Stabbing Of Journalist Raises Questions Of West's Iran Policy
The stabbing of an exiled Iranian TV presenter in London has renewed calls for action to confront and deter the regime in Tehran from expanding its malign activities.
The stabbing of an exiled Iranian TV presenter in London has renewed calls for action to confront and deter the regime in Tehran from expanding its malign activities.
Pouria Zeraati, a journalist and host at the UK-based Iran International, was attacked outside his home in Wimbledon Friday afternoon, reportedly by a few men who fled in a car after knifing him.
It is still unclear who the attackers were and what their motive was. But fingers were pointed at the Iranian regime almost immediately after the news broke, given the Islamic Republic’s track record in plotting against dissidents –and even foreign officials.
“The long arms of the brutal Iranian regime,” commented Hannah Neumann, a Green member of the European parliament. “We all need to urgently do our homework to protect those who seek refuge here from transnational threats and violence.
This is not the first time the Iranian regime seeks to harm Iran International journalists. An ITV investigation last year revealed that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) had commissioned a hitman to assassinate the hosts of two flagship shows on Iran International TV. The plot unraveled because the hitman turned out to be an agent of a ‘western intelligence agency’.
This time they got much closer, stabbing and injuring another Iran International journalist.
“Thankfully his condition is not believed to be life-threatening and he is in a stable condition,” London Metropolitan police announced in a statement. “However, due to the victim’s occupation…coupled with the fact that there has been a number of threats directed towards this group of journalists in recent times, the incident is being investigated by specialist officers from the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command.”
According to the police, since 2022, a number of plots to kidnap or kill UK-based individuals perceived as enemies of the Iranian regime have been disrupted.
British MP and Chair of Foreign Affairs Committee Alicia Kearns said, "Iran continues to hunt down those brave enough to speak out against the regime. Yet I remain unconvinced that we and our allies have clear strategies to protect people in our countries from them, and protect our interests abroad."
Critics like Kearns believe inaction or confusion in dealing with Iran’s threats has emboldened the Iranian regime to attempt to silence dissidents anywhere in the world with almost absolute impunity.
“The Islamic Republic feels safe in attacking journalists like Pouria Zeraati because it knows that it won’t face any consequences,” wrote Alireza Nader, an expert on Iran and US policy. “The Biden admin has no Iran policy, just a vague hope that it can return to “diplomacy” with the regime. And Europe follows Biden’s lead. How many more people will be knifed before @POTUS changes his policy?”
In February 2023, Iran International was forced to temporarily shut down operations in London and move to Washington, as threats against the organization and its employees were deemed too dangerous and imminent.
Not long before the incident, Iran's minister of intelligence had called Iran International a terrorist organization, laying the grounds for all sorts of action against the broadcaster and its journalists.
“I appreciate the wider concern this incident may cause,” said Commander Dominic Murphy, head of the Met’s Counter Terrorism, “particularly amongst others in similar lines of work, and those from Iranian communities. We continue to work closely with the victim’s organization.”
“This is a wakeup call for US and European officials,” Karim Sadjadpoor of Carnegie Endowment for Peace said on X. “Iran is actively trying to kill reporters and activists in the West and nearly succeeded in the middle of London.”
Zeraati, who was attacked in the early afternoon in south London, suffered knife wounds. He is in a stable condition, but remains hospitalized. The Metropolitan Police in London are conducting an investigation into the incident.
While the motive is unclear, the attack comes just a few months after a plot by the Iranian regime to kill 2 other Iran International journalists was revealed.
The Metropolitan Police in a statement said that "due to the victim’s occupation as a journalist at a Persian-language media organisation based in the UK, coupled with the fact that there has been a number of threats directed towards this group of journalists in recent times, the incident is being investigated by specialist officers from the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command."
A spokesman for Scotland Yard confirmed they were aware of the incident and were investigating. Although the motive for the attack remains unclear, it is understood that MI5 have been made aware.
Iran International’s journalists have long been a target by the regime for their coverage of Iran, and the platform it provides to critics and human rights activists.
In November 2022, the London Police provided protection to Iran International’s offices, acting upon credible intelligence about real threats against two of its journalists based in London.
In early 2023, the network had to temporarily shut down operations in London and move its broadcasting studios to Washington DC. In September of that year, operations resumed at a new location in London.
A man surveilling the previous London office was arrested by the police in February 2023. The Central Criminal Court of England sentenced him in December for gathering information on Iran International's London headquarters to 3.5 years behind bars.
Originally from Chechnya but residing in Austria, Magomed-Husejn Dovtaev (Mohammad-Hussein Dovtaev) was detained at Chiswick Business Park by officers from London’s Metropolitan Police Counter-Terrorism Command. He was charged with a single count of attempting to collect information "likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism." The jury court returned a guilty verdict for him.
