By Emanuele Ottolenghi. Two weeks after a huge explosion at a military base outside Tehran killed the Revolutionary Guards' top missile expert alongside 20 others, this week another explosion rocked Isfahan, the seat of a uranium conversion facility. There is no confirmation that the facility was indeed the site of the explosion - although some media reports have indicated this was the case.
Regardless, both explosions were too powerful to make the regime's initial explanations an ammunition explosion in the first case plausible. If this is the West's covert war against Iran's nuclear drive, it is going to shake the regime at its foundations, since such blows to Iran's clandestine missile and nuclear programmes would be the result of deep penetration of the regime's most secretive activities by foreign intelligence services.
As if this were not enough, Iran now finds itself pitched into an unprecedented double crisis - open factional infighting inside the regime and international diplomatic isolation. The former - a power struggle largely pitting the conservative camp, the Supreme Leader and the Revolutionary Guards against the sitting president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his entourage - is less about the country's direction in its foreign policy and more about who controls the levers of political, military and economic power.
The latter - a rapid escalation against Iran's neighbours and the West which culminated in the storming of the British Embassy in Tehran earlier this week - is a self-inflicted wound that may serve the more militant camp inside the regime.
The regime's rhetoric has escalated in the past few weeks with bellicose threats not only against Israel, on account of the ongoing, very public, debate in Jerusalem about the viability and desirability of a military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities, but also against the United States, Turkey, Europe and, of course, Britain.
