‘I feel more at risk in London than I did in Tehran’ – how the Iranian conflict has spread to the streets of Britain
Iranians here who question the rule of the clerics back home now need special police protection
‘It is clear the views propagated at the Islamic Centre of England are a direct threat to British values and citizens’
The London offices of Iran International, the Persianlanguage television news channel which has incurred the wrath of the regime in Tehran, are hard to access nowadays.
The property in Chiswick, west London, is surrounded by a 10ft-high steel fence and at its base are concrete blocks to prevent a suicide bomber driving a car into the building. Two armoured police vehicles protect the offices with steel barriers in front of a further police cordon.
The channel is beamed into Iran’s homes via satellite and over the internet. Journalists working there are under a threat of death from the authorities in Tehran. The stakes couldn’t be higher.
Eight miles north of the channel’s offices, the London headquarters of an Iranian opposition group has been firebombed, neighbours reportedly witnessing a Molotov cocktail lobbed at the building in the early hours of Monday. The group – People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran – claimed the “clerical regime’s terrorists and operatives” were responsible.
In Iran, daily protests and strikes – prompted by the death of Mahsa Amini for refusing to wear a head scarf – are threatening the survival of the Islamic regime. The fight, seemingly, is being continued on London’s streets.
MI5 has disclosed that it was aware of 10 plots to assassinate or kidnap “enemies” of the regime on Britain’s streets since the start of the year.
Ken Mccallum, MI5’S director general, said last month: “The Iranian intelligence services are a sophisticated adversary. They sometimes use their own operatives and at others they co-opt other people to work on their behalf.”
The regime, he said, is “prepared to take reckless action”, the threat of it all too visible on London’s streets.
There is growing frustration that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the branch of the Iranian army accused of peddling terror abroad, has escaped sanctions that would see it proscribed. The IRGC is banned in the US but the British Government’s new list of sanctioned terror groups and individuals issued yesterday did not include the IRGC.
Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Conservative Party leader and co-chairman of the all party parliamentary group on sanctions, said he had expected IRGC to be “right up there in the firing line”. His cochairman, Labour MP Chris Bryant, said: “With the terrible events in Iran it is appalling and incomprehensible that the Government is still refusing to take action against the IRGC.”
At the Chiswick business park, the armed police and the ex-british military hired by Iran International watch on nervously as Aliasghar Ramezanpour, the channel’s founder and editor-in-chief, poses for photographs in front of the steel and concrete security barrier.
A little over a month ago, counterterrorism police at Scotland Yard told him his life was in danger.
The Iran International building is now under round-the-clock protection; so too Mr Ramezanpour’s home in west London, where he lives with his wife.
He came to London in 2007, having fled Iran following a crackdown on the free press. “Right now I feel more at risk in London than I did back then in Tehran,” said Mr Ramezanpour, 61. “The regime is cornered. In Iran we are a proscribed organisation which gives the regime legal cover to attack us. Some of my family remain in Iran and sometimes they get summoned and questioned about me.”
Mr Ramezanpour was offered a safe house but has declined to move. “If I do that they win,” he said.
Iran is in turmoil right now, its cities caught up in protests over the death in September of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while in custody after being arrested by the country’s notorious morality police for not wearing a headscarf. On Thursday, Iran announced the first execution of a protester convicted of being a “rioter”.
Almost 3,000 miles away in London, security services have become increasingly alarmed by the regime’s behaviour. Iran has long been considered a rogue state, but in his annual threat update, Mr Mccallum knew what he was doing in deliberately calling out Islamic regime.
In Monday’s incident, the exterior of the offices of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran caught fire after a shed next to its offices was set ablaze. “There is no information to suggest a targeted attack,” said Det Supt Tony Bellis. But, he added: “Due to the location of the incident and the organisation based at the adjacent premises, the investigation is being supported by specialist officers from the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command.”
Meanwhile, in the affluent north London neighbourhood of Maida Vale, the pro-regime Islamic Centre of England (ICE), has also been attacked, this time by protesters wanting to overturn the Islamic republic. At the end of September, hundreds of demonstrators marched on the Iranian embassy in Kensington before turning on the Islamic Centre. Several police officers were hurt in trying to maintain public order.
The ICE is effectively an outpost of the Tehran regime, with its head appointed directly by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and its funding coming from Tehran. It is currently under investigation by the Charity Commission, which in 2020 issued it with an official warning after it held a candlelit vigil for the IRGC general Qasem Soleimani, designated a terrorist by the Government, who had been assassinated in a US drone strike. ICE director Seyed Moosavi praised Soleimani as a “great martyr”. The support for the dead general exposed the ICE to the risk of being found to have committed a terrorist offence.
Last month, the Charity Commission launched a statutory inquiry which could lead to the ICE being stripped of its charitable status. What sparked the latest watchdog intervention was Mr Moosavi’s astonishing attack on the protesters against the regime in Iran, who he described as “soldiers of Satan”, with the women refusing to wear hijabs guilty of spreading “poison”.
The outburst prompted calls for the ICE to be shut down. Kasra Aarabi, an Iran analyst at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, posted on Twitter: “It’s clear the views propagated at the centre are a direct threat to British values and citizens. The centre should be shut-down and Khamenei’s representatives should be expelled.”
The ICE’S tentacles are spread wide. Iran-watchers say there are centres connected to the body in Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow and Newcastle.
The Jewish Chronicle has reported links between the ICE and a nearby school called Iris (Islamic Republic of Iran School). The newspaper uncovered an Iranian propaganda video of children in the playground joining in a song called entitled “Hello Commander”, suggesting the song – about mythical warriors fighting infidels – was linked to a modern doctrine in which the goal is the destruction of the state of Israel.
The ICE has declined to speak to The Daily Telegraph but a spokesman told the Jewish Chronicle last month that the version of the song sung by the children had no such meaning, and had “nothing to do with a political agenda”.
Meanwhile, Iran International will continue to be beamed into Iran from Chiswick. Its staff are determined to keep going despite the threats. Britain’s counter-terrorism police and security services are holding their breath.