Iran’s murders of Jews continue despite Western leniency toward the regime

French police recently charged a French-Algerian dual citizen and his partner with allegedly plotting to murder Israelis and Jews in Paris, Munich and Berlin, all on behalf of Iran.

Iran’s efforts to murder Jews abroad show how the regime in Tehran has intensified its support for terrorism and assassination plots in the West, despite overtures and economic concessions from the United States and Europe.

The French Directorate General for Internal Security claimed on September 8 that Iran was planning to assassinate around seven people in Europe as part of a plot to “target civilians” to “create insecurity for the opposition” to the Tehran regime “within the Jewish/Israeli community.”

The aim of the plot was to intimidate opponents of the Islamic Republic and prevent them from engaging in activism against the clerical dictatorship.

The Islamic Republic has long maintained and exploited its ties to criminal networks, which are behind a recent wave of violent plots targeting Jewish communities and Iranian dissidents in Europe and the United States.

These networks include the German motorcycle gang Hells Angels, the Eastern European criminal organisation Organization and the Swedish crime networks Foxtrot and Rumba.

It is worrying that the regime’s killings, often carried out in secret by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Ministry of Intelligence (MOI), date back to the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979. However, the theocracy’s efforts have increased significantly in recent years.

Israel’s Mossad recently reported that Iran facilitated a series of terrorist attacks on Israeli embassies across Europe by capitalizing on the global anti-Semitic wave following the October 7 Hamas terror attacks. The Mossad stated that Tehran was behind a grenade attack on the Israeli embassy in Belgium in May 2024. Similarly, Sweden’s intelligence service confirmed in May 2024 that Iran orchestrated the foiled bombing of the Israeli embassy in Stockholm earlier this year.

Despite the Islamic Republic’s claims to discriminate between Jews and Zionists, the regime’s foreign plans have consistently targeted Jewish communities independent of Israel.

For example, Germany concluded that Tehran had planned the attempted arson attack on a synagogue in Düsseldorf in 2022.

Iranian dissidents, anti-regime activists and journalists have also been victims of Tehran’s transnational attacks. Most notably, in 2018 a Belgian court convicted Vienna-based Iranian diplomat Assadollah Assadi of plotting to bomb the annual convention of the National Council of Resistance of Iran. Belgian authorities said Assadi was an Iranian intelligence officer operating under diplomatic cover and carrying out orders from the Interior Ministry.

Tehran’s influence extends even into the United States, as evidenced by the foiled plots to assassinate and kidnap New York resident Masih Alinejad, an Iranian-American dissident and journalist who was the target of a foiled kidnapping attempt by Iranian intelligence in 2021.

In 2023, the U.S. Justice Department charged three men with ties to Iran and an Eastern European criminal network with plotting to assassinate Alinejad in her New York home in 2022.

Iran also facilitated the failed 2022 assassination attempt in New York on Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Versesa novel that prompted Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to write a fatwa in 1989, calling for his death. The U.S. District Court in Buffalo alleged that the assailant, who stabbed Rushdie multiple times, provided “material support and resources” to the Tehran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah between September 2020 and the day of the attack.

The European Union should respond to these attacks by designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization, as the United States did in 2019.

In addition, the UK, Germany and France should reimpose UN sanctions on Iran by triggering the ‘snapback’ process, in line with UN Security Council resolution 2231, which approved the 2015 nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

In a letter dated April 10, 2023, some 130 members of the US House of Representatives urged EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell to designate the IRGC as a terrorist entity. A month earlier, 12 members of the US Senate sent a letter with the same message to Borrell. He must finally listen to them.

Until then, the United States must maintain this pressure to ensure that Washington and Europe take a united stand against Tehran’s malign ambitions. At the same time, Washington must renew its maximum economic pressure on Iran to send a message to the regime that it will pay a significant price for its violence. After decades of assassinations, whether completed or attempted, there is no time to lose.

Janatan Sayeh is a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, focusing on Iranian domestic affairs and the Islamic Republic’s regional malign influence. Follow him on X @JanatanSayeh.

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