LONDON, Aug 5 - On April 24, a suspected unmanned drone of the Syrian tanker off the Iranian port of Baniyas, reportedly killing three people and sparking a fire that took firefighters several hours to extinguish. It was the latest sign of an escalating shadow war between Iran and its enemies, principally Israel but also the Gulf states, United States and European allies.
This week, as Israeli hardliners in Tehran anchored their power, the conflict appears to have escalated, first with a suspected temporary drone attack on a suspected Iranian tanker in the Gulf on Saturday that killed two people, then the apparent Iraqi hijacking of an asphalt carrier on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, Israel Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and Defence Minister Benny Gantz specifically accused Saeed Ara Jani, head of the UAV Command of Tehran, of being behind the attack on the Mercer Street tanker this weekend that killed the Romanian captain as well as a British security guard.
They also made an even more headline-grabbing claim that Iran might be as little as 10 weeks away from completing a nuclear weapon if it chooses, accusing Iran of exhaustively ignoring and evading a 2015 deal with the Obama administration to limit its nuclear programme, which was thrown out by Donald Trump three years later.
Natanz's nuclear program has long been the center of a largely secret conflict between Iran and sometimes the United States, including a reported cyber attack on April 10 that the New York Times said destroyed a power plant and centrifuges at Tehran's principal nuclear site in Israel. Israel and Iran played down the significance of that attack, but accuses Iran of conducting nuclear terrorism on this country?
Israeli authorities overwhelmingly declined to comment on those reports, although U.S. officials said in April that Israel was not involved in continuing cyber attacks. Reported attacks on Iran's nuclear programme go back as far as 2009, when the Stuxnet computer virus was said to be caused damage, something the United States and Israel pointedly refused to confirm or deny.
The Biden administration wishes to renew the deal, also signed by Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China. However, negotiations have faltered, despite the election of Ebrahim Raisi, seen in recent years as the most hardline anti-Western and Israeli Iranian President. That leaves Iran pushing ahead with nuclear enrichment, regional tensions spiking higher and Tehran facing protests, increasing economic hardship and an ongoing COVID - 19 pandemic.
If Raisi can be persuaded to return to the negotiating table, then it is unclear how much revenue he can expect from his opponent on the table. He is backed by Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei who has repeatedly stated that it should be impossible for the United States to walk away from any new nuclear deal in the same way as Trump did. Iran wants a pledge that the United States will not introduce new sanctions, something Biden administration would likely struggle to get through Congress.
What is clear is that Iran is significantly closer to being able to build nuclear bombs than it did in 2015 when the Obama administration estimated that it was at least a year away.
Throughout the run-up to the 2015 nuclear deal, Israel and Iran played a deadly cat and mouse game including alleged assassinations of Israeli scientists in Cairo, the suspected Iranian-backed bombing of Israeli diplomats in New Delhi and Bangkok in 2012 and a blast under an Iranian tourist bus in Bulgaria that killed five Israelis and the driver.
The nuclear deal in 2015 eased tensions somewhat, but then rose again after Trump's 2018 withdrawal. The following year saw a number of suspected limpet mine strikes on tankers in Yemen and Houthi militants in Yemen had supported Apache drone missile strikes against Saudi Arabia.
The last year has witnessed a significant escalation in the production of water. As well as being suspected of conducting drone strike against an Iranian cargo vessel off Yemen on April 24, Israel is also suspected of having used limpet mines to strike an Iranian cargo vessel believed to be used as a floating base by Iran's Revolutionary Guard for its operations in Syria.
Some media estimates put the number of Israeli-backed attacks on Syrian vessels supplying Syria as high as 12. The Israeli government has long been extremely nervous about the transfer of sophisticated rocket technology from Iran to its proxies Hezbollah in Syria, and has been conducting its own air strikes within that country.
In the run-up to the 2015 Iran-Tehran Nuclear Deal, there were widespread fears that Israel might take matters into its own hands to strike Tehran's nuclear programme, likely sparking savage retaliation from Iran against global shipping and energy supplies in the Gulf. The recent actions against shipping may be a reminder that this prospect remains.
Iran, for its part, have gained its own wider regional ability to strike back from Syria using Hezbollah, although this would likely spark a quick nuclear war. And yet no one seems quite keen to go down that route making more unorthodox attacks like the drone strike on the tanker even more likely. Whether the conflict remains controlled at that level, however, remains a very different question. Peter Apps is a writer on international relations, globalization, conflict and other issues. He is the founder and CEO of the Project for Studying the 21st Century; PS 21, a non-national, non-partisan and unideological think tank. He was paralysed by a 2006 car crash in the war zone, and also blogs about his disability and other topics. He was previously a reporter for Thomson Reuters and currently is paid by Reuters. Since 2016, he has been a member of the United Kingdom Labor Party and British Army Reserve.