How Iran Might Strike Back

Opinion|How Iran Might Strike Back

After more than a week of an Israeli bombing campaign against Iran, the United States joined the fray with an attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities. The United States now braces for Iran’s response, which seems imminent. Speaking on Iranian television after the American attack, a news anchor declared, “Mr. Trump, you started it, and we will end it.”

So what could the Iranian response look like? Among the most likely options are asymmetric operations, such as attacks on U.S. troops in the region, or terrorist attacks by Iranian proxies in the West, potentially in the United States.

Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, suggested that with its attack, the United States crossed a “very big red line.” At this point in the conflict, if Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, doesn’t retaliate, he could lose favor among regime hard-liners. An Iranian response is a distinct probability, even if the time frame remains unknown.

The first and most obvious target would be U.S. military bases in the Middle East, where tens of thousands of troops are stationed. The United States maintains military bases or outposts in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Qatar, Syria and the United Arab Emirates. Embassies, diplomatic compounds and other U.S. interests are all possible targets. Some of these sites could be attacked by Iranian missiles, and in other cases, Iranian proxies could take the initiative — whether the Houthis in Yemen or Shiite militias in Iraq. The U.S. State Department has issued travel advisories for American citizens in Israel, and the embassies in Iraq and Lebanon have called for the departure of all nonessential U.S. personnel.

The most serious threat in Iraq is the network surrounding Kata’ib Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Shiite militia group that attacked U.S. bases in recent years and could do so again. Kata’ib Hezbollah’s secretary general, Abu Hussein al-Hamidawi, released a statement last week that warned, “If America intervenes in the war, we will act directly against its interests and bases spread across the region without hesitation.”

The other Persian Gulf states could also find themselves in Iran’s cross hairs, as occurred in September 2019, when in the midst of escalating U.S.-Iran tensions, the Houthis fired drones at two oil installations in Saudi Arabia. Oil tankers off the coast of the United Arab Emirates were attacked a few months before those strikes. Today there is a distinct possibility that Iran and its proxies could seek to wreak havoc in the Gulf of Oman and the Strait of Hormuz, including by deploying sea mines, as they have done before. Attacks on tankers and commercial shipping would snarl global energy transit and unsettle global markets.