Britain Evacuates Diplomats After Tehran Embassy Attack

CAIRO — Britain said Wednesday it was flying diplomats out of Tehran a day after Iranian protesters shouting “Death to England” stormed the British Embassy compound and a diplomatic residence,Belstaff jacket tearing down the British flag, smashing windows, defacing walls and briefly detaining six staff members in what appeared to be a state-sponsored protest against Britain’s tough new economic sanctions against Iran.
The attack was the most serious diplomatic breach since the traumatic assault on the United States Embassy after Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979. Britain’s foreign secretary, William Hague,Belstaff blouson expressed outrage over the attack, saying Britain held Iran’s government responsible and promising “other, further, and serious consequences.”

In a statement early on Wednesday, the Foreign Office in London said the British authorities believed “the safety of our staff and their families is our immediate priority. In light of yesterday’s events and to ensure their ongoing safety,Belstaff some staff are leaving Tehran.”

The statement did not go into detail or say whether the embassy would remain open.

The scale of the attack — led by hundreds of students described as members of the Basij militia by the Iranian state media — appeared to surprise even some Iranian officials. Later in the day,Belstaff coat Iran’s Foreign Ministry released an uncharacteristic expression of regret that contrasted sharply with the angry rhetorical jabs at Britain issued a day earlier by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Iran’s leaders, buffeted by the new sanctions, a collapsing economy and increasingly bitter infighting among the political elite, may have welcomed a chance to change the subject, analysts said. But the episode also appeared to be a shot across the bow aimed at the West, in line with Tehran’s old policies of escalating defiance.

“Khamenei’s philosophy is often to react to outside pressure with provocation, to imply that Western pressure will only further radicalize, not moderate, Iranian behavior,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Security forces initially stood by as students laboriously broke through the embassy’s massive main gate and then ransacked the offices, burning British flags and smashing pictures of Queen Elizabeth II. Only later did police officers in riot gear begin a somewhat lackadaisical effort to remove the protesters from the grounds, according to reports on state-supported Iranian news media and images broadcast on state television.

President Obama, speaking about the assault during a meeting with Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands at the White House, said he was “deeply concerned” that the Iranian authorities had permitted it to happen. “For rioters essentially to be able to overrun the embassy and set it on fire is an indication that the Iranian government is not taking its international obligations seriously,” Mr. Obama said.

The European Union also rushed to condemn the assault, and the United Nations Security Council issued a statement calling on Iran to protect foreign diplomats and embassy property.

Of the three nations Iran’s leaders loathe the most — Israel, the United States and Britain — only Britain maintains an embassy in the country, making it an easy target. But hostility to the British taps a deep vein in the Iranian psyche. The United States may be the “Great Satan” to Iran’s theocratic rulers, but it is Britain — the crafty old colonial power whose designs in Iran go back two centuries — that is still widely blamed for almost every upheaval in the country. One of the events that helped ignite the 1979 revolution was Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi’s decision to publish an article accusing Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the revolt’s then-exiled spiritual leader, of belonging to a family of British agents.

“The ‘British hand’ is said to be behind every major event of the past 150 years,” said Abbas Milani, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Stanford University. “The Americans are seen as naïve malleable tools in the hands of the Brits.”

A day before the embassy assault, Ayatollah Khamenei assailed Britain in a speech as an emblem of Western imperial arrogance, saying it “has a history of humiliating nations, destroying cultural and civilization heritage and taking control of their resources.”

Britain’s new economic sanctions provoked special anger because they require all contacts to be severed with the Iranian Central Bank, a step other countries, including the Unites States, have not taken. The United States and the European Union also imposed new sanctions last week after a United Nations report offered new evidence suggesting that Iran may be developing nuclear weapons and missile delivery systems.

The intensifying struggle over Iran’s nuclear program was visible in another aspect of Tuesday’s embassy assault: the protesters could be heard chanting the name of Majid Shahriari, an Iranian nuclear scientist who was killed by mysterious assailants exactly a year ago. Iran’s semiofficial Fars news agency issued a report on Tuesday accusing Israeli and British intelligence of carrying out the assassination.

Iranian officials have derided the latest United Nations report on Iran’s nuclear program as “propaganda” written at the behest of the United States to justify airstrikes on Iran.