More than a dozen explosions and fires affected Iran between the last week of June and mid-July 2020. These incidents ranged from the serious, affecting Iran’s nuclear enrichment facility at Natanz, to fires that looked more like accidents that had little impact. The overall impact of these incidents, which have been portrayed as potential sabotage wrapped in secrecy, is not known.
To get a sense of the extent of these incidents it is worth looking at where they took place. The best way to do this is through mapping them. At MECRA we have created several maps that depict where the incidents took place. To compile this list we relied on different news reports and social media open source reporting. We attempted as much as possible to locate precisely the facilities, where that was not possible we placed the incident in the nearest large city.
Many of these incidents were reported in Iranian state-linked media. For instance the July 13 fire at a gas condensate plan in Kavian Fariman industrial zone in Razavi Khorasan province, was reported in Iran. Iran has probed many of these incidents and hinted that if sabotage was discovered there could be a response. The incident, allegedly at the Khojir surface-to-surface missile facility, which began this whole series of events, was recorded on video from Tehran because the explosion was so large. The fire there was initially reported at Parchin, but the location was found by satellite. Unsurprisingly, due to the US-Iran tensions and Israel-Iran tensions, there have been a number of articles suggesting cyber attacks could be linked to some of these events. Some of these areas, such as Parchin, have allegedly been damaged in the past by mysterious explosions…
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