May 19, 2024, 12:58 p.m. ET
9 minutes ago
Anushka Patil
The U.S. State Department said it was “closely following" reports of the crash but had no further comment.
May 19, 2024, 12:56 p.m. ET
11 minutes ago
The New York Times
The aftermath of the strike on an Iranian Embassy building in Damascus, Syria, last month.
Credit: Firas Makdesi/Reuters
The crash of a helicopter carrying President Ebrahim Raisi of Iran happened at a delicate moment for international relations, just days after senior American and Iranian officials held talks through intermediaries to try to
tamp down the threat of a wider conflict in the Middle East.
The area where the helicopter crashed was under heavy fog, and it was not immediately clear what had caused the crash, which set off an intense search and rescue operation.
For years, Iran and Israel have been locked in
a shadow war with attacks by land, sea, air and in cyberspace — many of them covert or carried out by proxies throughout the Middle East. But the risks of a wider conflict have risen sharply since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, setting off the war in Gaza and a
cascade of strikes and counter-strikes across the region.
The hostilities burst into the open after Israel conducted airstrikes on
a building in the Iranian Embassy complex in Syria in April. Iran retaliated with its
first direct attack on Israel after decades of enmity, launching more than 300 drones and missiles toward Israel, many of which were shot down.
Iran seemed intent on proving that it would attack directly — and not simply rely on its proxies, like
Hezbollah in Lebanon,
the Houthis in Yemen or
militias in Iraq. Yet the Iranian barrage also seemed
designed to cause little damage, reflecting an interest in avoiding war, analysts said at the time.
Still, the possibility of a wider conflict looms, and in recent days American and Iranian officials
took part in indirect talks in Oman — the first such conversations since Iran’s retaliatory attack on Israel last month.
Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser, said in a
news conference last week that “the threat posed by Iran and its proxies to Israel, to regional stability and to American interests is clear.”
Source: Iranian state and semiofficial news agencies
The New York Times