After more than a week of an Israeli bombing campaign against Iran, the United States joined the fray with an attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities. The United States now braces for Iran’s response, which seems imminent. Speaking on Iranian television after the American attack, a news anchor declared, “Mr. Trump, you started it, and we will end it.”
So what could the Iranian response look like? Among the most likely options are asymmetric operations, such as attacks on U.S. troops in the region, or terrorist attacks by Iranian proxies in the West, potentially in the United States.
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, suggested that with its attack, the United States crossed a “very big red line.” At this point in the conflict, if Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, doesn’t retaliate, he could lose favor among regime hard-liners. An Iranian response is a distinct probability, even if the time frame remains unknown.
The first and most obvious target would be U.S. military bases in the Middle East, where tens of thousands of troops are stationed. The United States maintains military bases or outposts in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Qatar, Syria and the United Arab Emirates. Embassies, diplomatic compounds and other U.S. interests are all possible targets. Some of these sites could be attacked by Iranian missiles, and in other cases, Iranian proxies could take the initiative — whether the Houthis in Yemen or Shiite militias in Iraq. The U.S. State Department has issued travel advisories for American citizens in Israel, and the embassies in Iraq and Lebanon have called for the departure of all nonessential U.S. personnel.
The most serious threat in Iraq is the network surrounding Kata’ib Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Shiite militia group that attacked U.S. bases in recent years and could do so again. Kata’ib Hezbollah’s secretary general, Abu Hussein al-Hamidawi, released a statement last week that warned, “If America intervenes in the war, we will act directly against its interests and bases spread across the region without hesitation.”
The other Persian Gulf states could also find themselves in Iran’s cross hairs, as occurred in September 2019, when in the midst of escalating U.S.-Iran tensions, the Houthis fired drones at two oil installations in Saudi Arabia. Oil tankers off the coast of the United Arab Emirates were attacked a few months before those strikes. Today there is a distinct possibility that Iran and its proxies could seek to wreak havoc in the Gulf of Oman and the Strait of Hormuz, including by deploying sea mines, as they have done before. Attacks on tankers and commercial shipping would snarl global energy transit and unsettle global markets.
Over the past 20 months, groups in the Axis of Resistance, a loose coalition of Iranian-backed terrorist proxies, have been significantly attenuated by Israeli attacks — including the fearsome Lebanese militia Hezbollah, which maintains a worldwide footprint of terrorist cells. But they retain some military capability outside the region. Now that the United States has become directly engaged in the conflict with Iran, Tehran could activate this network to conduct attacks in the West.
Hezbollah lashed out in the past by conducting attacks against targets in Latin America and Europe, partly in revenge for attacks on its personnel and also to further Iranian interests. In the early 1990s, Hezbollah bombings of Israeli and Jewish institutions in Argentina killed more than 100 people and injured hundreds more. A bus bombing in Burgas, Bulgaria, in 2012, also a Hezbollah attack, killed five Israeli tourists. Iran and its proxies have conducted surveillance operations against Jewish targets in Cyprus, India and Nigeria.
In more recent years, Hezbollah operatives have been arrested in the United States. In 2017 two men were arrested and charged with conducting surveillance of potential targets for Hezbollah in the country, including military and law enforcement facilities in New York City. In May 2023 a New Jersey resident was sentenced to 12 years in prison for receiving military-style training from Hezbollah while scouting a long list of potential targets, including the Statue of Liberty, Rockefeller Center, Times Square, the Empire State Building, myriad transportation infrastructure elements and the United Nations headquarters. The group has not carried out a successful attack in the United States. But Iran was implicated in several assassination attempts against high-ranking U.S. national security officials over the years, including John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and President Trump.
No matter the relatively lesser threat of a domestic terrorist attack, the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, dedicated more resources to monitoring the possibility of domestic sleeper cells linked to Hezbollah in recent days.
In conventional operations, the United States and Israel are militarily dominant against Iran. Israeli intelligence has thoroughly penetrated the country, as evidenced by the targeted assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leaders and other high-ranking members of Iran’s security and military establishment.
Asymmetric operations and terrorist attacks reflect Iran’s comparative advantage, dating to the 1983 attack on the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon, when the Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad Organization killed 241 American service members using a vehicle-borne bomb. The 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, attributed to Iran, which hit a U.S. military base, killing 19 American airmen and injuring nearly 500 other people, was a reminder that Tehran can use sleeper cells in foreign countries to stage complex attacks, including bombings and suicide missions. Iran also provides safe haven and sanctuary to Al Qaeda senior leaders, including the group’s de facto current leader, Saif al-Adel.
During Mr. Trump’s first term in office, he authorized the killing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’s Quds Force commander, Qassim Suleimani. Iran’s response unfolded over months, including targeting U.S. troops at bases in Iraq.
After last night’s bombing attack, Iran may feel compelled to respond immediately and with vigor. U.S. military officials overseas and law-enforcement personnel at home will need to remain on high alert, taking defensive measures and surging counterterrorism resources to prepare for a range of potential Iranian actions.
Colin P. Clarke is the director of research at the Soufan Group, an intelligence and security consulting firm based in New York City.
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