DUBAI: The killing of Iran’s top nuclear scientist last month was carried out remotely with artificial intelligence and a machine gun equipped with a “satellite-controlled smart system”, Tasnim news agency quoted a senior commander as saying.

Iran has blamed Israel for the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was seen by Western intelligence services as the mastermind of a covert Iranian programme to develop nuclear weapons capability. Tehran has long denied any such ambition.

Israel has neither confirmed nor denied responsibility for the killing, but in the past has acknowledged pursuing covert, intelligence-gathering operations against the nuclear programme of its arch-enemy Iran.

READ: Iran’s Khamenei promises retaliation for nuclear scientist’s killing

The Islamic Republic has given contradictory details of Fakhrizadeh’s death in a daytime Nov 27 ambush on his car on a highway near Tehran.

“No terrorists were present on the ground … Martyr Fakhrizadeh was driving when a weapon, using an advanced camera, zoomed in on him,” Tasnim, a semi-official agency, quoted Ali Fadavi, the deputy commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, as saying in a ceremony on Sunday.

“The machine gun was placed on a pick-up truck and was controlled by a satellite.”

Fadavi spoke after Iranian authorities said they had found “clues about the assassins”, though they have yet to announce any arrests. Shortly after Fakhrizadeh was killed, witnesses told state television that a truck had exploded before a group of gunmen opened fire on his car.

Last week Ali Shamkhani, Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran, said the killing was carried out with “electronic devices” with no people on the ground.

Commentary: Assassinating top scientist makes killing Iran’s nuclear programme harder

Experts and officials told Reuters last week Fakhrizadeh’s killing exposed security gaps that suggest its security forces may have been infiltrated and that the Islamic Republic is vulnerable to further attacks.

“Some 13 shots were fired at martyr Fakhrizadeh with a machine gun controlled by satellite … During the operation artificial intelligence and face recognition was used,” Fadavi said. “His wife, sitting 25 centimetres away from him in the same car, was not injured.”

Fakhrizadeh, identified by Israel as a prime player in what it says is a continuing Iranian quest for a nuclear weapon, was the fifth Iranian nuclear scientist killed in targeted attacks since 2010 inside Iran, and the second slaying of a high-ranking Iranian official in 2020.

The commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ elite Quds Force, Qassem Soleimani, was killed in a US drone strike in Iraq in January. Tehran retaliated by firing missiles at US military targets in Iraq.

LONDON: “Remember that name, Fakhrizadeh.” Thus spoke Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, in a characteristically histrionic moment during his April 2018 presentation on Iran’s nuclear programme.

No one in the Middle East is now likely to forget the name of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran’s top nuclear physicist, who was ambushed and killed by gunmen near Tehran late on Friday.

Especially not the Iranians – any more than they will forget Qassem Soleimani, the Revolutionary Guard commander of Iran’s foreign legion, assassinated by a US missile strike at Baghdad airport in January.

READ: Commentary: Trump walks away clean from Soleimani fallout

READ: Commentary: As Iran-US drama plays out, North Korea leader Kim Jong Un takes notes

ISRAEL’S LATEST HIT?

Israel, rather than the US, is probably responsible for killing Fakhrizadeh, just as it is widely blamed or, depending on the viewpoint, credited with murdering four nuclear scientists on his staff from 2010 to 2012.

But those hits came before Iran reached an accord in 2015 with the US, then led by President Barack Obama, and five world powers to constrain its nuclear programme and allow international monitors to verify agreed limits.

Outgoing US president Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from this deal in 2018, reimposing sanctions he has continued to ratchet up to strangle Iran’s economy.

Joe Biden, president-elect after defeating Mr Trump in this month’s elections and Mr Obama’s former vice-president, has said he intends to rejoin the 2015 nuclear compact, provided Iran returns to the set limits on uranium enrichment it has breached in response to the US pullout.

