Near Isfahan, Iran, Mossad Attack ‘A Spectacular Success’

In Isfahan on Sunday, a very great explosion – or more accurately, four separate explosions – blew up what appears to have been a gigantic weapons factory, apparently involving ballistic missiles. The Iranians, with poker faces, have dismissed the attack as no big deal, causing, the Defense Ministry claimed, “only minor damage and no casualties.” A preliminary Jihad Watch report is here. Here is how the Iranians described it: “Iranian Military Factory Hit by Drone Attack,” Algemeiner, January 29, 2023:

A loud explosion struck a military industry factory near the central Iranian city of Isfahan overnight in what Tehran said on Sunday was a drone strike by unidentified attackers.

“Unidentified attackers”? The entire world knows who the attackers were, and so do the Iranians. It was, of course, Mossad, with its fine Italian hand, that is always up to miching mallecho in Iran. Ever since Israel introduced a computer worm into Iranian computers that caused more than a thousand Iranian centrifuges to speed up and destroy themselves in 2010, in an operation that has entered history as Stuxnet, Israel has been performing acts of derring-do that have, through cyberwarfare, sabotage, and assassinations, rattled Iran’s leaders. Between 2010 and 2012, four of Iran’s top nuclear scientists were assassinated, one after the other, in the middle of Tehran traffic, by a man (or sometimes two) on a motorbike who pulled up alongside their cars and let loose a volley of shots, then rode off through that traffic. None of the killers has been found. And in recent months, Israel has renewed its campaign of assassination, killing nearly a half-dozen high-ranking officials belonging mainly to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

In 2018, 20 Mossad agents managed to break into a nondescript building in central Tehran, blast their way through 32 steel doors, and seize the entire nuclear archive of Iran, some 100,000 documents, which they managed to bring back to Israel for analysis, and also to share its information about heretofore unknown nuclear sites with the IAEA. In 2020 and then again in 2021, Mossad agents a managed to sabotage nuclear facilities at Natanz; the second attack was on a facility that had been built deep underground. At the end of 2021, Mossad killed Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the nuclear scientist who was regarded as the “godfather” of Iran’s nuclear program. On June 23, 2021, Mossad hit a nuclear facilities plant in Karaj, just outside Tehran, leading the Iranians in 2022 to move centrifuges out of Karaj and to what they believed would be a more secure facility located in Isfahan.

But on January 27, 2023, that facility, too, at Isfahan, was sabotaged. The Iranians have pretended that the attack caused “only minor damage” and that there were no casualties. Israel, as is its normal practice, remained silent.

But Israeli and Western analysts have concluded that the attack was a “spectacular success.” More on the attack and its aftermath can be found here: “Israeli drone attack on Iranian weapons factory was phenomenal success – sources,” by Yonah Jeremy Bob, Jerusalem Post, January 29, 2023:

Despite Iranian claims, the drone attack on Iran at Isfahan was a tremendous success, according to a mix of Western intelligence sources and foreign sources, The Jerusalem Post has learned.

There were four explosions at the site, which can even be witnessed on social media, against a facility developing advanced weapons, and the damage goes far beyond the “minor roof damage” that the Islamic Republic is claiming and which it has falsely claimed before also in other incidents in recent years.

Israel is playing the incident mum, but most Western intelligence and Iranian sources have credited the Mossad with similarly successful attacks against Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility in July 2020, a different Natanz nuclear facility in April 2021, another nuclear facility at Karaj in June 2021 and with destroying around 120 or more Iranian drones in February 2022.

There are also few organizations globally besides the Mossad which are reported to have the advanced and surgical strike capabilities displayed in the operation.

Iran’s response matches responses to similar incidents.

In each of those incidents, Tehran tried to initially pretend that the attacks failed and only acknowledged the extent of the damage when satellite photos or other evidence broke into the public sphere, outflanking their denials.

It is still unclear whether the advanced weapons which were damaged are related only to conventional warfare or might have dual-use relevance also to nuclear issues, such as certain ballistic missiles or explosives equipment that can be used for both conventional and nuclear weapons purposes.

Isfahan has been used on and off for various nuclear issues as well as non-nuclear military issues.

Iran even at one point told the IAEA that some of the nuclear activities being carried out at the Karaj nuclear facility until June 2021 had been moved to Isfahan.

Whom should we believe? The Iranians, who say there was “little damage” and “no casualties,” or the Western and other intelligence sources that claim the attack was a “spectacular success,” causing four separate explosions? We know that there was both a centrifuge facility and a ballistic missiles factory, next to each other. Were both targeted?

We have at least a half-dozen similar attacks on Iranian facilities attributed to Israel’s Mossad; in every case, the Iranians at first dismissed the seriousness of the attacks, and only later, after photographs of the sites were put on the Internet, did Tehran admit that, after all, major damage had been done. And that’s exactly what is likely to happen here, when the Israelis decide to make their “after” photographs of sites destroyed available to the world. Intelligence operations around the globe have already called this Mossad attack a “spectacular” success. When it comes to safeguarding the Jewish state from a malevolent Iran, hellbent on the destruction of the Jewish state, like the God of Israel, the Israelis themselves neither slumber nor sleep.

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