Tweet Share Share Comment The Middle East is blowing up. More militias and militaries are launching attacks against more countries, for more reasons, than the region has seen in decades—by some measures, in more than a century, since the breakup of the Ottoman Empire during and after the First World War.
Many of these recent strikes and incursions stem from the region’s largest, most violent, and contentious current war—the one between Israel and Hamas. But others are only peripherally related, if at all. And a few are downright puzzling.
In any case, the list amounts to what Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute calls “an insane scale of cross-border conflict.” It entails Israel attacking Gaza and Lebanon, Hamas and Hezbollah attacking Israel, Jordan and Iran attacking Syria, Iran attacking Iraq, Yemen’s Houthis attacking ships in the Red Sea, prompting the U.S. and Britain to attack Houthi targets in Yemen, and—most recent and, in some ways, most startling—an exchange of missiles and drones between Iran and Pakistan.
Pakistan’s strikes on Iran—which were launched in retaliation to Iran’s strikes on Pakistan—marked the first time that anyone has fired missiles against Iranian territory since the Iran–Iraq war of 1980–88.
President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, wrote in an article for the October 2023 issue of Foreign Affairs that the Middle East “is quieter than it has been for decades.” Sullivan was permitted to delete that sentence, and to revise several other newly outdated passages, for the journal’s online edition, in order to account for the facts of Hamas’ murderous attack on Israel on Oct. 7 and Israel’s retaliation.
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Here’s the thing, though. When the magazine’s print edition went to press, Sullivan’s assertion seemed to be true. What has happened in the three months since? Do all of the ensuing conflicts stem from Oct. 7? Do they all represent one giant wave of violence—different theaters of a long-suppressed, regionwide conflict that Hamas’ terrorist attack and Israel’s massively destructive retaliation unveiled and revitalized?
It’s complicated.
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The most striking, and alarming, attacks have been launched, just in the last few days, by—and against—Iran. The mullahs of Tehran had refrained from getting directly involved in the fights all around them while still fueling the conflicts through proxies. Perhaps they were deterred from direct action by the two U.S. aircraft carriers mobilized to the Mediterranean for precisely that purpose. Instead, the Iranians let their proxies—chiefly Hamas, Hezbollah, and lately the Houthis—do the dirty work, though even then backing them with caveats. Iran cheered Hamas but denied any involvement in the Oct. 7 attack; it let the Lebanon-based Hezbollah militias lob just enough rockets into northern Israel to signal support for Hamas but not enough to prompt devastating return fire from the Israeli Defense Forces.
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Iran’s motive—the reason its leaders decided to let the military, especially the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, fire off some salvos—is a matter for speculation. It could be that they felt a need to display leadership, to show their proxies that they weren’t fighting on their own. Iraq’s foreign minister, Fuad Mohammed Hussein, quipped on one newscast that the Iranians wanted to attack someone, and knew they couldn’t risk attacking Israel or America, so they bombed Kurdish leaders in Iraq.
There may be something to this (Michael Knights of the Washington Institute described Iran’s attacks on Kurds in Iraq as “bombing the usual suspects”), but it’s a bit flippant. Vali Nasr, a Middle East expert at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, told me, “Iraq’s foreign minister didn’t want to admit that anti-Iran terrorists are operating on Iraqi soil.”
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Read More Still, the question remains: Why fire off these salvos now? Demonstrating its power to Israel probably had something to do with it. At first, Tehran claimed that it hit a secret Mossad facility, and rationalized the attack as a response to the Jan. 4 suicide bombing at the graveside of Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian military commander, on the fourth anniversary of his assassination. (Iran blamed the bombing—which killed 84 Iranians—on Israel’s spy agency, even though ISIS publicly took credit for it.)
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In fact, the Iranians almost certainly don’t believe their own rhetoric on this. At about the same time that they attacked Kurds in Iraq, they also launched missiles at ISIS targets in Syria. That attack represented the true retaliation to the graveside bombing. However, even that attack was directed, in some ways, at Israel. Farzin Nadimi, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute, noted in a phone conversation that the missile fired at Syria was the longest-ranged missile Iran has fired in a military attack, and that, like the ones fired at Iraq, it was extremely accurate. “The missile traveled the same distance needed to hit Israel,” Nadimi said. In that sense, it was probably meant, in part anyway, to send Israel a signal—at once a threat and a deterrent.
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However, Iran’s drone and missile strike on Pakistan is more puzzling. Nasr called it “irrational,” “reckless,” and “out of left field.” Nadimi said the Iranians “probably didn’t think it through.” The attack was aimed at terrorists who had recently killed 16 IRGC soldiers on the Iran–Pakistan border. But the Iranians should have realized that the Pakistani government would have to strike back. Each side claimed that the other’s attack killed women and children.
The odd thing about the exchange is that, in most respects, Iran and Pakistan are allies. They were about to conduct joint naval exercises, which have since been canceled. They both regard the terrorist group as hostile. Their officials and diplomats, who have regular contact with one another, could have planned some joint operation against it. Instead, the two sides have condemned each other and withdrawn their ambassadors.
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Observers believe the tensions between the two will wind down. Nobody wants a war, or any sort of confrontation, on this border, especially since Pakistan has nuclear weapons. Diplomats from Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and China are offering themselves as intermediaries.
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Still, given the spree of violence that has hit the entire region like a pandemic, who knows whether the two sides will come to their senses. A lot of other leaders and politicians haven’t done so. And since Iran’s attack and Pakistan’s response were both launched, at least in part, to please or placate domestic political factions, further episodes of irrationality aren’t out of the question. It’s possible, for instance, that Iran will feel the need to strike back at Pakistan, lest others—most notably Americans and Israelis—get the idea that it’s possible to launch missiles at Iran without consequences.
Meanwhile, the war in Gaza rages on. Whatever the real reasons for the conflicts throughout the region (and those reasons are many), some of the combatants in all of them at least say that they’re spinoffs of that larger, historic war, so the spinoff battles are likely to rage on.
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