EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell this week declared that the recent killing of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was the head of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear-weapons program that the mullah-led regime continues to deny, was a ‘’criminal act.’’
Speaking at an online event marking the 10th anniversary of the European Union External Service (EEAS), the EU’s diplomatic service, Borrell stated: “This was a criminal act. I am sorry to say but this is not the way you are solving problems. We are not going to prevent Iran going nuclear by killing the experts on nuclear science, and there are people who does not want the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) to revive, and we have been working during these years to keep the deal alive in spite of the American withdrawal,” Borrell said in a reference to the 2015 nuclear deal between the world powers and Iran.
In a possible foreshadowing of how a prospective Biden administration might have reacted, former Obama CIA chief John O. Brennan posted a similar statement on Twitter, alluding to “international law” and even using the phrase “state sponsored terrorism.”
Borrell also wished that the European Union would be able to persuade the United States to return to the nuclear deal and Iran to go back to full compliance with nuclear responsibilities as envisioned by the JCPOA.
The U.S. under the Trump administration withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018 but President-elect Joe Biden has said he would rejoin the nuclear deal.
Who was Mohsen Fakhrizadeh ?
Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the senior Iranian nuclear scientist killed outside of Tehran on November 27, was being “reserved” by the Iranian regime for the day that Iran’s nuclear program would enter a new stage, a former senior Israel Defense Forces Military Intelligence said.
Lt. Col. (res.) Raphael Ofek, of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, said: “Throughout the entire time, Fakhrizadeh was responsible, in the language of physicists who deal with these issues, for weaponization.’’“Among other things, he even arrived as an invited guest to North Korea’s third nuclear weapons test in 2013.”
The stage of accumulating fissionable material—uranium—was not so much under Fakhrizadeh’s responsibility, but rather, this fell under the jurisdiction of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, which is headed by Iranian diplomat Ali Akbar Salehi.
“As soon as there is sufficient fissionable material ready for a bomb, that’s where his role came in,” said Ofek.
In a report published earlier in November, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) stated that Iran has now amassed 12 times the amount of enriched uranium it is permitted to hold under the terms of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), a deal struck between world powers and Tehran intended to constrain its nuclear program.
In 1998, Fakhrizadeh took over the Physics Research Center (known by its acronym, PHRC) of Iran, which became known as the Amad program, described in 2018 by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “a comprehensive program to design, build and test nuclear weapons.”
Netanyahu made the comments while unveiling a cache of files, which came to be known as the nuclear archive, and which was extracted by Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency from a Tehran warehouse.
“After taking over, apparently in 1998, he was head of the Amad program throughout the subsequent years,” said Ofek.
He recalled how, in 2015, before the JCPOA was signed, the IAEA had attempted to interview all of the Iranians involved in the Amad program, and how the Iranian regime had refused to allow Fakhrizadeh to be interviewed. “In short, he is considered a mysterious man,” said Ofek.
Tehran accuses Israel of being behind the killing but no one has claimed responsibility. Amos Yadlin, a former head of the IDF’s intelligence, who is director of the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel Aviv, said he could not “confirm that it was an Israeli action.”
But he stressed that it was a big blow for the Iranian regime, likening it to the killing of Qassem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s elite Quds forces, by the U.S. in January. He said that replacing Fakhrizadeh is going to be tricky for the Iranians as “sometimes there are personalities [for whom]their replacement is very difficult.”
For Yadlin there are four candidates who could have carried out the attack on Fakhrizadeh: “The U.S, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Iranian opposition.” To prepare such an attack would have involved “years” of intelligence work, he said.
Trump reportedly recently asked advisers whether it was an option to take action against Iran’s main nuclear site and Yadlin said “maybe those who conducted the operation now … thought that this is the last chance to give Trump a good excuse to attack the nuclear facilities if the Iranians retaliate.”
”America is very careful. They want to use military power only for limited specific attacks, almost surgical, without possible escalations and the cost of war,” Yadlin stressed.
”The good news is that nobody wants war, not the Iranians, not the Americans, not Israel, not Saudi Arabia. Today, everybody understands that full scale war will only bring their side mostly costs and very limited benefits. So, if Trump can be convinced that there is an operation that is limited and surgical and can be contained without escalations, maybe we will see more surprises before January,” he added.
Saudi Press: ‘a service to mankind’
Following the killing of Fakhrizadeh, numerous articles have appeared in the Saudi media justifying the killing and presenting it as beneficial to the world, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) reported.
Some even went so far as to attack those who have condemned it.
