Those who sow the wind, reap the whirlwind. And Iran has sowed far more than just a wind. Its interference in its neighbors’ affairs has come close to reaching gale force. It has sustained and reinforced the bloody Assad dictatorship in Syria, built a proxy army out of the Lebanese Hezbollah terrorists and brought Yemen to its knees by fomenting and equipping the Houthi rebel insurgency. The Iranian tempest has also blown down attempts by Iraqis to rebuild their shattered state and assert their independence. And the icy blasts of Tehran’s ill wind have been felt here in the Kingdom and in Bahrain as the ayatollahs seek to subvert the governments of their Gulf States neighbors.

The outrage by the Iranian regime at Saturday’s attack by four gunmen on a Revolutionary Guards’ parade in the southwestern city of Ahvaz is entirely phony. The ayatollahs have perpetrated crimes vastly greater than this throughout the Arab world and indeed have unleashed their security forces on their own people, slaughtering scores of protestors. This is not in any way to diminish the odiousness of this attack which killed civilians as well as soldiers. Among the dead was a four-year-old girl and it is being reported that 60 people, including women and children, were wounded, some of them with life-threatening injuries.

Two groups, the Ahvaz National Resistance and Daesh (the self-proclaimed IS) have said they were responsible for the carnage. The latter claim, however, is more credible. Daesh put out a video that appeared to show three of the attackers disguised in Revolutionary Guard uniforms before the assault. To the camera, they spouted Daesh’s usual blasphemous jihadist claptrap. Three of the terrorists were killed and a fourth was captured. It remains to be seen what sort of a confession will be extracted from this individual. The regime will doubtless be hoping the man will be made to claim that he was working for the United States or its allies, thus backing up Tehran’s fiction. Even if he is a dedicated Daesh terrorist, dementedly proud of being part of this terrorist killing machine, he may have been briefed to insist he was acting at the behest of the US and its allies. Daesh strategists might be hoping this would strike some sort of blow against their two most implacable enemies. Only a fool or Iran’s devious ayatollahs would ever dream of believing such nonsense.

The reality is that the Tehran regime itself fostered the viper that is Daesh. Their Syrian satrap, Basher Assad, cynically used Daesh and Al-Qaeda affiliates in Syria to attack the Free Syrian Army and its supporters, which was the real challenge to his dictatorship. Iran also seized on the Daesh incursion into western Iraq as an excuse to promote its influence, using the vicious Badr militia to murder moderate Sunni and Shia politicians.

Iran’s venal and economically-illiterate politicians and their praetorian Revolutionary Guards have no one to blame but themselves for the terrible weekend violence in Ahvaz. President Trump’s UN ambassador Nikki Haley got it in one when she responded to the outraged condemnation of Iranian president Hassan Rouhani by telling the Tehran regime to “look in the mirror”.