‘Yes, I am threatening you’: Iran’s regime quietly spreads chaos in an unprepared West

The Tehran regime harasses dissidents across the world, leaving no stone unturned in an effort to quash opposition. Meanwhile, governments do little to help, writes Borzou Daragahi

The stream of threats and intimidation has had an impact (AFP via Getty)

Medis is still not sure what exactly triggered the operatives of the Iranian regime to target her with such vehemence. One day she was one of numerous hardworking Iranians living as an immigrant abroad. The next day the 35-year-old Europe-based doctor and outspoken activist was receiving dozens of emails a day, threatening her with murder and rape. Her phone was flooded with menacing calls, including video messages from men holding up knives.

Then there was the random Iranian stranger approaching her and calling her a “whore” at a market in the European capital where she lives. And the phone calls by regime enforcers to her elderly parents in Iran, urging them to shut their daughter up, or else. “They told my mom, ‘We’re going to do something to your daughter so brutal that you won’t even recognise her corpse’,” says Medis, asking that her last name not be published for fear for her own security and that of her family.

What’s worse, authorities of the EU government where she lives all downplayed her concerns, and offered her no additional protection. “I am scared when I go out. I was forced to move and found a place that is close to the metro to limit the time I am out on the street. I don’t go out alone.”

While protests triggered by the September death of Mahsa Amini in Iran have mostly died down in the face of a violent crackdown, the regime remains intensely vigilant. The Islamic Republic appears intent on not only suppressing Iranians at home but using various means to hunt down and silence dissidents abroad. Neither governments nor diaspora networks abroad are quite able to deal with it, leaving victims to mostly fend for themselves.

The regime’s tactics range from anonymous emails threatening prominent voices in the diaspora, to out-and-out assassination schemes. United States authorities last month claimed that the regime contracted several men allegedly connected to an eastern European crime network to kill prominent New York-based dissident and outspoken activist Mahsa Alinejad.

“The conduct shows how far Iranian actors are willing to go to silence critics, even attempting to assassinate a US citizen on American soil,” FBI director Christopher Wray said in a press release.

Iranian embassies in Europe and the foreign ministry in Tehran did not reply to emailed inquiries about their operations abroad. Iranian officials have long strenuously denied that they use diplomatic outposts to conduct overseas operations. Defenders of the Tehran regime often highlight the long US and Israeli history of renditions or assassinations of individuals abroad. Saudi Arabia, China and Russia – along with other countries – also attempt to kidnap or kill critics abroad, occasionally using diplomatic missions to organise such operations.

But the Tehran regime may have good reason to fear any coalescing movement abroad. It came to power in 1979 in part on the shoulders of activists organising in the diaspora against Shah Mohammad-Reza Pahlavi, with Paris-based Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini railing against the monarchy in speeches broadcast or distributed by cassette tapes to Iran. From the start, the Tehran regime aggressively sought to export its values abroad and target enemies outside the country. It has been behind numerous assassinations and assassination attempts abroad, according to Western intelligence officials and several high-profile court cases over the decades.

"Since its inception, the Islamic Republic has been a heavily ideologised state with the ambition to promote its ideological as well as survival interests even beyond its borders,” says Ali Fathollah-Nejad, an Iran expert at the American University of Beirut’s Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs. “The targeting of dissidents in exile also signals the regime's fear of an outside opposition that could influence the domestic situation in Iran."

Indeed, the son of Iran’s deposed late Shah, Reza Pahlavi, is mobilising dissidents abroad, while firebrands like journalist Alinejad are loudly denouncing the regime for its human rights record and treatment of women.

Iran’s operations against dissidents abroad also suggest a robust network of informants, loyalists and clandestine operatives likely linked to diplomatic and cultural outposts around the world, including Tehran-backed Islamic centres in London, Manchester, Newcastle, Birmingham and Glasgow. In several instances, regime operatives appear to have either followed activists’ movements, or gained access to electronic data that allowed them to locate dissidents. Authorities have done little to crack down on networks, despite a spate of assassinations of dissidents abroad.

“They are monitoring us,” says Medis. “They have people, some of them work at the embassy. They take photographs of us. They send spies. We know who they are.”

Iranian journalist Nejat Bahrami used to doubt stories about activists being targeted by the regime in Turkey, where he has lived for the last 18 months. “I thought people were telling stories to bolster their asylum claims,” he says.

Even when the outspoken 44-year-old began receiving menacing messages on social media channels vowing to kill him, “bury him in a grave”, or kidnap him and bring him back to Iran, he downplayed them as morbid pranks by regime supporters.

That changed after he visited Istanbul with friends. Soon afterward, he began receiving photos on the messaging app Telegram of the exact sites he had toured, the image of a man with his face cropped out in each shot. Someone had either followed him around town or, perhaps more disturbingly, managed to penetrate the Turkish mobile network and locate the sites he had been visiting. Many fear there may be a collaboration with the Ankara and Tehran regime, though Turkey has denied such ties.

“Before it was nothing serious – just swear words,” Bahrami says. “But this unnerved me because it had an operational element.”

Sharareh, another activist in Turkey, began receiving WhatsApp messages and details about the shops and cafes she frequents during her daily life. Messages would boast about having access to her address. “They said, ‘We will splash acid on your face’,” she recalls.

She changed her sim card and deleted all the messaging apps on her phone but continued to be defiant. “Every time they threaten me, they prompt me to speak out with an even tougher stance,” she says.

But the stream of threats and intimidation has had an impact. She has received little support from other activists or authorities in Turkey, and retreated into a bubble of fear and loneliness. Though she continues to give interviews on Iranian television channels, she has become shut-in, terrified of leaving her home. “I have gone out four times in four months,” she says through tears. “When I go to sleep at night I am terrified they will storm into my home. I am terrified. Through these threats they hold everyone hostage.”

The regime also appears to be putting pressure on family members of activists still inside Iran. In addition to threatening phone calls to her parents, Medis says members of her immediate family back home have all been suspended from their jobs as punishment for her activism abroad.

In an extraordinary audio tape released last month, Paris-based activist Massi Karmi confronts the operative who had been calling her parents and threatening them in Iran. The operative insists her social media posts and protest appearances violate Iranian law. She replies that she is in France, where freedom of speech and assembly are the law of the land.

He is unbowed. “Any action you take against the Islamic Republic abroad is a crime and your family here will have to answer for it,” the regime operative says in the recording, excerpts of which were broadcast by BBC’s Persian edition. “Would you like your mother and father to go to Evin Prison?” He adds: “Yes, I am threatening you.”

Iranian activists in Canada and the UK have also allegedly been targeted, including at demonstrations where pro-regime operatives or embassy employees show up and begin harassing or photographing participants. Some of the confrontations, including incidents in London and Milan, have been recorded on video and gone viral on Iranian social media channels.

Activists suspect that embassy employees and other regime adjutants, including students benefiting from generous government-financed scholarships to study abroad, are collecting information on activists and sending them back to Iran, where they end up in the hands of the Revolutionary Guard or the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, the two main regime instruments for suppressing dissent.

After one protest, Medis recounted that a person who had approached her posing as another activist asked about a recent interview she had given to a television channel. She later figured out that the person was actually connected to the local Iranian embassy.

It was three weeks afterward, around November, that she received her first strange phone call. “Someone called and asked if this is your address and still the same,” she recalls. “I said, it’s the same. Then he suddenly hung up.”