Iran’s Hitmen: The New Rise Of Western Terror Agents Working For Tehran

–OpEd–

LONDON — War in the Middle East, now with unprecedented components like Iran directly firing missiles at Israel and pagers exploding in people’s hands, has understandably revived the West’s terrorist fears.

In an echo of the 1980s, when the newly founded Islamic Republic of Iran kidnapped Westerners in Beirut and murdered opponents in European capitals, intelligence agencies in several European states and the United Kingdom recently warned their governments of a revival of that regime’s terrorist activities on the continent. They were especially concerned by signs of possible collaboration between criminal gangs and the Iranian Revolutionary guards’ Unit 840, the department reportedly in charge of assassinations and sabotage abroad.

Since 2020, agencies have attributed no less than 33 terrorist incidents across Europe to the Islamic Republic. These included street attacks on Iranian opponents or attempted bombings or shootings targeting Jewish or Israeli personalities and institutions, as it recently happened in Denmark and Sweden.

Indeed, Sweden’s state security service (SÄPO), has come to qualify local criminal and trafficking gangs as effective Iranian proxies or “terror tentacles” not unlike militias like Hezbollah or Hamas.

Sweden has an unexpectedly strong criminal sector in spite of its generous welfare and high living standards, and two Swedish gangs in particular have come to be associated with the Tehran regime. One is Foxtrot, run by the Swedish Iraqi dual-national Rawa Majid. Police agencies have been after him for some years, though he was reportedly jailed in Iran in 2023-4. It is believed that he may have arranged a deal with the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds force, which runs Unit 840, in exchange for his release.

Terror tentacles

The other gang suspected of aiding the Quds force is Rumba, run by Ismail Abdo. He was briefly arrested in the Turkish town of Adana in 2023, before being released on a meager 0 bail, though it is less clear how he may have become a collaborator of the Islamic Republic.

The Islamic Republic has its own list of terrorists and sponsors of terrorism.

It is believed that Unit 840 is run by an officer named Yazdan Mir, who has shown a talent for forging ties with organized crime and getting gangs to do Iran’s dirty work abroad. The Unit’s activities are broadly divided into eliminating opponents and working with criminal groups, with three geographical departments respectively covering the Middle East and Africa (including Israel), Asia-Caucasus and Europe, and the Americas.

While Iran began using foreign nationals to murder opponents soon after the 1979 revolution, Unit 840 has systematically been developing those ties, especially with criminals. For example, Catalan politician Alejo Vidal-Quadras was shot and wounded in Madrid in 2023. It is believed that he channelled money between the far-right Vox party and the Iranian Mujahedin-e Khalq or MKO, a Marxist-Islamist opposition group intermittently listed as terrorists in the EU and the United States. The first suspect detained for Vidal-Quadras’s shooting there was a Franco-Tunisian criminal, Mehrez Ayari.

Sponsors of terrorism

The Islamic Republic has its own list of terrorists and sponsors of terrorism, which included Vidal-Quadras for his ties to Tehran’s most violent opponents, the MKO. But as Spanish security agencies have pointed out, there is no clear evidence to link his suspected attackers with Tehran.

In the United Kingdom, police uncovered a plot to kill two journalists of the Iran International TV channel, Sima Sabet and Fardad Farahzad, thanks to an Eastern European informant. The Metropolitan Police also detained an Austrian of Chechen background in relation with threats made against the London-based broadcaster, for which he was later given a three-and-half-year jail sentence.

There have been several suspicious casualties within Unit 840 recently.

Another of the broadcaster’s reporters, Pouria Zeraati, was stabbed in a London street on March 30, this time by Albanians. The Metropolitan Police say they have thwarted more than 20 attempted terrorist acts in the UK since 2022, including five in 2024. The government’s response has been to place more members of the Revolutionary guards on its Financial Sanctions Notice.

In April this year, French police arrested a Franco-Algerian couple with an established drug trafficking background, now suspected of planning to bomb Jewish or Israeli premises in France and Germany. France’s security agency (DGSE) also takes these arrests as indicative of the Islamic Republic’s bid to bring its reprisals over the Middle East into European territory. In the Netherlands, the courts recently gave the Moroccan-Dutch gang boss Ridouan Taqi a life sentence for numerous crimes that included the murders of three Iranian opponents living in the Netherlands in recent years.

Methods of retaliation

Unit 840 is also believed to have worked for years with Turkish criminals, who may have been instrumental in nabbing and handing over to Iran the Swedish-Iranian-Arab opponent and regional separatist, Habib Chaab. He was hanged in Iran in 2023. Chaab was caught thanks to the help of Turkish-Iranian trafficker Naji Sharifi, also suspected of seeking to kill Iranian fugitives in the state of Maryland, and of possibly killing Saeed Karimian, an Iranian TV executive, in Istanbul in 2017.

There have also been several suspicious casualties within Unit 840 recently. One of its colonels, Hassan (or Hussein) Sayyad Khodaei, who was shot dead from a motorcycle in Tehran in May 2022. He was reportedly in charge of targeting Jews and Israeli nationals in the Unit, and Iran immediately blamed Israel for the killing.

Six days later, another Unit commander, Ali Ismailzadeh, fell from his balcony in Karaj, outside Tehran. In this suicide/homicide case, according to rumors, the suspected culprit may not have been Israel. This was instead a punishment for Ismailzadeh possibly collaborating with Israel in Khodaei’s death.