The UK is urged to proscribe Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps before further attacks occur. The IRGC is described as increasingly able to harm people in the UK, including through torched places of worship, violent harassment of citizens, destruction of ambulances, and threats to peaceful gatherings. The IRGC is portrayed as operating in the UK as a permissive environment for funding, recruitment, propaganda, hostile intelligence activity, sanctions evasion, and concealment of illicit proceeds through shell companies and real estate. It is also alleged to run banned media offices and to influence local gangs in London under the banner of Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia, targeting Jewish-linked sites. The warning is compared to Argentina’s 1994 AMIA attack, linked to an IRGC figure later leading the organization in Iran.
"The United Kingdom must act to proscribe Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, before it's too late. The IRGC must be proscribed before more places of worship are torched, more citizens are violently harassed, more ambulances intentionally destroyed, more peaceful gatherings threatened. The IRGC has the capability and the to harm people on British soil with increasing ease. This threat could be nipped in the bud with the right measures, right now."
"The IRGC views the United Kingdom as a permissive environment. For the IRGC, the United Kingdom is not just a place to money or recruit British citizens to post the regime's propaganda on social media, though both are certainly happening there. The IRGC is also conducting hostile intelligence operations, evading sanctions, hiding millions of pounds from illicit shadow fleet oil sales in high-end real estate portfolios, incorporating shell companies, running banned media offices, and sheltering their spendthrift children."
"And, most recently, the IRGC freely influenced local gangs in London under the banner of Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia, or HAYI, to torch and destroy half a dozen Jewish-linked targets there over the span of just a few weeks."
"The situation in today's United Kingdom is not unlike Argentina in 1994. Back then, a young IRGC veteran of the Iran-Iraq War named Ahmad Vahidi worked with local Shi'a militants in Buenos Aires to attack the AMIA Jewish center, killing 85 people. Two years earlier, he had planned an attack on the Israeli embassy there that killed 29 people."
Read at The Cipher Brief
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