Iran’s Assassination Plots Against Jews Persist Despite the West’s Leniency on Regime

The French police recently charged a French-Algerian dual citizen and his partner for allegedly conspiring to assassinate Israelis and Jews in Paris, Munich, and Berlin — all at the behest of Iran.

Iran’s efforts to murder Jews overseas demonstrates how the regime in Tehran has intensified its support for terrorism and assassination plots in the West, despite outreach and economic concessions by the United States and Europe.

The French General Directorate for Internal Security claimed on September 8 that Iran had planned to assassinate some seven individuals across Europe as part of a plot to “strike targeted civilians” to “create insecurity for the opposition” to Tehran’s regime “from within the Jewish/Israeli community.”

The plot aimed to intimidate the Islamic Republic’s opponents, in order to dissuade them from engaging in activism against the clerical dictatorship.

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

The networks include the Hells Angels biker gang in Germany, the Eastern European criminal organization known as the Organization, and the Swedish Foxtrot and Rumba organized crime networks.

Troublingly, while the regime’s assassinations — often implemented covertly by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Ministry of Intelligence (MOI) — date to the Islamic Republic’s founding in 1979, recent years have seen a marked escalation of the theocracy’s efforts.

The Israeli Mossad recently reported that Iran has facilitated a string of terror attacks on Israeli embassies across Europe by capitalizing on the global antisemitic wave after the Hamas terror attacks of October 7. The Mossad stated that Tehran was behind a grenade attack against Israel’s embassy in Belgium in May 2024. Similarly, Swedish intelligence confirmed in May 2024 that Iran had orchestrated the foiled bombing attack against the Israeli embassy in Stockholm earlier this year.

Despite the Islamic Republic’s claims of differentiating between Jews and Zionists, the regime’s foreign plots have consistently targeted Jewish communities independent from Israel.

For instance, Germany concluded that Tehran had plotted the attempted arson attack on a synagogue in Dusseldorf in 2022.

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

Tehran’s reach has even extended to the United States, evidenced by foiled plots to assassinate and kidnap the New York-based Masih Alinejad — an Iranian-American dissident and journalist who was the target of a thwarted kidnapping attempt by Iranian intelligence services in 2021.

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

Iran also facilitated the failed 2022 assassination attempt in New York against Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, a novel that had prompted Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to issue a fatwa in 1989 calling for his death. The US District Court in Buffalo claimed that the perpetrator, 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 entity, like the United States did in 2019.

Furthermore, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France should reinstate UN sanctions on Iran by triggering the snapback process in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 2231, which endorsed 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 the EU’s 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. At long last, he needs to listen to them.

Until then, the United States must maintain this pressure to ensure that Washington and Europe pose a unified stance against Tehran’s malign ambitions. At the same time, Washington should reimpose maximum economic pressure on Iran in order to send the regime a message that it will pay a significant price for its violence. After decades of assassinations, whether completed or attempted, there is no more time to waste.

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