READ: Iran assassination could undercut Biden’s diplomatic options

SCORCHED EARTH POLICY

That goal, already complicated, has just been made a lot more difficult, which is surely the intention of Trump and Netanyahu, as well as their Sunni Arab allies in the Gulf led by Mohammed bin Salman, crown prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia.

Before it gracelessly departs, the Trump team looks bent on a scorched earth policy in the Middle East to make the incoming Biden administration’s road back to diplomacy more difficult.

Beyond imposing yet more sanctions, Mr Trump is reported recently to have sought advice on the feasibility of air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. This month Mike Pompeo, secretary of state, brokered a surprise meeting in Saudi Arabia between Mr Netanyahu and Prince Mohammed.

Ostensibly about detente and “normalisation” of relations, it was also about a united front not just against Tehran but Mr Biden’s Iran policy, setting off alarm bells across the region.

Until now, hostilities against Iran have remained in the realm of shadow war, hit squads and proxy conflicts between Sunni and Shia from Iraq to Lebanon and Syria to Yemen. But the Fakhrizadeh killing upped the ante.

READ: Commentary: Trump may be conceding but his scorched-earth antics are deeply troubling

READ: Commentary: America has a chance to repair diplomacy. Don’t squander it

A RECKONING WILL COME

The hopeful assumption is there will not be a real war. But there will be a reckoning.

Fakhrizadeh, sometimes compared to Robert Oppenheimer, father of the world’s first atomic bomb in 1945, is believed by western intelligence agencies to have led Iran’s quest for a nuclear weapon until it was halted in 2003.

Tehran denies intent to build a bomb but has been determined to master the complete nuclear cycle that would enable it to do so.

The Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign, and exit from a deal that had successfully eliminated Tehran’s former nuclear fuel hoard, has led Iran to recreate a stockpile of enriched uranium.

It is now 12 times the size of the accord’s ceiling and of higher than allowed purity.

While this is not close to weapons-grade uranium, Mr Trump has pushed Iran closer to it, and Mr Netanyahu has urged the US not to return to previous arrangements that controlled production.

POLITICAL GIFT TO IRANIAN HARDLINERS

Those who resist Iran’s growing power in the Middle East are jubilant about the Fakhrizadeh death.

But Iranian physics cannot be killed, nor can the growing conviction among Iranians that America – the Great Satan in the Islamic Republic’s narrative – cannot be trusted since it reneges on international deals. This is a political gift to hardliners.

READ: Commentary: The thorny challenge of justifying strike on Soleimani

READ: Commentary: The one person Israel and UAE are both afraid of

The Biden administration must navigate a minefield. It is not just the nuclear deal that Mr Obama secured in 2015.

The incoming president must also find a way to deal with Soleimani’s legacy of paramilitary militias – armed with missiles – who have forged a Shia Iranian corridor from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean.

Yet how is a bankrupt Iran to deal with the region’s constellation of failing states without seeking terms not just with its neighbours but the world?

READ: Commentary: Dear world, please manage your expectations of a Biden presidency

Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen all face economic contractions vastly greater than the ravage inflicted by Covid-19.

Iran, and Persia before it, has a reputation for strategic patience. It will now be tested.

TEHRAN: Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday (Nov 28) retaliate for the killing of the country’s top nuclear scientist, raising the threat of a new confrontation with the West and Israel in the remaining weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency.

Khamenei pledged to continue the work of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who Western and Israeli governments believe was the architect of a secret Iranian programme to make weapons.

Friday’s killing, which Iran’s president was swift to blame on Israel, could complicate any efforts by President-elect Joe Biden to revive a detente with Tehran that was forged when he was in Barack Obama’s administration.

Trump pulled Washington out of the 2015 international nuclear pact agreed between Tehran and major powers.

Khamenei, who is Iran’s top authority and who insists the country has never sought nuclear arms, said on Twitter that Iranian officials must take up the task of “pursuing this crime and punishing its perpetrators and those who commanded it”.

