Ahmad Hashemi
Hudson Institute, Feb. 21, 2023
“The Islamic Republic also believes that Israel’s theft of piles of Iran’s secret nuclear files in 2018 involved the use of Azerbaijan as a staging ground for that daring operation.”
Iran and Israel are at war and Israel’s extraordinary capacity to target Iran’s strategic assets is not news to Iran watchers. Iran has severely suffered from this shadow war.
Take the following examples: In the 2000s Iran’s nuclear program was – according to foreign reports – severely compromised and delayed by Stuxnet, as the world’s first digital weapon. In 2018, in a daring and surreal move reminiscent of the James Bond movies, Mossad agents snuck tons of nuclear files out of Iran. In August 2020, Israel was accused of having its operatives kill Al-Qaida’s number two leader in the heart of Tehran. In November 2020, there was the assassination of the chief of Iran’s nuclear program in the Tehran suburbs, reportedly using an AI-assisted weapon. In July 2022, it was reported by foreign outlets that Mossad interrogated an Iranian IRGC member inside Iran.
And recently, on January 29, Israeli drones reportedly targeted Iran’s military facilities in Isfahan, a sensitive province in the heart of Iran, home to the country’s defense, missile, and nuclear industry.
Mossad operations along the Iranian border, reality, or fiction?
The Aras River serves as a border that has divided the Azerbaijani nation into two for the last two centuries: the Iranian Azerbaijan in the south and the independent Republic of Azerbaijan in the north. Since Azerbaijan’s independence in 1991, the northern side of the border has created new opportunities for the Jewish state. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev once acknowledged that nine-tenths of Israel-Azerbaijan cooperation is below the surface. And with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in office, this strategic security partnership is expected to grow further.
After Azerbaijan liberated its territories from Armenian occupation in 2020, a new geopolitical landscape emerged. Azerbaijan now had a 428-mile shared border with Iran, an entirely unwelcome development for the regime in Tehran.
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