Published On: Mon, Jan 22nd, 2024

Iran missile attacks were ‘warning to West’, says defence expert as Tehran vows revenge | World | News


’s recent spate of Missile attacks on Iraq and were partly aimed at sending a signal to the West about its military capability, the former chairman of Parliament’s defence committee has said.

Tobias Ellwood MP was speaking as Ebrahim Raisi, the President to the Islamic Republic ominously pledged to seek vengeance for the deaths of five Iranian officials killed in Syria after an airstrike he blamed on Israel.

In recent days, Iran has launched attacks on an an Iraq military base in which is home to US military personnel; on targets in against the so-called Baluchistan Liberation Army and the Baluchistan Liberation Front in Pakistan; and on Syria, apparently in response to the bomb attack in the city of Kerman on January 4.

Mr Ellwood, the MP for Bournemouth East, suggested while there will undoubtedly have been a strategic element to what Tehran was doing, there was also an secondary motive with tensions high in the Middle East and Western ships in the Red Sea, and air strikes on the Iran-aligned Houthis.

Former British Army officer Mr Ellwood told Express.co.uk: “Iran is by some distance the most powerful military in the Middle East.

“And as such it’s sending a clear message to the West with these missile launches.”

However, there was no evidence as things stood that Iran had any intention of pursuing a direct confrontation with the West, Mr Ellwood emphasised.

Nevertheless Mr Ellwood – who advocates the UK government designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organisation – believes the escalation risk in Iran launched military strikes against neighbouring states is obvious.

Counter-terrorism police this week said Britain faced its most “acute threat” of hostile foreign interference and spying since the Cold War because of the “triple threat” of Russia, China and Iran.

Assistant Commissioner Matt Jukes, Britain’s head of counter-terrorism policing, argues the challenge faced now is “greater now than since the days of the Cold War”, adding: “I don’t want to be coy.

“We are talking about parts of the state apparatus of Iran, China and Russia,” he told reporters.

A new specialist investigations unit would use the provisions of a security act past last year to ”be the most overt part of the UK security community stepping up its response to those hostile state actions”.

He warned: “This is not simply rhetoric.

“In my seat, you tend to look at dashboards of indicators and there are particular indicators that we will be focused on. And right now, there are needles on that dashboard that are moving in the wrong direction.”

In a statement issued yesterday after the raids which claimed the lives of five senior members of Iran’s security forces in Damascus yesterday, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi “expressed his condolences” to the families of those he called “high-ranking martyrs”.

Pledging to avenge their deaths, he called the attack a “cowardly assassination of five of Iran’s most distinguished advisors”.

Mr Raisi said the strike were both “terrorist and criminal” and “showed the height of Israel‘s desperation and weakness against the combatants of the resistance front”.

He warned: “It will not remain unanswered.”



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