Iran’s top covert operator is dead at American hands and Iran’s Supreme Leader says he’s aiming for “severe revenge” against the U.S. for the attack. But what could that look like?
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Iran has a number of options at its disposal to respond to the U.S. assassination of Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani and has spent decades developing the plans and forces to prepare for these kinds of contingencies. The Islamic Republic’s military is no match for the U.S. in a conventional fight, so any response is likely to be asymmetric, involving proxy groups and denials of attribution and responsibility.
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Iran’s next steps are likely to be driven more by factors other than their expressed desire to respond and the options available to do it. Instead, the primary constraints on Iranian retaliation are political and likely come from Iran’s expectations for what kind of response they could provoke from the U.S. and whether they’re willing to absorb it.
Under Iran’s theocratic system, those calculations ultimately rest with one man—Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and while he’s already gone on record to vow revenge, no one outside Iran really knows precisely what form it will take.
DIRECT CONFRONTATION
At the most direct and confrontational end of the retaliatory spectrum lies a drone or missile attack on U.S. military bases. The U.S. has a number of bases throughout the Gulf but among the largest and most important are Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates, and Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, which represent the largest U.S. air bases in the region. Naval Support Activity in Bahrain serves as the hub for U.S. Navy activity in the Gulf and Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, which houses forward deployed U.S. troops in the region.
Becca Wasser, a senior policy analyst at the Rand Corporation, told The Daily Beast that while it’s unlikely that Iran is on the verge of a direct, imminent attack against American forces, “It is worth thinking about the way in which these targets are vulnerable and the risk to them because it is not out of the realm of feasible to think that Iran could target bases or assets in the region either through proxies or, should things escalate further, directly.”
Iran has long made it known that these bases are on their target list in the event of an all-out war with the U.S. In November 2018, Brig Gen Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of Iran’s missile force, appeared on Iranian television next to satellite images of Al Dhafra, Al-Udeid, and Kandahar airbases to proclaim, “They are within our reach and we can hit them if they (Americans) make a move.”
Given the importance of bases like Al-Udeid to U.S. military operations in the region and its attractiveness as a target, the Defense Department has been moving to diversify its options for command, control, and basing of U.S. forces in the region.
Over the summer, the Air Force demonstrated the ability to command and control aircraft at Al-Udeid from a facility at Shaw Air Force Base, South Carolina.
OIL CHOKEPOINT
Iran’s most potent threat comes by way of its geography. The Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf represents one of the world’s largest energy chokepoints through which much of the Gulf’s oil flows by ship. Iran has repeatedly warned that it could shut down the narrow passage to oil traffic but has never made good on the threat.
Short of closing the Strait, Iran’s IRGC Navy could also reuse its playbook from the tanker wars of the 1980s to attack, mine, and seize U.S. military and international commercial traffic in the Gulf. Iranian forces had routinely harassed U.S. Navy forces in the region up until recently, capturing a handful of American sailors whose boat allegedly drifted into Iranian waters and using armed fastboats, helicopters, and drones to make threatening passes by U.S. war ships.
VENGEFUL PROXIES
More likely retaliation could come in the form of attacks by Iranian-backed militias, terrorist groups, and proxies in the region. Those operations would fall to the Quds Force that Soleimani had commanded. Since his assassination on Thursday, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei appointed Ismail Ghaani, a Soleimani deputy, to run the organization.
“He has been the force's deputy commander for more than a decade, and can probably steer the organization,” Amir Toumaj, an Iran researcher who has written extensively on the IRGC’s intelligence and covert operations units, told The Daily Beast. “He is, however, less charismatic and probably won't be able to fill Soleimani's shoes as a cultural icon. With a background in operations and intelligence, his experiences include the Kurdish insurgency, the entire Iran-Iraq War, and IRGC intelligence deputy.”
Iraqi militias that Iran trained, armed, and equipped have the capability to target U.S. military and diplomatic personnel in Iraq, as they demonstrated over and over throughout the course of the Iraq war. Given that the strike against Soleimani also killed Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy chief of Iraq’s militia force and the leader of Kataib Hezbollah, they’re also likely among the Quds Force’s most eager tools for the job.
More recently, Iran appears to have used its allies in the Houthi movement in Yemen to carry out attacks. While Yemen’s geography places it relatively far from U.S. forces, Iran’s transfer of short-range ballistic missiles, land attack cruise missiles, and drones have allowed the Houthis—and by extension, Iran—to target cities well inside Saudi Arabia. The introduction of more advanced and longer-range missiles could also allow the Houthis to target American bases from Yemen.
The Iranian footprint in Yemen also gives it the ability to target maritime traffic transiting the Red Sea. In December, the State Department announced that U.S. forces had seized Iranian anti-ship cruise missiles allegedly en route from the Quds Force to Houthi fighters in Yemen. In late 2016, Houthi forces fired anti-ship cruise missiles at U.S. Navy ships off Yemen’s Red Sea coast. It’s unclear if the attacks were directed by Iran or whether they used Iranian weapons, but the recent seizure suggests at a minimum that Houthi forces would have the capability to pull off more such strikes at Tehran’s direction.
SOFT TARGETS
Aside from military targets, Iran could also unleash the Quds Force against soft targets in terrorist attacks. Quds Force operatives have been implicated in a range of thwarted terrorist attacks around the world, including an allegedly thwarted plot to bomb Israeli tourists in Kenya, members of Iranian dissident groups in Europe, and an alleged plan to blow up the Saudi ambassador in a Georgetown restaurant. Iran’s proxies in Hezbollah have been implicated in plots in Argentina, New York, Bulgaria, and Thailand.
If past is precedent, the U.S. is likely not to be the only target of Iran’s retaliatory ire. In previous periods of high tension, the Islamic Republic has used American allies—particularly in the Gulf—as targets in order to squeeze Washington indirectly as well.
After the discovery of the Stuxnet malware that hindered uranium enrichment facilities at Iran’s Natanz enrichment plant, U.S. officials believe Iran targeted Saudi Arabia’s national energy company, Aramco, with the Shamoon virus, which briefly paralyzed the world’s largest energy company.
And in the wake of an uptick in sanctions this spring, Iran mounted a pushback campaign against the Trump administration’s maximum pressure policy which included attacks against oil and petrochemical tankers owned by Norway, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates and a ratcheting up of Iranian-backed Houthi militants’ use of ballistic and cruise missiles against Saudi cities and energy infrastructure.
