In March, at the height of the war between Iran, the United States, and Israel, many feared Tehran would trigger a devastating wave of terrorist attacks in the West.
More than two months later, these attacks have not materialized on the scale initially feared.
Terrorism experts warn, however, that it is still too early to dismiss the threat of Iranian terrorist attacks and sabotage through militant proxies, radicalized individuals, or criminals.
Matthew Levitt, the head of counterterrorism and intelligence at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy think tank, believes Iran is interested in seeking revenge for what Iranian leaders have repeatedly called a “war of aggression.”
“Iran, in the context of the war, has an interest in raising the costs to the United States and Israel and anybody else that it sees as participating in this war,” he said.
Experts and officials are closely examining more than a dozen attacks in North America and Europe during the past two months to determine whether these are part of Tehran’s campaign to get back at the U.S. and Israel for killing many of its senior leaders and destroying its military sites and infrastructure.
The worry, says Levitt, is that the Iranians are using “small-scale attacks” to “put pressure on democratic societies, such as the United States,” Levitt said.
In Washington, a defense official who has studied threats emanating from Iran for decades says that the U.S. government is closely monitoring whether Tehran directs these attacks or if individuals or groups are acting independently.
“Right now, frankly, nobody can answer this,” he said, requesting anonymity while discussing the current assessment of Tehran’s intentions.
Sleeper Cells
Since 1984, successive U.S. administrations have declared Iran a state sponsor of terrorism. Tehran has employed terrorist attacks, sabotage, irregular warfare through militant proxies, and assassinations to increase its influence across the Middle East, empower allies, and target opposition.
Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and its external wing, the Quds Force, run vast networks of militant proxies, agents, and sleeper cells to carry out such campaigns.
Colin Clarke, executive director of the Soufan Center, a New York-based think tank focused on terrorism, views the threat of Iranian sleeper cells as real.
“The essence of a sleeper cell is that we don’t know about it until it becomes operational,” he said.
On May 15, the U.S. Justice Department charged Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi with planning some 20 attacks on Jewish institutions in Europe and North America as part of a retaliation campaign by Iran. He was arrested in Turkey and handed over to the U.S. authorities and faces a trial in New York.
Al-Saadi, 32, is believed to be the commander of Kataib Hezbollah, the Iraqi militia allied with Iran’s Quds Force. The criminal complaint against him states he was also behind Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiya (HAYI), a previously unknown group tied to most attacks and plots in Europe.
Over the years, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has arrested several operatives of Hezbollah who admitted to being part of sleeper cells in the U.S. The Lebanese Shia militant group, a close ally of Iran, has been declared a terrorist group by the U.S. and allied Western nations.
Clarke says this is evidence that Iran potentially still has sleeper cells. “What’s the tripwire for them to actually operationalize it and use it?” he asked. “They could be holding that capability back if there’s some kind of U.S. ground invasion.”
Iran has framed the U.S. invasion in Shia religious terms. Tehran feels particularly aggrieved over the killing of 86-year-old Khamenei during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
“The enemy should know that their happy days are over, and they will no longer be safe anywhere in the world, not even in their own homes,” a Quds Force statement said soon after Khamenei’s killing at the beginning of the war in March.
“There are a number of ways the Iranians could make life painful for us here in the United States,” Clarke said. “We just don’t know what that is at this point.”
Hardliners In Charge
The rise of Ahmad Vahidi to the IRGC’s leadership after his predecessor was killed at the war’s onset has worried Western officials because of his past role in overseeing Iran’s subversive activities abroad.
At 68, Vahidi is regarded as one of Iran’s most powerful leaders. He is a hardline figure who was central in several of the IRGC’s high-risk foreign operations. He has been wanted by Interpol since 2007 for his alleged involvement in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people. Both the U.S. and the EU have imposed sanctions on him.
“For hardline figures like him, terrorism will be one way of exerting pressure,” the defense official noted. “Or it can be used as a means of extracting concessions in a future peace deal to end this war.”
Iran’s war with the United States and Israel might have weakened its operational capacity to unleash a terror campaign immediately. During the war in March, Israel claimed to have targeted and killed Rahman Moqadam, the head of Unit 4000, a secretive branch of the IRGC responsible for terrorist attacks abroad.
In a sign that IRGC’s external operations remain active, Turkey, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan, Kuwait, and Qatar all claim to have disrupted terrorist cells linked to Iran since the outbreak of the war.
