A leader of Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard is promising that American generals will be targeted and killed in revenge for last week's attacks on two of his country's leading nuclear scientists -- a threat Middle East experts say must be taken seriously.

In a speech published in Farsi at an Iranian website linked to the Revolutionary Guard, Brig. Gen. Mohammad Reza Naghdi was quoted as saying that “the filthy Americans and the Zionists should not think that with killing our scientists, they can divert our nation from its path of Jihad and scare us.” 

He continued with a specific threat: “We will mark the hanging sites of the American and Zionist generals and we will identify which hanging was in retaliation for the blood of our great martyr Shahriari.”

Reza Kahlili, a former CIA spy who left Iran first discovered the comments, said "that the United States should be concerned about this threat."  Jim Phillips, an expert on Middle East Policy for the Heritage Foundation, and Alireza Nader, an expert in Iran’s leadership at the RAND Corporation, said Iran often makes outlandish threats, but they agreed that this one has to be taken as a serious and credible threat because it came directly from Naghdi.

Both Phillips and Nader said that the most likely place for an attack to occur would be Iraq, and any attack would most likely be carried out by surrogates working for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. “The Revolutionary Guards have been in Iraq since the 1980s and they have an extensive network there,” Phillips said.

While Nader agreed that Iraq was the place Iran was most likely to strike, he also suggested that Bahrain, Qatar and other Gulf states would also allow the Iranian general to carry out the threat.