In 2022, Iran tried to assassinate American citizen Masih Alinejad in Brooklyn, New York, because she spoke out against the Ayatollah’s oppression of women. This month, the alleged assassins are on trial in a groundbreaking court case on transnational repression.
Last week, one of the men on trial testified, providing firsthand insight into the case. Khalid Mehdiyev—the Azerbaijani mobster who was personally assigned to kill Masih—is part of the Russian crime syndicate “Thieves-in-Law,” a criminal syndicate operating in the U.S. and Europe, which has reportedly carried out assignments on behalf of Iran.
Mehdiyev reportedly got the orders from two fellow mobsters, Rafat Amirov and Polad Omarov, who prosecutors say “conspired with the Iranian government to kill Alinejad in exchange for $500,000.” Amirov and Omarov, also alleged members of Thieves-in-Law, seem to have received their orders from a network of Iranian men led by a brigadier general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Ruhollah Bazghandi. These men have also been charged by federal prosecutors in Manhattan, but they remain outside U.S. jurisdiction and have not been apprehended.
In his chilling testimony, Mehdiyev described how he surveilled Masih’s Brooklyn home, including taking pictures of her, her husband, and her son. Mehdiyev and his associates knew where she bought her coffee and when she watered her garden.
He detailed the various ways they plotted to kill her, including getting her phone number and pretending to be an admirer of her work to “get into her life” with texts asking for help with asylum requests and praise for her journalism. She did not respond.
Mehdiyev was observing her around the clock, noting especially how much she loved her garden and how much time she spent there. If you’ve seen Masih speak, you know she wears a flower in her hair as a symbol of freedom, and she is also known for sharing flowers and vegetables from her garden with neighbors. In one especially horrifying contingency plan, Mehdiyev would ask her for flowers from her garden and then gun her down. The plan would have used her own freedom and generosity against her.
The mobsters discussed burning down Masih’s house, but decided that was too risky.
Mehdiyev testified that he once saw Masih sitting on her porch as he walked by. When he returned with his gun, she was gone.The next day, he showed up to her home and rang her doorbell–which you can see clearly in this Ring camera footage. Thankfully, Masih did not answer that day, and Mehdiyev was arrested shortly thereafter, but only because he ran a stop sign with an AK-47 in his backseat.
Facing life in prison for the murder plot, Mehdiyev is cooperating with authorities to testify against both the Iranian government officials who ordered the assassination and the middlemen who facilitated it.
What did Masih do to make the Iranian regime want to kill her?
She “enraged” the regime by criticizing one of Iran’s “core rules”—the one that compels women to wear head scarves. She launched the My Stealthy Freedom campaign against compulsory hijab in 2014, for which she won the Geneva Summit Women’s Rights Award in 2015. She was later exiled to the US for her work and became an American citizen. Since then, the Iranian regime has made several attempts to kidnap or assassinate her right here in the US.
Masih believes that women ought to be able to have bad hair days—or good ones—in public. She merely wanted women to make their own choices about what they want to wear walking down the street. For this reason alone, the Iranian regime has dedicated hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to kill her.
This is the most clear and public case in the United States today of an increasingly dangerous issue: Transnational repression. “TNR,” as it is often referred to in the policy community, describes actions taken by dictators outside their borders meant to silence and harass dissenters to their regime.
Transnational repression is another way of saying that dictators outside the United States can affect the rights of people inside the United States. The FBI’s assistant director in charge of the New York field office, James Dennehy, described this TNR plot as a direct attempt by the Iranian regime “to stop an American from exercising their constitutionally protected right to free speech; to end their life for speaking out publicly against the Iranian regime and its human-rights violations.”
And Masih’s case—while a horrific example of TNR—is not isolated. As RDI’s Sohan Mewada wrote recently, “While transnational repression is now a consistent and effective part of the authoritarian playbook, the long arm of authoritarian influence goes beyond regimes silencing their fiercest critics. And democracies have yet to fully grapple with the scope of the threat.”
The threats cross several domains. Not only do they target political dissidents, they also infiltrate companies to steal foreign secrets and co-opt the institutions of free societies to degrade the very norms of openness they were built to protect.
Despite the seeming distance of Iran and its internal political fights about women’s rights, the United States is actually on the frontlines of this fight. For those who might believe that geographic distance, constitutional protections, or America’s democratic values would deter transnational repression, the reality is that they do not.
Fortunately, at least two bills have been introduced to Congress that will address the issue of transnational repression: the Combating Transnational Repression Act and the Transnational Repression Reporting Act. These bills will create a Transnational Repression Office in the US Department of Homeland Security to track, investigate, and counter transnational repression in the US, and require official reporting on every case of transnational repression in the US and the government’s response. These efforts would be a good start to protect Americans from dictatorial regimes and reverse the worsening trend of transnational repression on US soil.
The United States must act decisively to counter this growing threat. The Renew Democracy Initiative urges Congress to pass crucial legislation addressing transnational repression. You can support this effort by signing our petition today!
