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By Saeed Shah and Benoit Faucon/The Wall Street Journal r
Islamabad, January 18: Iran’s military tested and found a limit to its ability to project power this week as Pakistan responded to a missile attack with the first publicly acknowledged airstrike on Iranian territory in decades.
The Pakistani retaliation followed Iran’s first direct attacks in neighbouring countries since Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza began in October.
Iran-backed militant groups such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah and the Houthis of Yemen have been attacking Israel and U.S. interests in the Middle East since the war began. But in recent days, after a U.S.-led force struck the Houthis, Iran stepped out from behind its militant allies and attacked what Tehran said were Israeli spies in Iraq and terrorists in Pakistan and Syria.
The strikes served as a show of force to Iran’s foreign foes and to an Iranian public that has been demanding revenge for a Jan. 3 terrorist attack that killed dozens of people in the Iranian city of Kerman.
For Tehran, where leaders often lump together the country’s enemies—claiming for example that the U.S. and Israel support Islamic State, which claimed responsibility for the Kerman bombings—Iran’s strikes this week showed how it might target anyone if it chose to do so.
“It’s a message to the U.S. and Israel,” said Joel Rayburn, a former U.S. special envoy for Syria. “It demonstrates [Iran’s] willingness to get directly involved as opposed to proxies.”
Pakistan, which isn’t in the Middle East, got sucked into that demonstration of Iran’s resolve on Tuesday. Iran said it used missiles and drones to target an Iranian insurgent group in Pakistan, Jaish al-Adl. The group had previously claimed responsibility for the killing of 11 police officers in a December attack in eastern Iran.
Pakistan retaliated on Thursday with airstrikes against what it said were Pakistani separatists in an Iranian border village. Ten Pakistani people were killed, local Deputy Gov. Alireza Marhamati told state media.
Iranian Strikes Draw Pakistani Pushback
While Tehran condemned the Pakistani strike, both sides offered muted rhetoric, referring to their relationship as brotherly, a signal that neither wished the tit-for-tat strikes to escalate.
“Iran is telegraphing to the United States that if you come after us, we can create chaos,” said Kamran Bokhari, a senior director at the New Lines Institute, a think tank based in Washington.
Iran’s actions came shortly after a U.S.-led force began strikes on the Houthis in response to the group’s firing at merchant ships and U.S. Navy vessels in the Red Sea. The U.S. launched a fifth round of strikes on Houthi weaponry in Yemen on Thursday, and President Biden said that the strikes would continue until the Houthis stop their attacks.
Iran’s message in its own direct strikes was as much domestic as international. Tehran had said that the one known suicide bomber in the Jan. 3 attack had entered the country through Pakistan. Islamabad didn’t respond to a request for comment on that allegation.
Iran’s strikes this week were widely publicized on Iranian state media, which also went into great detail on the types of projectiles used in the attacks. On Monday, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said they had struck Islamic State targets in northern Syria from Iran using a precision-guided missile that has a range of about 900 miles—meaning it could also reach Israel.
On the same day, Iran launched ballistic missiles at what it said were Israeli spy bases in Erbil, in Iraq’s ethnic Kurdish region, in retaliation for the killings of Iranian officers and militant allies. Israel hasn’t commented on the killings.
“Iran is responding to popular demand to retaliate by striking nonstate actors,” said Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa at London’s Royal Institute of International Affairs. But it is also “defining its red lines in response to the war in the region.”
Iranian officials have long insisted that Iran always reacts proportionally and largely symbolically when under attack, rather than escalating conflict.
Tehran appeared to have miscalculated, some experts said.
“It was a PR stunt. But they overplayed their hand,” said a security adviser to the U.S. in the Middle East. “They were under pressure to show agency. But they didn’t achieve much other than making Pakistan angry.”
Pakistan, a nuclear-armed nation with a large military, couldn’t afford to let the strike on its western border go unanswered as it faces a giant adversary, India, on its eastern border, said Ejaz Haider, a defense analyst based in the Pakistani city of Lahore.
“This strike was a signal to Iran to back off, but it was also just as much a signal to India,” said Haider.
The U.S., which has endeavored since the Gaza war began to stave off a regional conflict, condemned the recent Iranian strikes. “We’ve seen Iran violate the sovereign borders of three of its neighbors in just the past couple of days,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said. “We don’t think it’s in anyone’s interest, including Iran, to see this conflict escalated.”
The U.S. designates a number of the parties in the regional conflicts as terrorist organizations, including Iran’s allies the Houthis, Hezbollah and Hamas, and its foes Islamic State and Jaish al-Adl, and the Biden administration has sought to draw a distinction between its strikes in Yemen and Iran’s recent actions.
After the first U.S.-led strikes on the Houthi rebels in Yemen last week, Biden said Washington had sent a private message to Iran about its Houthi allies’ actions against shipping. “We’re confident we’re well-prepared,” he told reporters Saturday.
Biden weighed in again after the Pakistan strikes on Thursday. “Iran is not particularly well liked in the region,” he said.
“These are two well-armed nations and we don’t want to see an escalation of any armed conflict in the region,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said. The U.S. is in touch with Pakistani counterparts, he said.
Kirby also noted that Iran struck Pakistan first, calling it “another reckless attack, another example of Iran’s destabilizing behavior in the region.”
The Iranian strikes don’t represent a significant deterrent, some current and former U.S. officials said. To hit this week’s “soft targets,” Iran faced nothing close to the sort of air defenses that it would have to overcome to directly attack Israel, said Andrew Tabler, a former Middle East director at the White House’s National Security Council.
Islamabad and Tehran have long accused each other of harboring militants, but have maintained uneasy and not openly hostile relations.
Pakistan said that it used drones, rockets and missiles fired from aircraft in Thursday’s attack. “Maximum care was taken to avoid collateral damage,” the Pakistani military said. “Going forward, dialogue and cooperation is deemed prudent in resolving bilateral issues between the two neighbouring brotherly countries.”
Tehran described Pakistan’s strikes as “unbalanced and unacceptable,” while also characterizing Pakistan as a friend and pointing to Israel as Iran’s foremost enemy.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran always adheres to its policy of good neighborliness and does not allow its enemies and terrorist allies to strain these relations,” Iran’s foreign ministry said.
Aresu Eqbali and Sabrina Siddiqui contributed to this article.
Write to Saeed Shah at saeed.shah@wsj.com and Benoit Faucon at benoit.faucon@wsj.com
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