Iranian agents are getting bolder abroad
▶ Events this week have shown the ferocity with which the regime is pursuing its enemies
Iran is a dangerous place to discuss oppression. Throughout the eight-year term of former president Hassan Rouhani, countless journalists and publications were shut down. The country’s new president, Ebrahim Raisi, has been sanctioned for his alleged role in mass political executions during the 1980s. The habit of targeting opposition figures is now spreading beyond the country’s borders. On Tuesday, US authorities charged four Iranian intelligence officials with conspiracy to kidnap Iranian-American journalist and women’s rights campaigner Masih Alinejad. Alinejad has for years been showing the world footage of Iranians resisting regime oppression. Now she is reportedly the target of what would be the first known Iranian plot to kidnap an American citizen in US territory.
Other journalists have not been saved. In 2019, Ruhollah Zam of Amad News, a Telegram channel that shared footage from protests and other material damaging to government officials, was lured from his home in France to Iraq. From there, he is thought to have been kidnapped and taken to Iran, where he was executed last December.
Earlier this week, details emerged of an Iranian cyber group’s attack on the British university Soas. The operation, which faked emails from a genuine scholar at the institution in an attempt to access personal credentials of those attending a policy discussion, threatened anyone in a foreign capital, Iranian or non-Iranian, with an interest in the country’s politics.
Events of this week have broken a number of precedents, widening the type of people abroad that the regime targets. The country’s diaspora is particularly threatened. The Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs estimates that more than 4 million Iranians live abroad, many of whom have not been back since the revolution of 1979, but whom the government still judges as citizens of the current state. A particularly high number of Iranian-origin people live in western societies, a difficult fact for a regime that since its inception has defined itself against these same parts of the world.
We should laud the bravery of those Iranians who are dedicated to exposing the reality of life in their country. But sympathy is not enough. In an interview yesterday with this paper, Alinejad laid out the sacrifices she has been forced to make because of her work. When the FBI came to her house last December to warn her of the plot, she, by her own account, did not take their warning seriously. That ended abruptly when agents showed her Iranian intelligence material of pictures of her and her loved ones at home. She was forced to upend her family life, move to a total of three different safe houses over eight months, not leave the country and even fear going outside to tend to her garden.
This is the sort of sacrifice that keeps the hope of a fairer Iran alive. But it is also the sort of action that is increasingly dangerous for Iranians, even those who live abroad. News over the past few months has shown that there are few idle threats when it comes to the regime. They must, unfortunately, always be taken seriously.