by Huey Dessalines

Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a top Iranian nuclear scientist, was assassinated in Tehran on Friday. Bullets riddled his vehicle and there were reports of an explosion as well. Fakhirizadeh was a major part of the Iranian nuclear effort and is the highest ranking Iranian scientist to be assassinated to date. Israel has long sought to neutralize/destroy Iranian nuclear capabilities, seeing Iran as a competitor for hegemony in the MENA [Middle East and North Africa] region. Israel’s intelligence service, MOSSAD, has regularly targeted Iranian scientists for assassination. The Guardian reports that three high profile assassination incidents have taken place in the past decade:

In 2010, Masoud Ali Mohammadi, an expert on particle physics, was killed by a remote-control bomb strapped to a motorcycle as he was leaving his Tehran home.

Later that year, another nuclear scientist, Majid Shahriar, died in similar manner when attackers rode up alongside him and stuck bombs to his car. Fereidoon Abbasi Davani, Iran’s atomic chief at the time, survived an assassination attempt that same day. Both men are believed to have worked with Fakhrizadeh.

In 2011, Darioush Rezaeinejad, an academic whose affiliation to the country’s nuclear activities is disputed, was shot by gunmen riding on motorcycles. A year later, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, the deputy head of Iran’s uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, was killed in a magnetic bomb attack while he was driving his Peugeot 405 to work.

This recent assassination of a high profile Iranian nuclear scientist has been met with denial from the governments of both Israel and the United States. Yet it is stock in trade for the lame duck Trump administration, which began the year by assassinating Major General Qassem Soleimani of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, and in response to losing the election has escalated saber rattling against Iran. The Trump administration also intends to continue the so-called “flood” of economic sanctions, another imperialist tool which resulted in the suffering and starvation of countless Iraqis, particularly children, in the 1990s at the behest of the Clinton Administration, which sought to punish Saddam Hussein’s government for supposedly maintaining stocks of WMDs. As we know, there were no WMDs in Iraq, and millions of children died in what one former UN official called a planned “genocide”.

The Iranian people, undoubtedly, will fare no better with Biden than they have with Trump – both seek to maintain US-Israeli hegemony in the region which will come at the continued expense and humiliation of the Iranian people. Furthermore, the internal situation in Iran will remain heated as the masses continue to struggle and protest against inflation and other economic problems, many of which have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic which has had global economic impact, along with fresh sanctions. The US government has also been sanctioning trade partners of Iran, such as Russia and China, continuing the inter-imperialist struggle. It also continues to meddle in the affairs of Venezuela after two years of attempted coups against the left-populist Bolivarian government.

Yet, the Iranian government has experience with weathering sanctions and the Yankee-Israeli plot to wreck the Iranian economy has fallen flat. Iran remains a semi-feudal country ruled by theocratic reactionaries, and there has been, historically, a Maoist movement in Iran which has upheld the necessity of and waged armed struggle against reactionaries and imperialists of all types. Undoubtedly, the Iranian masses remember this heritage of revolutionary struggle and will unite further to struggle against threats to their desires for peace, land and liberation from both within and without. It is the task of US revolutionaries to aid them by preparing the terrain in our own country and making revolution.