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The FlyDubai stabbing is contributing to concerns that Iran could increase covert and deniable attacks as the conflict with the United States and Israel drags on.
British Prime Minister Andy Burnham, meanwhile, said there are “strong indications” Iran played a role in a suspected terror plot near RAF Fairford, the British air base used by U.S. forces during operations against Iran. Counterterrorism police have since arrested a dual U.K.-Iranian national on suspicion of preparing terrorist acts.
The two suspected attacks are raising questions over whether Iran’s war strategy is shifting, but experts caution not to treat the incidents as equally indicative of Iranian involvement — or evidence yet that Tehran has changed its tactics.
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President Donald Trump said early information he has received points to a possible Iranian connection to the attack aboard an Israel-bound FlyDubai flight, where a co-pilot allegedly stabbed the captain and attempted to crash the aircraft with more than 180 people aboard.
The United Arab Emirates and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have described the FlyDubai incident as terrorism, but UAE authorities have not publicly attributed the attack to Iran. Neither investigation has publicly established that the Iranian government directed the attacks, and Iran has denied involvement in the Fairford case.
Daniel Byman, director of the Warfare, Irregular Threats and Terrorism Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the Fairford case fits more closely with Iran’s recent use of hired operatives and other intermediaries.
“The attack on the airbase in the United Kingdom does fit more recent patterns,” Byman told Fox News Digital, while stressing how much remains unknown about the investigation.
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The FlyDubai attack would be a more significant departure.
“That is quite different, and that is something that Iran in the past, at least we haven’t seen Iran do,” Byman said. “It is plausible to me that Iran is involved, but that seems like much more of a stretch based on Iran’s traditional way of operating.”
But the uncertainty surrounding the attacks also illustrates part of the appeal of the broader strategy Iran has spent decades developing: using proxies, covert operatives, criminal networks and other intermediaries to threaten adversaries far beyond its borders while making Tehran’s own role more difficult to establish.
Matthew Levitt, a former Treasury and FBI counterterrorism official who now directs the Reinhard Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at the Washington Institute, said Iran has increasingly sought to put more distance between itself and the people carrying out overseas operations.
“Typically Iran does not admit that it’s involved in these types of attacks because it wants reasonable deniability,” Levitt said.
“There are several advantages for Iran to using terrorism,” Byman said. “One is that there is often a degree of deniability.”
“Terrorism gives Iran a lot more reach,” he added. Levitt, however, put the distinction with conventional warfare more bluntly.
“If Iran shoots a drone or a missile at you, you know where it came from and you know where to shoot back,” he said. “But if Iran uses proxies, and recruits people and does things in a covert manner, it might not be so easy to point a finger back at Iran or to know exactly who did it.”
That capability matters in part because Iran does not have the conventional military strength to match the United States and its allies directly, Levitt said.
“They just don’t have the capability to fight soldier to soldier, airplane to airplane in an all-out kinetic war, but they’re extremely effective at asymmetric warfare, at covert terrorist activity, if that’s what this proves to be,” he said.
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Recent U.S. prosecutions have shown how far that playbook can extend. Federal cases have accused Iranian operatives of seeking to recruit hitmen to kill U.S. officials and using Eastern European organized crime figures in a murder-for-hire plot targeting Iranian-American journalist and dissident Masih Alinejad in New York.
Those operations relied on the same basic advantage: Tehran could pursue targets overseas without launching a conventional attack that immediately identified Iran as the aggressor.
The question now is whether the current conflict gives Iran reason to push that strategy further.
Levitt said Tehran could pursue overseas plots in an effort to pressure Western governments to end the conflict by demonstrating that Iran can impose costs far beyond the conventional battlefield.
And if Fairford and FlyDubai are ultimately tied to Tehran, he said, they would stand out because they involve harder targets and potentially more ambitious tactics than the assassinations, kidnappings, shootings and smaller-scale bombings Iran has more commonly pursued overseas.
“Perhaps this is the new normal, and Iran wants to demonstrate that it can exact a higher cost,” Levitt said.
Byman, however, pointed to several reasons Tehran could exercise restraint.
Iran already has other ways to pressure Washington and its allies, while a terrorist attack against Americans could backfire by uniting U.S. public opinion behind further escalation against Tehran, he said. U.S. and Israeli strikes against senior Iranian intelligence and security officials may also have disrupted some of the networks Tehran would need for overseas operations.
“If Iran wants to go further, then terrorism does become more of an option,” Byman said.
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