Suicide bombing comes home to Iran

Amir Taheri

Until a few years ago, the global map of Islamist suicide terrorism included a single tiny patch of territory: Israel.

Since then, the map has expanded to include first Iraq, where suicide attacks have claimed thousands of lives, and then Afghanistan, where the Taliban use it as a war tactic. Then Pakistan, where suicide attacks have become part of daily life.

Wednesday's suicide attack in Chabahar, the principal Iranian port on the Gulf of Oman, has shown that Iran, too, is now part of that sinister map.

The double attack, which claimed at least 39 lives, wasn't the first of its kind in Iran. In October 2009, a suicide bomber killed 31 members of the Revolutionary Guard at a public ceremony in Pishin, on the Pakistani border. Among those killed was Gen. Muhammad Shushtari, whom many regarded as the rising star of the Guard. This July, another suicide attack in Zahedan, the capital of Sistan-Baluchistan province, killed 27.