He called Fakhrizadeh a “prestigious nuclear and defence scientist” and said he was “martyred by the hands of criminal and cruel mercenaries”.

“This unparalleled scientist gave his dear and valuable life to God because of his great and lasting scientific efforts, and the high prize of martyrdom is his divine reward,” he added.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani told a televised cabinet meeting on Saturday Iran would respond “at the proper time”.

“Once again, the evil hands of Global Arrogance and the Zionist mercenaries were stained with the blood of an Iranian son,” he said, using terms officials employ to refer to Israel.

Israel’s N12 news channel said Israeli embassies had been put on high alert after the Iranian threats of retaliation.

Israel has declined to comment on the killing of Fakhrizadeh and an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman said the ministry did not comment on security regarding missions abroad.

The White House, Pentagon, US State Department and CIA have also declined to comment on the killing, as has Biden’s transition team. Biden takes office on Jan 20.

The ministry said that the scientist, who headed its research and innovation organisation, died after medics failed to revive him.

“REMEMBER THAT NAME”

Germany, one of the signatories to the nuclear pact, called for restraint on all sides to avoid derailing any future talks.

TORONTO: Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) recently demonstrated its sophisticated missile technology by attacking US military bases in Iraq.

But later the same day, its missiles unintentionally destroyed an airliner in Iran, killing 176 civilians, including 57 Canadians.

That combined success and blunder suggest Iran’s military and government “human systems” have not kept up with the weapon technology they wield. They also illustrate how missile threats pose challenges to other countries worldwide.

AIRLINER INTERCEPTION OVER IRAN

Iran belatedly admitted Saturday that IRGC surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) had shot down the passenger jet near Tehran. The SAM crew somehow mistook the Ukrainian airliner for an American cruise missile. Ukrainian investigators believe the missile exploded near the airplane’s cockpit, instantly killing the crew.

READ: Commentary: Amid brewing tensions and deadly strikes, intermediaries facilitate US-Iran diplomacy

The airplane was defenceless against the apparently Russian-made SAM. The only major airline whose planes carry missile countermeasures is Israel’s El Al. And those are effective mostly against simple heat-seeking SAMs, not sophisticated radar-guided ones.

It’s unclear why IRGC personnel didn’t realise the aircraft was civilian. Their radar should have displayed the airliner’s transponder code. Did the IRGC disable that potentially life-saving feature?

Iran is not alone in making interception errors. In 2018, Syria used Russian-supplied SAMs to down a Russian airplane they mistook for an Israeli fighter jet. And in 1988, a US warship destroyed an Iranian airliner it thought was a warplane.

You could call the incident “human error” or “recklessness and incompetence.”

Either way, it indicates problems with organisational co-ordination and communication, rather than the technology itself.

In fact, the IRGC had showcased its technological strengths earlier that day.

BALLISTIC MISSILES INTO IRAQ

On Jan. 8, the IRGC launched between 15 and 22 ballistic missiles toward US military bases in Iraq. Some landed many kilometres off target. But most struck the bases and at least five destroyed buildings. Fortunately, the Americans suffered no casualties because they had taken shelter.

READ: Commentary: As Iran-US drama plays out, North Korea leader Kim Jong Un takes notes

The fact that some missiles never reached the target zone indicates their reliability remains problematic. But the direct hits that others scored shows the growing accuracy of Iran’s missile guidance systems.

Most importantly, the attack demonstrated Iran can strike US targets hundreds of kilometres away. That’s despite overwhelming American military superiority.

CRUISE MISSILES AGAINST SAUDI ARABIA

Iran’s cruise missiles have achieved similar sophistication. Ballistic missiles soar high into the air before arcing down toward their targets. By contrast, cruise missiles fly close to the ground like small airplanes — hence the IRGC’s mistake.

Those improvements were evident last September. That’s when seven cruise missiles and 18 smaller drones heavily damaged two Saudi Arabian oil refineries. Yemen’s Houthi rebels claimed they made that attack. But many observers believe Iran supplied the missiles.

