Senior Iranian officials have blamed Friday’s assassination of MohsenFakhrizadeh on Israel. Tel Aviv has so far remained silent on the matter.
Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran’s top nuclear scientist who was killed Friday onthe outskirts of Tehran, was such a crucial figure in the country’s covertnuclear programme that it will be hard to replace him with someone ofsimilar leverage and stature, according to Maj. Gen. (ret.) Amos Yadlin,the ex-head of Israeli military intelligence, who referred to Fakhrizadehas “the core source of authority, knowledge, and organisation of thisprogramme”.
He told a recent briefing for journalists that Iran’s nuclear programme hastwo domains: an open part, stipulating the production of nuclear materialthat Tehran says is meant for civilian use, and a covert portion pertainingto weaponisation, which Iran denies.
While admitting that the recent killing, which Tehran has blamed on Israel,will hardly do any significant damage to the former, Yadlin acknowledgedthat the negative repercussions for the latter would “be huge”, but they”cannot be measured since nobody knows exactly the scope and the depth andwhat the Iranians are doing covertly”. Tel Aviv hasn’t yet made any formalcomment on the killing.
1100MW nuclear power plant in Karachi near completionlink
*’Graveyards Full of Irreplaceable People’*
Yadlin went on to elaborate about various lines of thinking in the Israelidefence authorities’ ranks regarding if there is any sense in assassinatingnuclear scientists, pointing to two extremes. On the one hand, “there arethose who say that when you deal with a system and you cut [off] its headit’s always very useful”, while on the other, there are those who believeany leader can be replaced, and “that the graveyards are full of people whowere irreplaceable”, he said.
He also noted some might argue that the liquidation of Iranian scientistsdoes more harm than good, due to it creating anger and prompting revenge –something that may motivate Tehran to go out of its way to prove to theworld that such assassinations won’t stop them from reaching their intendedgoals.
Yadlin, who in 1981 partook in the operation that bombed Saddam Husein’snuclear reactor at Osiraq, went on to note that Fakhrizadeh, who was also ageneral in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), along with formerHezbollah number two Imad Mughniyeh, killed in 2008, and IRGC Al-Quds forcehead Qasem Soleimani assassinated in Iraq in early 2020, were seniorleaders and indispensable parts of their respective organisations. – Sputnik