The US is on high alert and preparing for a possible attack by Iran targeting Israeli or American assets in the region in response to Israel’s strike on the Iranian embassy in Syria, a US official has said .
“We’re definitely at a high state of vigilance,” the official said, confirming a CNN report that said an attack could come in the next week.
Suspected Israeli warplanes bombed Iran’s embassy in Damascus on Monday in a strike that killed an Iranian military commander and marked a major escalation in Israel’s war with its regional adversaries.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has said that seven Iranian military advisers died in the strike, including Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior commander in its Quds Force, which is an elite foreign espionage and paramilitary arm.
Iran has said it reserves the right ‘to take a decisive response’.
US President Joe Biden discussed the threat from Iran in a phone call on Thursday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“Our teams have been in regular and continuous contact since then. The United States fully supports the defence of Israel against threats from Iran,” a senior Biden administration official said.
Iranian police yesterday announced the arrest of a senior operative of Islamic State with two other members of the group accused of planning a suicide attack during next week’s celebrations marking the end of Ramadan.
The police said Mohammad Zaker, known as ‘Ramesh’, and the other two were arrested in Karaj, west of the capital Tehran, following clashes, according to Iranian media. Eight others accompanying the men were also detained, they said.
Islamic State claimed responsibility for two explosions in Iran in January that killed more than 100 people and wounded scores at a memorial marking the fourth anniversary of the assassination of top commander Qassem Soleimani in Iraq in 2020 by a US drone.
Iran arrested 35 people in January, including a commander of Islamic State’s Afghanistan-based branch ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K), who it said were linked to the twin bombings on January 3 in the southeastern city of Kerman.
On March 22, in the deadliest attack inside Russia in 20 years, gunmen opened fire with automatic weapons at a concert hall near Moscow, killing at least 144 people in a rampage claimed by Islamic State.
US intelligence sources said ISIS-K had carried out both the January 3 attacks in Iran and the March 22 shootings in Moscow.
Sources familiar with the matter said Iran had tipped off Russia of the possibility of a major attack on its soil
In 2022 Islamic State took responsibility for an attack on a shrine in Iran that killed 15 people. Earlier attacks claimed by Islamic State include twin bombings in 2017 that targeted Iran’s parliament and the tomb of the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Islamic State once occupied large swathes of Iraq and Syria, imposing a reign of terror.
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