'Tehran is the head of the snake': UK must designate Iran Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist group, says ex-US general

8 October 2024, 15:06 | Updated: 8 October 2024, 15:08

Tehran’s massive missile attack on Israel, the second in the past six months, proved one fact: when it comes to belligerence and terror in the Middle East, Tehran is the head of the snake.

Living in Europe for years, I learned that in defence and security, there must be a clear unanimity across the Atlantic. And one area that this is truer than ever before is in dealing with threats emanating from the Islamic Republic of Iran.

In recent years, these threats have expanded in terms of quantity, sophistication, and global reach, to the point of being unmistakable to anyone working in the fields of security or foreign policy in the West.

Since the protests that broke out across the Islamic Republic two years ago, the Iranian regime has become both more desperate and more brazen in targeting expatriate dissidents and their political supporters throughout the world.

In Spain last November, a former President of the European Parliament, Alejo Vidal-Quadras, was quick to accuse Tehran of orchestrating an attack after he survived being shot in the face outside his home.

Vidal Quadras had been an outspoken critic of Tehran and supporter of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), who was calling for a firm policy regarding Tehran for years.

The accusation was supported by the hallmarks of that attack and others which have been conclusively traced back to Iran.

The attack on the Spanish politician showed that the targets are no longer limited to Iranian dissidents who have been the main targets of Tehran’s terror apparatus, which now uses criminal gangs to pursue its ominous objectives.

Fortunately the regime’s opponents have not been terrorised into silence. Activists and “Resistance Units” affiliated to the main Iranian resistance movement, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (also known as MEK) who remain openly committed not only to the women’s rights, which sparked the 2022 uprising, but also to the dream of replacing Iran’s theocratic dictatorship with a true representative democracy.

Unfortunately, dissident activity both within Iran and among Iranian expatriate communities has still not received the volume of support that it deserves from Western governments.

This is somewhat surprising, given the close connections between Tehran’s retaliation against that activity and its broader threats against foreign adversaries and Western interests.

It is not as if the United Kingdom, the European Union, or the United States have failed to recognise those threats. The Labour Party explicitly did so in the run-up to the General Election, with then-shadow foreign secretary David Lammy signaling that once Labour was in power it would move to designate the author of many such threats – Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – as a terrorist organisation, which hundreds of parliamentarians had urged the prior government to do.

Similar appeals have been made throughout the EU, but so far it is only the United States that has taken this very basic step toward confronting an Iranian threat which has been growing exponentially worse.

While calls to proscribe the Revolutionary Guards have naturally intensified, the IRGC’s threats to international security have only continued to proliferate.

British intelligence has identified more than 15 Iranian terror plots inside the UK since the 2022 uprising. None of these have proven successful so far, but the same cannot be said of all the IRGC’s efforts to undermine Western interests and stoke fear among Tehran’s adversaries.

The hard-liner paramilitary organization is at the helm of Iran’s weapons smuggling operations, and just this month it began delivering ballistic missiles to Russia for use in the war on Ukraine, after having previously supplied thousands of one-way attack drones. And the Iran-backed Houthi militant group has been firing missiles to ships and threatening commercial shipping in the Red Sea for nearly a year.

Western inaction emboldens the IRGC to facilitate these and other threats, all in the interest of maximising Tehran’s power projection.

It is long past time for the UK and its allies to respond and challenge the impunity that Iranian officials and institutions have enjoyed for far too long.

An essential first step towards that end is designating the IRGC as a terrorist organisation, and the UK government should carry out its campaign promise to take the right step immediately.

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Chuck Wald is a retired U.S. Air Force general and was Deputy Commander, U.S. European Command.

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