UK's National Union of Journalists condemned the attack on Zeraati. Michelle Stanistreet, NUJ general secretary, said, “This cowardly attack on Pouria is deeply shocking, and our thoughts are with him, his family and all of his colleagues at Iran International. We hope he makes a swift recovery...this brutal stabbing will inevitably raise fears amongst the many journalists targeted at Iran International and the BBC Persian Service that they are not safe at home or going about their work."
British MP and Chair of Foreign Affairs Committee Alicia Kearns said, "This is deeply upsetting, Iran International had to shut down its UK arm for a short period, it only recently returned to the air from London. Whilst we don’t know the circumstances of this attack, Iran continues to hunt down those brave enough to speak out against the regime. Yet I remain unconvinced that we and our allies have clear strategies to protect people in our countries from them, and protect our interests abroad."
In December 2023, UK’s ITV revealed that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) was plotting to assassinate two Iran International television anchors in London in 2022 amid Iranian anti-government protests.
The plan was foiled because the man hired to do the job turned out to be a ‘double-agent’ working for a western intelligence agency. He would relay all information to his handler, but then shared some details with ITV.
Based on irrefutable evidence – seen and verified by ITV and multiple officials– the plot was commissioned and signed off by Mohammad Reza Ansari, the IRGC commander in charge of assassinations outside Iran.
Ansari is the ‘mastermind’ behind failed plots to assassinate former US officials Mike Pompeo and John Bolton –for which he’s been sanctioned by the US treasury. He is based in Syria and is reported to have links with the family of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
According to ITV, Ansari hired and directed the hitman (Ismail) through another Assad associate, Mohammad Abd al-Razek Kanafani, requiring him first to use a car bomb and then a ‘quiet’ way to kill his targets: “simply stab [them] with a kitchen knife.”
The plot was cynically codenamed the “wedding”. The targets, Sima Sabet and Fardad Farahzad, were “bride” and “groom”. They did not know about the details of the plot until told by ITV during the making of the report.
Until DIMDEX entered the stage in 2008, Turkey’s Istanbul International Defense Industry Fair, “IDEF” (1993-present), UAE’s Abu Dhabi International Defense Exhibition, “IDEX” (1993-present), and Pakistan’s Karachi International Defense Exhibition and Seminar, “IDEA S” (2000-present), did enjoy unrivalled seniority over Qatar’s DIMDEX as regional biennial military exhibition hubs. But Iran’s effective “show” of its military hardware at DIMDEX 2024, the Qatari military exhibition just took the whole concept of arms deals and commerce to a grand new level.
Certainly, this is not Iran’s first rodeo at DIMDEX as the Iranian military industrial complex has been an enthusiastic participant at Qatar’s military expo for quite a few years. Since 2014, Qatar and Iran have become increasingly aligned in a cold war against Saudi Arabia and their military and security cooperation and sponsorship of non-state antagonists such as Hamas has bonded them in an unprecedented way.
From 2018 onwards, Iran has offered a far more diverse arsenal of missiles and drone technology at Qatar military expo. The Iranian military tech have passed muster in a half dozen proxy conflicts across the world over the past decade. The list is long and diverse. Ethiopia put Iranian drones in battlefield in Ethiopia-Tigray conflict with utmost effectiveness. Houthis use the same technology in their relentless and frequent assault on shipping lanes in the Red Sea. The very Iranian drones supplied to Iraqi-Shia militia have killed US service members in Jordan recently. The Hezbollah of Lebanon and Hamas use Iranian supplied drone technology against Israel. And last but not least, Putin’s Russia has unleashed thousands of Iranian Shahed suicide drones upon hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian civilians.
Since Apartheid South Africa, itself a major arms supplier and subject of multiple sanction regimes on an international scale by the 1980s, the Tehran regime has effectively beaten the multitude of sanction regimes imposed upon it by the Euro-American alliance. Whilst the Mullahs’ decades long deepening strategic entente with Russia and China has been fundamental to the success of their sanction thwarting measures, it is Western complacency that has arguably “enabled “the Iranian regime’s meteoric rise to its present “drone” mastery.
DIMIDEX has served the Mullahs in Tehran, their praetorian IRGC, and their proxy henchmen across the Middle East by leaps and bounds. Whilst DIMIDEX helped establish the Tehran regime as a competitively “affordable” and “lethally” reliable supplier of military drones, as well as missiles, in the era of post-Cold War “asymmetrical warfare”. More importantly, it has established Tehran as a global middle power with far reaching destabilizing potentials like no other.
The tale of the recent rise of a regime like the Islamic Republic of Iran that has been frequently called “rogue” by various members of the Euro-American alliance over the past forty-five years to such lethal and de-establishing pre-eminence was authored with the enabling hand of the combined EU-US diplomatic appeasement or practical complacencies. Also, increasing US isolationism in the aftermath of Iraq War, and the economic upheavals inflicted upon the West by the 2008 Great Economic Recession played a role.
