To Combat Iran’s Assassination Attempts, the US Must Project Strength

“It is highly relevant that this was a cross-border crime,” declared US federal judge Colleen McMahon at a sentencing hearing for agents of Iran responsible for an assassination attempt on US soil.

She added, “It is highly relevant that foreign citizens who were agents of a foreign power conspired to commit, and tried to commit, and almost succeeded in committing, a murder inside the United States — where, presumably, an American citizen like Ms. Alinejad should be safe in her own home.”

The context: In 2022, an assassin dispatched by agents of Tehran stepped onto the Brooklyn porch of Iranian American dissident Masih Alinejad.

Fortunately, the attempted murderer — Khalid Mehdiyev — failed to achieve his goal. Alinejad was on a Zoom call at the time, and didn’t answer the door.

After his arrest, Mehdiyev pled guilty to attempted murder, and awaits sentencing. In late October, the two agents who hired him, Rafat Amirov and Polad Omarov, faced justice, receiving 25-year prison terms at McMahon’s orders.

The judge’s statement reflects her understanding of the longstanding ambitions of the Islamic Republic of Iran — and it points to the vulnerability of the United States to attacks on its soil.

In fact, according to the US State Department, Tehran has killed hundreds of dissidents in more than 40 countries since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The Trump administration should not forget that the Iranian threat to the US homeland remains real and ongoing — and that a posture of strength constitutes the best way to combat it.

Iran’s malignant ambitions have always transcended its borders, reflecting the regime’s authoritarian and revolutionary creed.

Tehran seeks not only regional hegemony, but also global leadership rooted in its radical, pan-Islamist interpretation of Shiite Islam. Its assassination attempts have spanned the entire globe, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Pakistan, Turkey, Cyprus, Iraq, India, Azerbaijan, France, Austria, Germany, Iraq, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Thailand, and the Philippines, among others.

“The Islamic Revolution does not have any borders,” said Ahmad Qolampour, a senior official of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which has committed the bulk of the assassinations, in 2016. The paramilitary force, he added, “does not have the word ‘Iran’ in its title. This means that it seeks to defend the Islamic Revolution and its achievements without regard to particular borders.”

Qolampour understood his marching orders. As the Islamic Republic’s constitution states, the IRGC seeks to fulfill “the ideological mission of jihad in God’s way; that is, extending the sovereignty of God’s law throughout the world.” Or, as the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Islamic Republic’s first supreme leader, said, “Islam is a sacred trust from God to ourselves and the Iranian nation must grow in power and resolution until it has vouchsafed Islam to the entire world.”

How does Iran choose its targets? The regime’s decisions often stem from its perception of the value and prominence of the potential victim, frequently selecting well-known dissidents — like Alinejad — whose death could send a deterrent message to like-minded individuals.

At the same time, in the absence of a clear organizing calculus, Tehran also attacks obscure or little-known dissidents — sending a message that nobody is impervious to the long arm of the Islamic Republic. In so doing, Iran seeks to sap the resolve of all dissidents, both at home and abroad, who continue resisting the regime.

Perhaps more importantly, Tehran’s decisions also emerge from its conception of an assassination’s likely political fallout. If the target appears unwilling or unable to exact retribution, or if Tehran judges that a government’s reprisals would not be painful, prospects for assassinations rise. All too often, particularly in Europe, governments have chosen to offer token condemnations of Iranian assassinations without taking significant countermeasures, thereby emboldening Tehran.

Thus, Iran has rarely targeted the United States. After all, America maintains a powerful security infrastructure geared toward discovering and foiling potential plots and thwarting other Iranian illicit activities, such as sanctions-busting and export control violations.

This reality, along with Iran’s fear of US retaliation, likely explains why Tehran has carried out only two successful assassinations in America prior to its attempted murder of Alinejad — and those were way back in 1980 and 1992. An additional foiled attempt occurred somewhat more recently: In 2011, America charged two agents of Tehran with plotting to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States at a restaurant in Washington DC. 

And the 2022 assassination attempt against Alinejad was hardly the first or last time that Iran targeted her. In 2021, for example, the United States unsealed an indictment alleging a plot by Iranian intelligence officials, beginning in at least June 2020, to kidnap the activist and take her back to Iran. And in November 2024, the US Department of Justice announced another murder-for-hire plot and related charges against three men engaged in an IRGC-directed plot to kill Alinejad.

What emboldened Tehran to target Alinejad after years of reluctance to traverse US soil? The answer remains unclear. But the timing may be instructive.

At the start of the first plot, a US election was on the horizon, with the possibility that President Donald Trump would soon leave office. And during the second and third plots, President Joe Biden had been advancing an extraordinarily conciliatory policy toward Iran.

In all three cases, Iran’s decisions to act when it did may have stemmed from its perception that Washington lacked the will to retaliate. In particular, Trump’s preoccupation with remaining in office potentially led Tehran to believe, rightly or wrongly, that he sought no new conflict with Iran. Biden, for his part, sedulously sought the revival of the 2015 nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which Trump had abandoned in 2018. To achieve this goal, Biden lifted key sanctions on Iran, refused to enforce many sanctions still on the books, and failed to take meaningful action against Tehran’s aggression in the Middle East.

In response, the Islamist regime likely concluded that it had golden opportunities.

Biden’s efforts to resuscitate the JCPOA failed. And to its great credit, the Trump administration rendered the accord largely irrelevant when it bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities in June, restoring the posture of US strength that Biden had dismantled. The agreement became effectively dead when Trump triggered the reimposition of United Nations sanctions on Iran in September.

But the case of Alinejad offers a lesson: When Washington lowers its guard against Iran, the regime feels emboldened to strike, harnessing its founding impulses to eliminate those who stand in the way of its violent ideological agenda — no matter where they may reside.

Tzvi Kahn is a research fellow and senior editor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow him on X @TzviKahn.