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VOA – The U.S. government privately warned Iran that the Islamic State group’s affiliate in Afghanistan was preparing to carry out a terrorist attack before bombings in Kerman earlier this month that killed 95 people, a U.S. official said Thursday.
The official, who was not authorized to comment and insisted on anonymity to discuss the intelligence, said the U.S. was following its long-standing policy of a “duty to warn” other governments against potential lethal threats.
The official did not detail how the United States, which does not have diplomatic relations with Iran, conveyed the warning about its intelligence on ISIS-Khorasan, known as ISIS-K, but noted that government officials “provide these warnings in part because we do not want to see innocent lives lost in terror attacks.”
Iranian state media did not acknowledge the U.S. giving Tehran the information, and Iran’s mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the CSIS think tank in Washington, said the warning may reflect a wider U.S. desire to seek dialogue with Iran despite recent attacks by Iranian-backed proxies on U.S., Israeli and other Western interests and the advances of Tehran’s nuclear program.
“This is an olive branch,” Alterman said, adding that U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration came into office believing dialogue between Washington and Tehran could benefit both sides.
Aaron David Miller of Washington’s Wilson Center think tank largely concurred, noting the failed efforts on the nuclear deal and the improbability of transforming relations that have been largely antagonistic since the Islamic Republic’s birth.
“You can’t transform the U.S.-Iranian relationship. All you can do is to look for opportunities … to transact, to de-escalate and avoid an escalatory ladder that would lead to war,” he said.
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the January 3 attack on Kerman, about 820 kilometers (510 miles) southeast of Iran’s capital, Tehran. The dual suicide bombing killed at least 95 people and wounded dozens of others attending a commemoration for the late General Qassem Soleimani, the leader of the Revolutionary Guard’s expeditionary Quds Force, who was killed in a 2020 U.S. drone strike in Baghdad.
In the time since, Iran has been trying to blame the U.S. and Israel for the attack amid Israel’s war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip. It has launched missile attacks on Iraq and Syria. It then launched strikes on nuclear-armed Pakistan, which responded with its own strikes on Iran, further raising tensions in a region inflamed by the Israel-Hamas war.
The Wall Street Journal was first to report that the U.S. had provided the warning to Iran.
ISIS-K was behind the August 2021 suicide bombing at the Kabul airport that killed 13 U.S. troops and about 170 Afghans during the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
ISIS-K has thousands of members and is the Taliban’s most bitter enemy and top military threat. The group has continued to carry out attacks in Afghanistan and beyond since the Taliban takeover.
