Following last Friday’s assassination of eminent Iranian physicist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in the rural town of Absard, east of Tehran, there has been strong condemnation of the brutal murder, involving automatic firearms and explosives, by the Islamic Republic, its neighbouring Arab states including regional ally Syria, its wider geopolitical allies Russia and China, and, despite the fact that its currently imposing sanctions on Tehran in tandem with the United States, the European Union.
The killing of Fakhrizadeh comes at an especially fraught time in relations between the West and Tehran, with the year beginning with both the assassination of IRGC commander Qasem Soleimani in a US drone strike in Baghdad and the subsequent retaliatory missile strikes by Iran on US airbases in Iraq, and ending with a high-level summit meeting in the Saudi city of Neom between US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman, amid rumours that one of the final acts of the outgoing Trump administration will be to launch a military strike against the infrastructure of the Islamic Republic, in line with the interests of both Tel Aviv and Riyadh.
Indeed Netanyahu himself had earmarked Fakhrizadeh in an April 2018 slideshow relating to Iran’s nuclear programme, the weapon recovered in the attack bears all the hallmarks of Israeli manufacture, and an unnamed Israeli senior official has already confirmed Mossad involvement in the killing to the New York Times.
Despite mounting evidence of Israeli involvement in the murder of Fakhrizadeh however, the initial condemnation by the West is a far more restrained approach than its response towards Russia over an alleged 2018 assassination attempt on former British intelligence asset, Sergei Skripal.
In the weeks after the nerve agent attack on Skripal and his daughter on a Salisbury park bench in March of that year, scores of Russian diplomats were expelled from Britain, the United States and Europe; the largest mass-expulsion of Moscow’s diplomats since the end of the Cold War, and a move that has so far not even been suggested will be used against Tel Aviv in response to its role in the murder of Fakhrizadeh.
To understand this differing approach to Russia and Iran, and Israel by the West, one must look at the wider geopolitical relationship between the US-NATO hegemony and each of the aforementioned countries.
In 2011, following the decision by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a long-time opponent of the Zionist State, to refuse to allow Western-allied Qatar to build a pipeline through his country, a regime-change project was launched by the intelligence services of the US, UK, Saudi Arabia and Israel, involving the arming and training of Wahhabi militants seeking to remove Syria’s secular government and replace it with a Western-friendly theocratic leadership.
In 2013, at the request of the Syrian government, Iran intervened in the conflict, realising that should Damascus fall, Tehran would be next in line to experience a US-backed ‘revolution’ - with the Islamic Republic also being a steadfast opponent of the Zionist State since the 1979 Islamic Revolution seen the Washington and Tel Aviv-friendly Shah of Iran being deposed and replaced with the anti-Western and anti-Zionist Ayatollah Khomeini.
The Western-Israeli attempt to remove Assad was pushed back even further in 2015, with an intervention by the Russian Air Force allowing Damascus to retake vast swathes of its territory that had previously fallen under the control of US-backed terrorists, and ultimately resulting in Assad remaining in power more than nine years after the proxy war to remove his leadership first begun.
This differing approach to the aspirations of the US-NATO hegemony and the Zionist State by both Moscow and Tehran is therefore why the current condemnation emanating from the West regarding the murder of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh will ultimately amount to nothing more than empty rhetoric – a far different approach than the sanctions and military action that would currently be taking place against Iran had Tehran’s agents assassinated an Israeli nuclear scientist involved with that country’s nuclear weapons programme.
WRITER
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