was known as to why. “In particular, the government and security authorities cannot explain why they were unable to prevent such an attack.”
Bazoobandi said Israel’s deadly late December airstrike on Sayyed Razi Mousavi, a Revolutionary Guards general in Syria, also caused considerable consternation among the Iranian regime’s supporters.
She said that if the regime was now attacking targets beyond its borders in an unsystematic way, it was to demonstrate that it is still strong. “This would also fit in with the explanation that the Kurdish businessman killed in the attack in Syria was a spy working for Israel. Ultimately, the regime’s aim is to keep its supporters happy with random attacks.” Political scientist Ali Fathollah-Nejad, the director of the Center for Middle East and Global Order (CMEG), a Berlin-based think tank, had a similar view. On X, formerly Twitter, he wrote that Iran’s attacks were “primarily a diversionary maneuver by the Islamic Republic, motivated by domestic and regional concerns.”