The U.S. secretly passed information to Iran that ISIS terrorists were planning the double-suicide bomb attack that killed 84 people at a memorial for an Iranian general in early January, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The information that the U.S. shared was detailed enough to have allowed Iran to head off the attack, or at least reduce the casualty count, the Journal reported, citing unidentified U.S. officials. The U.S. had reportedly acquired intelligence that ISIS-K, an Afghanistan-based offshoot of the Islamic State, was planning the attack.
Two ISIS suicide bombers blew themselves up in the southern city of Kerman on Jan. 3, as mourners filed into a memorial for Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ assistance to foreign militias including Hezbollah and Hamas. Soleimani was killed in by a U.S. drone near Baghdad airport four years earlier to the day.
“Prior to ISIS’s terrorist attack on January 3, 2024, in Kerman, Iran, the U.S. government provided Iran with a private warning that there was a terrorist threat within Iranian borders,” a U.S. official told the Journal. “The U.S. government followed a longstanding ‘duty to warn’ policy that has been implemented across administrations to warn governments against potential lethal threats. We provide these warnings in part because we do not want to see innocent lives lost in terror attacks.”
It is not clear how or whether the U.S. contacts in Iran shared the information. Gen. Hossein Salami, the Revolutionary Guard’s top commander, said after the attack that the Islamic State was acting on behalf of the U.S. and Israel.
Iranian officials didn’t respond to the U.S. about the warning, it wasn’t clear why the Iranians failed to thwart or blunt the attack the Journal reported.
Islamic State, a Sunni organization has long been at odds with Iran’s Shiite population, which it considers to be infidels, and claimed responsibility for the Kerman attack.