The head of the Mossad intelligence service declared unequivocally on Monday that Iran was responsible for a series of strikes on oil facilities and ships in the Persian Gulf in recent months, as well as an attack on the Bahraini embassy in Baghdad last week.
“I say to you, with certainty, based on the best sources of both Israeli and Western espionage, that Iran is behind these attacks. They were approved by Iranian leadership and carried out, in large part, by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its proxies,” Yossi Cohen said, speaking at Israel’s Interdisciplinary Center’s Herzliya Conference.
Iran has been accused by the United States and other countries in the Gulf of being directly or indirectly responsible for the attacks on the oil facilities, including most recently on two tankers in the waters off the coast of the United Arab Emirates last month.
Cohen’s comments were the first time the Mossad has publicly accused Iran of being responsible for those attacks and for the violent protests around the embassy in Iraq, which was reportedly carried out by supporters of Iran-backed militias in the country in response to Bahrain hosting a United States-led economic peace conference last week.
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“Despite being different types of targets in different locations, they are part of the same campaign being led by the same figure,” Cohen said.
He accused Tehran of trying “to start a fire” in in the Middle East.
The Mossad chief warned that Iran was extending the range of its activities and had established a 300-person cell inside Africa for that purpose. Cohen also noted that Iran has been accused of conducting and planning a number of terrorist activities inside Europe in recent years.
Cohen rejected claims that Iran was interested in dialogue and diplomacy with the West regarding its nuclear program and destabilizing activities in the region. “Iran is pulling [the world] in the opposite direction,” he said.