The articles underlined that Fakhrizadeh was no ordinary civilian scientist whose work contributed to mankind, but rather the head of Iran’s malicious nuclear program, which threatens the region and world. Anything that thwarts the Iranian regime’s goal of acquiring nuclear weapons, including the assassination of senior Iranian officials, is a service to mankind, the authors argue.
Some of the articles expressed wonder that anyone could denounce the assassination of a man who had served a criminal regime and worked to build a nuclear bomb with the aim of perpetrating a heinous crime.
It is noteworthy that officially, Saudi Arabia has refrained from condemning the assassination, even though several of its regional allies, among them the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Jordan, did so several days after the fact.
In his Nov. 30 column in the Saudi daily ‘Okaz, Saudi journalist Tariq al-Homayed, former editor of the London-based Saudi Asharq Al-Awsat daily, harshly attacked organizations and states that had denounced the assassination.
He wrote: “Although it is reprehensible to rejoice at someone’s death, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the Iranian scientist and IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] commander who was killed outside Tehran, was not working to develop a COVID vaccine; he was known as ‘the father of the Iranian atomic bomb.’ Thus, it is important to expose those who rushed to offer condolences for the death of this Iranian scientist—whose killing is no less a blow [to the Iranian regime]than the killing of [IRGC Quds Force commander] Qassem Soleimani…
“The first to offer condolences and to consider the killing of the Iranian scientist an act of terror were, of course, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Hamas, the Turkish and Qatari foreign ministries and the [Bashar] Assad regime in Syria. They all extended condolences, condemned the targeted killing and called it an act of terrorism. The Houthis [in Yemen]are sure to follow their example …
“The condemnation of the killing by these terror organizations, and by terror-supporting countries such as Turkey and Qatar, reflects their solidarity with Iran. As mentioned, the Iranian scientist who was killed was not engaged in helping humanity … but in an evil project and a wicked plan against the entire region. [This means that] those who condemn his killing … are the region’s biggest hypocrites—how can they condemn the killing of a man who devoted his life to building an evil bomb for an evil regime when they do not condemn Iran’s killing of unarmed people across the region?
“Iran is the reason for the deaths of Syrians, Iraqis and Lebanese. It is destroying Yemen and sheltering all the terrorist elements in the region. The clearest example of this was provided by Al-Qaeda’s No. 2 leader—who was killed recently in Tehran, not in Afghanistan! … So how can action against the evil [Iranian] leadership be regarded as reprehensible terror? …
“The countries that consoled Iran and condemned the killing of the Iranian scientist are essentially Iran’s partners in shedding Arab blood and in sowing destruction throughout our region, from Iraq through Syria to Lebanon and Yemen. … ‘’.
“People need to know that Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was not a civilian scientist who taught at a university or worked at a lab, but an IRGC commander and a senior official in Iran’s defense ministry who was in charge of the nuclear project.”
In his Nov. 29 column in Asharq Al-Awsat, Abdullah bin Bajad ‘Otaibi wrote that over the past 40 years, the Iranian regime has used terrorism and assassination against its opponents at home and abroad, and shouldn’t be surprised that its rivals have chosen to respond in kind,
“Regimes choose their weapons according to how they see themselves, who they are, and what they aspire to. A tool used by the Iranian regime is [spreading]chaos and terror around the world, along with everything that this entails: bombings, assassinations, blood-soaked demonstrations and [use of]militias.’’
“People need to know that Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was not a civilian scientist who taught at a university or worked at a lab, but an IRGC commander and a senior official in Iran’s defense ministry who was in charge of the nuclear project. Whoever decided to assassinate him wanted to harm the entire [Iranian] regime, just as [this regime harms]its opponents all over the world. So far, nobody knows for certain who planned and carried out this assassination.’’
“One of the Iranian regime’s problems is that it has a large number of enemies around the world, and there is hardly a single country where it has not interfered in some way or another. As a result, when one of its members is assassinated, it cannot quickly point at any particular country based on reliable evidence. [Instead], it always chooses [to blame]Israel, so as to use its security and intelligence failure as a tool to foment religious and sectarian [sentiment]in an effort to boost the slogans of the regime and strengthen its ideology.’’
In a Nov. 30 article in ‘Okaz, Mohammed al-Saed claimed that the Iranian regime seeks to acquire nuclear weapons so as to take over the world, such that disrupting these efforts, let alone assassinating senior Iranian officials connected with the nuclear program, is a service to mankind that should not be condemned. He wrote:
“The assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, an IRGC commander, was in fact not so different from bombing the Iranian nuclear reactor. In terms of its severity and its impact on the Iranian regime, this assassination is the closest thing to a bombing of a nuclear reactor which causes a real nuclear explosion—just without the collateral damage.