Intervening catastrophic events, namely, the Arab Spring and the rise of ISIS, acted as a catalyst to catapult the Iranian regime to its present hegemonically destabilizing status. The advent of the Arab Spring, in tandem with President Obama’s phased withdrawal of the US troops from Iraq and his administration’s hesitation to intervene in Syria in the face of the usage of unconventional warfare by the Syrian regime against civilians, marked the beginning of the rise of the Iranian regime to this high station.
As ISIS emerged in the wake of Iraq’s sectarian conflict and the worsening of the Syrian civil war, Iran joined Russia to keep Assad in power in Syria and reinforced its proxy militias in Iraq. The IRGC under Qassem Soleimani began developing all manner of military hardware suitable for application in asymmetrical warfare like one waged by anti-Assad militia in Syria and ISIS across the region. By 2018, the Iranian drones rivalled the Turkish ones in the skies of Syria and became an indispensable strategic arm of Iraqi militia forces and Yemeni Houthi army. Certainly, rivalry with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council states was a primary casus belli for the Iranian regime to ever fortify the Houthi arsenal with missile and drone technology.
Some could, and did, justify the Euro-American alliance’s appeasement and rapprochement with the Iranian regime that culminated to the 2015 JCPOA on grounds of “raison d’états”, namely, quelling ISIS. In fact, they went as far as likening such “expedient policies” to the Grand Alliance between the Anglo-American powers and Stalin’s USSR during WWII against Hitler. Yet, this invoked a bizarrely flawed historical analogy.
The Iranian regime was allied with Russia primarily to destroy anti-Assad Syrian rebellion, and ISIS was a bloody inconvenience that turned up amid such an intervention and was dealt with accordingly. In the course of their alliance, Iran and Russia partook in the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians and displaced millions of others, and they also quelled ISIS. The Russo-Iranian military alliance in Syria was thus not a benevolent humanitarian intervention. It was only akin to the Italo-German intervention on behalf of Franco’s fascists in the Spanish Civil War. In fact, such an exercise was precursor to, and did congeal, the later Italo-German military alliance as Axis against France and Britain in 1940.
Similarly, the collaboration between Iran’s IRGC and Wagner group during the Syrian Civil War consolidated the already deeply developed military industrial collaborations between the two countries; and drone development was one of many such collaborations. Against the backdrop of their earlier military collaboration in Syria, the Iranian drone contribution to Russia’s lethal operations against Ukraine was thus not an aid expected from a “client” of Russia but was an urgently needed assistance offered by “an ally” that had already showcased the usage of this technology against militants and civilians alike to their Russian partners in Syria.
Euro-American appeasement diplomacy vis-à-vis the Iranian regime continues to date despite the end of ISIS. EU and the US continued to subject the Iranian regime to “sanction regimes, threats and public chastening” but in effect have not deterred the regime effectively and concretely from its destabilizing practices.
Iran’s Shia Imperium have sent many shots across the Euro-American alliance’s bow in the region; some have even taken the life of US service members in the past six months. The recent March 19, 2024 Wall Street Journal’s reporting on EU-US rift over sanctioning Iran for weapons transfers in the Middle East is illustrious of the European pathological enabling of the Iranian regime’s military industrial complex; an enabling appeasement diplomacy that has imposed high energy costs for average European households with inflationary results and led to catastrophic consequences for millions from the Russo-Ukrainian war front to the troughs of Bab-al-Mandab and the Red Sea.
EU diplomacy, which might as well be dubbed “Borrell’s diplomacy”, is symptomatic of a deep-seated complacency in the attitude of the Euro-American alliance towards the Iranian regime. Whilst Biden administration turned a blind eye to Iran’s surging oil exports to China, both the US (under successive Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations) and EU were guilty of willful blindness towards Iran on the transfer of UAV parts and academic knowhow to Iran.
Roughly a month ago, it was revealed that US, UK, and Australian universities were involved in drone technology research with top Iranian technology universities. Just three days before the publication of the Guardian report of the Western-Iranian academic collaboration on drone technology, Iran International published its own investigative report that reveled the Euro-American complacency allowed Iran to import drone parts since at least 2014. The Guardian of London, which was once owned and published by the renowned liberal C.P. Scott, has got it wrong when it declaims “how Iranian-supplied drones are changing the nature of warfare”. The article should have been befittingly rephrased: “How Iranian-supplied drones, unenforced sanctions, and appeasement helped a ‘rogue’ regime become a destabilizing global middle power”. Iran’s “Gaza” drone at DIMIDEX was simply “proof that is in the ‘Iran’s UAV technology’ pudding”.
