By Pishtaz | 2023-09-11

For years, the Islamic Republic of Iran has steadily held its position on the US State Department's list as one of the top global sponsors of terror.

Since its inception, the Islamic Republic has been pursuing regional expansionist policies via groups such as Lebanese Hizbullah and the Houthis in Yemen, and meddling in other countries' affairs.

It also has a long history of targeting Iranian dissidents living abroad.

Iran's global campaign of terror has killed some 360 individuals outside the country since 1978, with assassinations taking place in 40 countries, according to a US State Department report published in May 2020.

Assassinations have been directed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force (IRGC-QF) and Iran's Ministry of Intelligence for the most part, as well as by "proxy groups" such as Lebanese Hizbullah, it said.

Almost all the victims have been dissidents or members of the opposition.

"Iranian diplomatic personnel repeatedly have been implicated in assassinations abroad, as evidenced by arrest warrants, judicial and police investigations, intelligence services and witness reports," the report said.

Plots against Iranians abroad

Masih Alinejad, a US citizen of Iranian origin who was previously targeted in a kidnapping plot disrupted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), in January identified herself as the target of an assassination plot.

Alinejad had launched a social media campaign in 2014 encouraging women in Iran to share self-portraits without the veil, which she had then posted on her Facebook page.

In December, a Washington Post investigation said Tehran had intensified its efforts to target dissidents living overseas. The report was based on documents and interviews with 15 officials in Washington, Europe and the Middle East.

Multiple Iranian agencies have been implicated in the plots, the newspaper said, including Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security, the IRGC-QF and the IRGC Intelligence Organisation.

According to officials and experts quoted in the report, the orders to kidnap or kill abroad come from the senior level of the Iranian government.

Vancouver-based Iranian-Canadian podcaster Ramin Seyed-Emami said the Canadian police had warned him in the summer of 2021 about the Iranian regime's potential plot to target him, the Washington Post reported in December.

Seyed-Emami takes an anti-regime stance on his podcast, where he interviews individuals inside Iran.

He is the son of Kavous Seyed-Emami, an Iranian-Canadian environmentalist who died under suspicious circumstances in Iran's notorious Evin prison in 2018.

Last August, Western security and law enforcement agencies said they disrupted an attempt to assassinate former US national security adviser John Bolton in Washington.

Iranian national and IRGC member Shahram Poursafi, also known as Mehdi Rezayi, was indicted in absentia by the US Justice Department over allegations he had offered to pay an individual in the United States $300,000 to kill Bolton.

Also in August 2022, author Salman Rushdie, whose 1988 novel, "The Satanic Verses", sparked the ire of the Iranian regime, was repeatedly stabbed by Hadi Matar, a US-born Lebanese-American, as he was about to deliver a lecture.

According to his agent, Rushdie has lost sight in one eye and the use of one hand as a result of the attack at the Chautauqua Institution in New York state.

Some said Matar was influenced by a fatwa issued by Islamic Republic founder Rouhollah Khomeini, who had called for Rushdie's murder.

On December 12, 2020, Iranian dissident Rouhollah Zam, who was lured to Iran by IRGC elements, was hanged in Tehran, an execution that prompted international condemnation.

Colleagues and friends of Zam in France said he had made the mistake of being lured into a trip to Iraq in October 2019.

And in April 2017, Saeed Karimian, the Iranian owner of Dubai-based GEM TV -- chiefly focused on entertainment programmes -- was shot dead in Turkiyë.

Family members said he had been threatened by the Islamic Republic in the month preceding his assassination.

Karimian had been tried in absentia by a Tehran court and sentenced to six years in prison for "spreading propaganda against Iran".

History of targeting dissidents

One of the Islamic Republic's earliest killings of Iranian nationals in the United States was the 1980 murder of Iranian embassy press attaché Ali Akbar Tabatabaei.

Tabatabaei was the president of the Iran Freedom Foundation -- an anti-regime group founded in 1979, shortly after the Islamic Revolution.

In June 1988, Iranian-Armenian actor and comedian Raffi Khachaturian was attacked by members of the Lebanese Hizbullah and a pro-Iran vigilante during an anti-regime demonstration in Los Angeles and blinded in one eye.

Khachaturian's post-revolution comedy shows had lampooned Khomeini and the Islamic Republic.

In July 1989, Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou -- secretary-general of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdestan (PDKI), was assassinated in Vienna on the second day of a meeting with an Iranian government delegation.

Ghassemlou's aide, PDKI central committee member Abdullah Ghaderi Azar, was murdered as well, as was Fadhil Rassoul, another man who was with him.

Rassoul was an Iraqi Kurdish university professor who had acted as a mediator between the Iranian government and Ghassemlou.

All three victims were shot with multiple bullets at close range.

In April 1991, Abdorrahman Boroumand, an Iranian dissident who was living in Paris after the 1979 revolution, was stabbed to death in the lobby of his apartment building.

Alongside Shapur Bakhtiar, the last Iranian prime minister under the Pahlavi reign, Boroumand had an active role in creating the National Movement of the Iranian Resistance (NAMIR), in August 1980.

The founders of NAMIR described it as the first pro-democracy opposition movement to Iran's theocracy.

Three months after Boroumand's murder, three agents of the Islamic Republic killed Bakhtiar and his assistant Soroush Katibeh in Paris.

In 1992, Fereydoun Farrokhzad, a well-known Iranian poet, singer and comedian, and an opponent of the Iranian regime, was stabbed to death in his apartment in Bonn, Germany. Reports say he was stabbed 38 times.

Farrokzhad had reportedly received death threats as he had criticized and ridiculed Khomeini and the Iranian regime.

'Political leadership' ordered killings

Also in 1992, three Iranian-Kurdish opposition leaders and their translator were killed at a restaurant in Berlin, Germany.

The resulting court case is considered a turning point, as it was the first time the Islamic Republic's overseas assassinations had been brought to trial in a foreign country in such a prominent way.

Five years after the slaying, a Berlin court concluded that the highest levels of Iran's ''political leadership'' had ordered the September 1992 killings, and three Lebanese men and one Iranian were convicted.

On the heels of the verdict, several European countries, as well as New Zealand, Australia and Canada, recalled their ambassadors from Tehran.

In May 1996, Reza Mazlouman, a lecturer at the University of Tehran who was deputy education minister during the Pahlavi reign, was assassinated in Paris by an Islamic Republic agent.

The Iranian regime has continued to pursue and kill its opponents -- politicians, journalists and artists -- in other countries, an Iran-based analyst who wished to remain unnamed told Al-Mashareq.

"Some cases of the regime's terror plots have not even become widely known, as the targets were not famous," the analyst said.

"The number of people murdered by the Islamic Republic is probably more than what we know of, and possibly even more than the official figure the US State Department has announced in its reports."

"The Islamic Republic has engaged in plotting against its critics and seems to have become even more active in this regard in the past years, out of a clear fear of dissent," he added.