News of the recent assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran’s top nuclear scientist and a senior official within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), has once again raised the specter of direct confrontation between Iran, Israel and the United States. For the past year and a half, tensions with Iran have crested and waned based on a variety of events in the region, including the late 2019 attack in Iraq that killed Qassem Soleimani, the head of the IRGC’s unconventional warfare arm known as the Quds Force.
