Contrary to some local and international reporting, Shooshtari had not been a member or commander in the IRGC’s fabled Quds Corps, the foreign special operations unit of the Revolutionary Guards. The confusion may have arisen because of Shooshtari’s ties to the Quds garrison (no relation to the Quds Corps), which is one of the main national operational headquarters of the IRGC.
Details of the early morning attack are still sketchy, but IRGC sources now rule out a second suicide bomber. The lone suicide bomber is believed to have hid explosives on his body and detonated them as he approached the senior IRGC commanders. The sheer scale of the loss has led some Iranian and international media to speculate about a “sophisticated” operation, but all the available information in the local media and information supplied by IRGC and intelligence sources in Tehran point to a simple and straight-forward suicide bomb attack.
