Iranian helicopter crash could reverberate around the Mideast

The helicopter crash in which Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, the country’s foreign minister and other officials were killed is likely to reverberate across the Middle East, where Iran’s influence runs wide and deep.

That’s because Iran has spent decades supporting armed groups and militants in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and the Palestinian territories, allowing it to project power and potentially deter attacks from the United States or Israel.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final say in the Shiite theocracy, quickly named a little-known vice president, Mohammad Mokhber, as caretaker and insisted the government was in control, but the deaths marked yet another blow to a country beset by pressures at home and abroad.

Tensions have never been higher than they were last month, when Iran, under Raisi and Khamenei, launched hundreds of drones and ballistic missiles at Israel in response to an airstrike on an Iranian Consulate in Syria that killed two Iranian generals and five officers.

Israel, with the help of the United States, Britain, Jordan and others, intercepted nearly all the projectiles. In response, Israel apparently launched its own strike against an air defence radar system in the Iranian city of Isfahan.

The sides have waged a shadow war of covert operations and cyberattacks for years, but the exchange of fire in April was their first direct military confrontation.

The ongoing war between Israel and Hamas has drawn in other Iranian allies, with each attack and counterattack threatening to set off a wider war.

It’s a combustible mix that could be ignited by unexpected events, such as Sunday’s deadly crash.

Israel has long viewed Iran as its greatest threat because of Tehran’s controversial nuclear programme, its ballistic missiles, and its support for armed groups sworn to Israel’s destruction.

Iran views itself as the chief patron of Palestinian resistance to Israeli rule, and top officials for years have called for Israel to be wiped off the map.

Raisi, who was a hardliner viewed as a protégé and possible successor of Khamenei, chastised Israel last month, saying “the Zionist Israeli regime has been committing oppression against the people of Palestine for 75 years”.

“First of all, we have to expel the usurpers; secondly, we should make them pay the cost for all the damages they have created; and thirdly, we have to bring to justice the oppressor and usurper,” he said.

Israel is believed to have carried out numerous attacks over the years targeting senior Iranian military officials and nuclear scientists.

Proxy war

There is no evidence Israel was involved in Sunday’s helicopter crash, and Israeli officials have not commented on the incident.

Arab countries on the Persian Gulf have also long viewed Iran with suspicion, a key factor in the decision of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain to normalise relations with Israel in 2020, and of Saudi Arabia to consider such a move.

Iran has provided financial and other support over the years to the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which led the October 7 attack into Israel that triggered the Gaza war, and the smaller but more radical Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which took part in it. But there is no evidence that Iran was directly involved in the attack.

Since the start of the war, Iran’s leaders have expressed solidarity with the Palestinians. Their allies in the region have gone much further.

Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group, Iran’s most militarily advanced proxy, has waged a low-intensity conflict with Israel since the start of the Gaza war. The two sides have traded strikes on a near-daily basis along the Israel-Lebanon border, forcing tens of thousands of people on both sides to flee.

So far, however, the conflict has not boiled over into a full-blown war that would be disastrous for both countries.

Iran-backed militias in Syria and Iraq launched repeated attacks on US bases in the opening months of the war, but pulled back after US retaliatory strikes for a drone attack that killed three American soldiers in January.

Yemen’s Houthi rebels, another ally of Iran, have repeatedly targeted international shipping in what they portray as a blockade of Israel. Those strikes, which often target ships with no apparent links to Israel, have also drawn US-led retaliation.

Iran’s influence extends beyond the Middle East and its rivalry with Israel.

Israel and Western countries have long suspected Iran of pursuing nuclear weapons in the guise of a peaceful atomic programme in what they see as a threat to non-proliferation everywhere.

These days, Iran is enriching uranium to up to 60 per cent purity – near weapons-grade levels of 90 per cent. Surveillance cameras installed by the United Nations nuclear agency have been disrupted, and Iran has barred some of the agency’s most experienced inspectors. Iran has always insisted its nuclear programme is for purely peaceful purposes.

AP