Alex Vatanka, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute think tank in Washington, diverges from the consensus, arguing that Tehran does not need to resort to terrorism to promote its interests, at least not at this juncture of the conflict.
He says that after avoiding collapse in the face of an intense U.S. and Israeli bombing campaign, Tehran does not see itself as weak. Vatanka says Iranian leaders now see their country as a leading middle power that has successfully established conventional deterrence against rivals by launching thousands of missiles and drones against the U.S. military, Israel, and the Arab Gulf nations.
“Terrorism is essentially the act of the desperate little man who doesn’t have the capacity to drop bombs on you from 30,000 feet,” he told MBN. “Iran right now doesn’t see itself that way.”
Uncoordinated Attacks
Western counterterrorism officials are scrutinizing more than a dozen attacks or foiled plots that have occurred since the war began with Israeli and U.S. airstrikes on Iran on Feb. 28.
In the latest incident, police in Toronto arrested 18-year-old Ruslan Novruzov in connection with a May 7 attack. On May 12 he was released on bail. Novruzov is suspected to be the gunman who used an improvised weapon to shoot at three people outside a synagogue in the southeastern Canadian city.
In the U.S., the FBI said the man responsible for ramming his car into a synagogue near Detroit, Michigan, on March 12 was inspired by Hezbollah. Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, 41, had lost his relatives in Israeli attacks in southern Lebanon in early March. His brothers were reportedly affiliated with Hezbollah.
Conversely, the FBI has found no evidence that the gunman who killed three people in downtown Austin, Texas, on March 1 was supported or directed by a terrorist group from abroad. Senegal-born Ndiaga Diagne, 53, was killed by the police during his shooting spree, which also injured a dozen people.
Notably, he admired the late Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He was wearing clothing inscribed with an Iranian flag design bearing the words “Property of Allah” at the time of the attack.
Since March, HAYI — the previously unknown group affiliated with terrorist suspect Al-Saadi — has been linked to at least 11 plots or attacks in four European nations. U.S. authorities believe this group is connected to pro-Iran militants in Iraq. It has been implicated in blasts, arson and stabbings in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, and Belgium.
These increasingly violent attacks have targeted Jewish, Israeli, and Iranian opposition sites or individuals. After a stabbing attack that injured two Jewish men in late April, London raised its terrorism threat level to severe, indicating that a terrorist attack was imminent.
David Jones, a former conservative British cabinet minister, is concerned that Iran may attempt to initiate a sabotage campaign in the West while maintaining plausible deniability.
“The most important link is ambiguity and deniability,” he remarked. “This pattern of disparate terrorist activity will likely continue.”
Amid rising antisemitic attacks in London, the Metropolitan police have deployed more than 100 counterterrorism officers to protect the city’s Jewish communities from “some of the highest levels of hate crime alongside significant terrorist and hostile state threats.”
In October, Sir Ken McCallum, the head of the British domestic intelligence MI5, said his organization had tracked more than 20 “lethal Iran-backed plots in just the [last] one year.”
In July, the U.S., UK, Canada, France, and 10 other European nations said a surge in Iranian threats and attacks against individuals in Europe and North America was a “clear violation” of their sovereignty.
“The biggest risk now is not recognizing the sort of patterns and methods that Iran adopts in terms of its terrorist activity,” Jones said.
Guns For Hire
Farzan Sabet, an Iran expert at the Geneva Graduate Institute, says hardline leaders in Tehran are now keen on deploying propaganda and online tools, such as encrypted messaging apps, to recruit individuals or connect with criminals.
“They are trying to recruit ideologically motivated people, less likely to be detected, to carry out attacks,” he said, referring to a “lone wolf” strategy.
Clarke, the head of the Soufan Center in New York, agrees, suggesting that Iran is following a Russian model of hiring criminals for sabotage, assassinations and terrorism.
“All you need is a cell phone connection and the willingness to pay somebody to commit an attack,” he said.
Levitt also sees Tehran going for this low-risk option because such attacks are easy to execute and can be plausibly denied.
“They don’t cost a lot of money, and they don’t cost a lot diplomatically or politically,” he said.
Sabet said Western intelligence agencies are already seeing an increase in such efforts.
“The success has not necessarily caught up yet, but moving forward, we could, unfortunately, see some attacks succeed due to the higher volume of efforts,” he said.
Abubakar Siddique
Abubakar Siddique is a journalist and author focused on the broader geopolitical landscape of South Asia and the Middle East.
