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Hamid Badakhshan walked into the Shahcheragh Shrine in Shiraz and murdered 15 worshippers with a gun last week. He was shot, and died in Iranian police custody. ISIS claimed the attack as part of its broader sectarian war on Shi'a Islam.

The reaction to the attack was eerily reminiscent of the early Syrian civil war, or Iran's 1979 revolution. People mistrusted the official line about unfolding violence, with good reason. But as more facts emerged, conspiracy theories served to obscure more than illuminate. Foreign journalists, instead of acting as a check on speculation, indulged in it themselves.

Given the circumstances, many Iranians doubted the ISIS claim in the Shahcheragh attack. Officials and regime supporters had immediately taken advantage of the tragedy to blame Iran's insecurity on the ongoing popular uprising. And there are precedents for the Iranian government egregiously lying in public, including its misinformation and obfuscation around the shootdown of Flight PS752 two years ago.

The evidence for a false flag at Shahcheragh, however, was circumstantial and weak. Opposition outlet IranWire scrutinized a government propaganda graphic about the massacre. The image file's metadata appeared to show that it was made before the attack, which could be evidence of foreknowledge, or a computer time zone error. IranWire also noted contradictions between two different alleged ISIS propaganda claims floating around.

ISIS eventually released a tape and photos of "Abu Aisha al-Umari" taking an oath of allegiance to the group, in front of the ISIS flag. He was the same Hamid Badakhshan photographed at the scene of the attack. Barring an unimaginably sophisticated conspiracy, the imagery proves that ISIS was the culprit.

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