MILITARY VULNERABILITIES

Iran’s successful cruise and ballistic missile attacks represent not only its missile strengths, but also other countries’ vulnerabilities. Even the powerful and well-funded US military has trouble blocking such missiles.

Ballistic missiles’ high-altitude flights are easy to spot on radar. But their fast speed makes them difficult to hit. Even if hit, their downward trajectories mean they might damage targets anyway.

READ: Commentary: Will Iran consider cyberattacks to retaliate against Soleimani’s killing?

READ: Commentary: The road to getting the F-35s up and ready for Singapore

Conversely, cruise missiles are relatively easy to destroy once detected. But their low flying altitudes mean they’re often undetected until too late.

Capturing launch sites is one way to counter both missile types. That’s how Allied forces shut down Germany’s V-2 ballistic missiles and V-1 cruise missiles during the Second World War.

The US Army does have medium-range Patriot missile interceptors, but only at a few locations. Besides, that system’s effectiveness against ballistic missiles is questionable. And Saudi Patriots failed to stop the refinery cruise missile attack there.

Consequently, the US Army is developing new short-range missile defences. It’s also buying two interceptor systems from Israel in the meantime. But those aren’t deployed yet.

Meanwhile, most other countries’ armies, including Canada’s, completely lack interceptors. By contrast, many nations’ warships carry interceptors for self-defence.

ISRAELI CONCERNS

The country best equipped for missile defence is Israel. But even it worries about Iranian developments.

Israel developed its Arrow and David’s Sling systems to intercept ballistic missiles. Its Iron Dome system protects against short-range rockets and mortars. Even its tanks can intercept anti-tank guided missiles.

Iron Dome has seen extensive use against attacks from Gaza. The system was first deployed in 2011 and became really effective in 2014.

But that effectiveness partly relies on rocket inaccuracy. Even when fired at large targets like entire towns, roughly three-quarters land harmlessly in fields. Very few would directly hit buildings. Iron Dome batteries can focus on stopping those few.

That’s one reason Iranian missile improvements concern Israel. Suppose the IRGC were to supply Hamas in Gaza or Hezbollah in Lebanon with precision guidance systems. Those militants could greatly increase their weapons’ accuracy.

Instead of blindly firing rockets at whole towns, the militants could target important buildings like power plants. And instead of worrying about just a fraction of the rockets, Iron Dome units would need to intercept most of them. That could quickly overwhelm their capacity.

It’s truly impressive how far the world’s engineers have advanced missile technology. Now politicians must make similar advances in diplomacy. Otherwise, missile mayhem will become increasingly common.

Michael J. Armstrong is associate professor of operations research at the Goodman School of Business, Brock University. This commentary first appeared in The Conversation.

REUTERS: Iran has instructed its oil ministry to prepare installations for production and sale of crude oil at full capacity within three months, state media said on Sunday, ahead of a possible easing of U.S. sanctions after President-elect Joe Biden takes office.

They quoted President Hassan Rouhani as saying that Iran exported more than two million barrels a day before U.S. President Donald Trump exited the 2015 nuclear deal with six powers in 2018 and reimposed sanctions that have hit Iran’s economy hard by sharply cutting its vital oil exports.

U.S. President-elect Joe Biden, who will take office on Jan. 20, has said that he would return to the pact and would lift sanctions if Tehran returned to “strict compliance with the nuclear deal”.

Rouhani said on Sunday that his country was preparing for a speedy increase of its oil production, the official IRNA news agency reported.

“The Oil Ministry will take all the necessary steps to prepare the oil industry’s facilities to produce and sell – proportionate to the available capacity – within the next three months,” IRNA quoted Rouhani as saying.

It is estimated that Iran exports less than 300,000 barrels of oil per day (bpd), compared to a peak of 2.8 million bpd in 2018.

([email protected]; editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise)