Everything was choreographed. Minutes before Iran launched the first wave of drones that led yesterday’s early morning mass attack against Israel, a group of young people were changing the sign that dominated Tehran’s Palestine Square. The photo of General Muhammad Reza Zahedi, the highest-ranking commander killed in the attack on the Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus on April 1, was replaced by another showing an Israeli flag pierced by missiles. On both posters the message was written in Persian and Hebrew.
“Next time it will be even bigger”, said the slogan that dominated the square when the drones and missiles were already flying towards Israeli territory. In the end, and after days of speculation about what the announced response would be, Tehran showed the cards: a combination of more than 300 drones and missiles launched mostly from its territory that, as they warned yesterday, only sought to attack two clear targets : the military base from which the attack on the diplomatic compound in Syria was launched and the intelligence unit that has led all operations for the past six months.
Support from allied militias in Tehran, widely thought to lead the attack, hardly seemed anecdotal. Moments later, a crowd of followers of the Islamic Republic gathered in this same square to celebrate what the authorities consider a “victory”. An image that was repeated in many other cities of the country where chants of “Death to America” ??and “Death to Israel” or “Allahu akbar” were heard in the wee hours of the morning.
“Iran had to do it. Israel had attacked their consulate and this is our territory. It was done in self-defense,” explained Xiba, a university professor of languages ??who was waiting for the bus in the same square decorated with Palestinian flags late yesterday afternoon.
“It’s been many years since Israel has lost scientists and soldiers and Iran did nothing,” this woman justified. Ramin, a dentist who was having a coffee on the other side of the square, agreed with Xiba and pointed out that this time it had not been an arbitrary attack by Iran, nor an action through the allied militias, but an act of “defense”. “Any other country would have done the same. And Iran showed that it had the means to carry it out,” he said.
The position of both was in line with the message Iran wanted to send yesterday after the attack. “Iran has created a new equation”, assured the top commander of the Guardians of the Revolution, General Hussein Salami, which showed that the “war in the shadows” that Iran and Israel have waged for years now he went on to give himself up openly.
After decades of confrontation, which began with the creation of the Islamic Republic in 1979, Iran responded for the first time directly on Israeli soil. It left behind the strategy of “strategic patience”, which Iran talked about so much for years, and marked the red lines for the future. “From now on, to any attack against Iran’s interests, personalities or citizens, we will respond from Iran,” Salami said on public television.
Hours later, a photo was made public of Salami in the company of other senior military officials in the command room from where they ordered and followed the attack. Among them was also the supreme head of the Iranian military forces, also the General of the Revolutionary Guards, Muhammad Bagheri, who also used Iranian television to warn Israel of a more serious response if it attacked them again .
Bagheri made it clear that Iran was ending its “response”, that the objectives had been met, but also announced that Tehran had warned Washington that any support for an Israeli response would represent an attack on its bases in the region. Iran wanted to emphasize in multiple ways that it was far from having used its full response capacity. The country remained on alert yesterday.
Foreign Minister Amir Abdollahian, who intervened before the diplomatic corps accredited to Iran, defined the operation as “limited and minimal”. He assured that he had notified the countries of the region of the action 72 hours in advance with a response that he defined as “legitimate defense” and assured, as foreseen from the beginning, that the Iranian action not only it had been announced in time, but it had also been designed after much negotiation so as not to provoke a larger escalation. “Bravo to the Guardians of the Revolution”, said President Ebrahim Raisi, who pointed out that they had “taught the Zionist regime a lesson”.
But not everyone in Iran thought the same. Amir, a 25-year-old trader who claims that he was a follower of the system for years, said that everything was choreographed to “save face”.
“They had to respond in order not to look bad with those who cry ‘Death to America’ and with those who support them in the region, but look how many missiles reached their destination. How can they say that this is a victory?”, assured this young man, who asked not to forget that many of the children of the authorities live in the West. “With this, what they are going to cause is that the dollar will go up, that prices will go up and that our lives will be more miserable”, said Amir, who assured that he was not afraid.
It is not the same as Sima, a 22-year-old student. Yesterday, she was afraid of a bigger attack, like many. “My father told me about his experience in the war with Iraq, the fear of missiles. I don’t want that, I just want to live quietly and in peace”, he said.
