It was Colonel Mustard, in the library with the candlestick.

In the immediate aftermath of an attack on a memorial procession for Qassem Soleimani near his grave in Kerman on Wednesday, I suggested that although the regime in Tehran would almost surely implicate Mossad, the deadly blasts were more likely “a manifestation of sectarian violence — so, Sunni extremism.”

Later, writing in the Daily, I noted that nothing about the incident suggested Israeli involvement. It appeared to be indiscriminate rather than targeted, there was no connection to the country’s nuclear program and no high-profile Quds members were killed.

Further, to the extent initial reports were accurate that most of the dead were killed in the second blast, that suggested terror tactics whereby bombers attempt to inflict maximum casualties by waiting for crowds to gather around the injured before detonating additional explosives.

Sure enough, ISIS took credit on Thursday, claiming that in fact, there were no remotely detonated suitcases, as reported by Iranian media, but rather the blasts were attributable to suicide belts worn by Omar al-Mowahid and Sayefulla al-Mujahid. (I have no idea who they are. They were just named in the ISIS statement.)

Soleimani was the single-most effective counterweight to ISIS in the region. The Quds’ Shiite militia in Iraq were instrumental in routing ISIS from the country and also aided their ideological and operational big brother, Hezbollah, in the battle to restore the Assad regime in Syria, where the opposition was primarily Sunni. The US assassinated a top leader from one of those militias on Thursday — Abu Taqwa, a senior Al-Nujaba commander and a high-ranking PMF official, was killed in a Baghdad drone strike.

When Soleimani was likewise killed four years ago, then Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif chided the US for “assassinating the most effective force fighting ISIS, Al-Nusrah, Al Qaeda et al,” where “et al” meant Sunni extremism in general. That, Zarif warned, was an “extremely dangerous and foolish” thing to do.

To be sure, no one should shed any tears for any of Iran’s commanders or operatives linked to the Quds, but it’s absolutely true that if you have a Sunni extremist problem, one way to solve it is to send in militia operating at the behest of the Quds. Put differently, if you were a Sunni extremist or Sunni militant in Iraq or Syria during the wars, the very last person you wanted to see through your binoculars on the frontlines was Soleimani. That was to look directly into the eyes of death itself.

In claiming the attack on Kerman, ISIS called the slain general a “hypocrite.” That, and a few other gripes, served as the justification for the group’s decision to murder dozens of Iranian mourners in what counted as the single-deadliest attack on Iranian soil since the revolution.

Khamenei didn’t name Israel on Wednesday, but Ebrahim Raisi and a top Iranian lawmaker were quick to blame the IDF. It wasn’t immediately clear how the Iranian government intended to deal with ISIS’s claim given the propaganda value of blaming Israel.

Assuming ISIS is telling the truth (and who doesn’t trust ISIS, right?), the attack is easy enough to contextualize: Soleimani singlehandedly transformed the Shiite crescent into a militarized extension of the IRGC, and ISIS is ideologically committed to casting the Shiite community as apostates.

Israeli officials cited, but not named, by various international media outlets uniformly rejected the notion that Mossad or the IDF had anything to do with Wednesday’s events in Kerman.