Last Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against
Shahram Poursafi, a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (





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Attacks And Assassination Plots Highlight Threat Of Iranian Terror



(New York, N.Y.) — Last Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed an
indictment
<[link removed]>
against Shahram Poursafi, a member of Iran’sIslamic Revolutionary Guard Corps
<[link removed]>
(IRGC), for plotting a murder-for-hire attack against former U.S. National
Security Adviser Ambassador John R. Bolton. Two days later, 24-year-old Hadi
Matar stabbed British-American author Salman Rushdie during a lecture in
western New York. Iran denied involvement in the attack but Matarreportedly
<[link removed]>
had direct contact with IRGC members on social media. Over 30 years later,
Iran maintains its 1989 fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death.



To read the Counter Extremism Project (CEP)’s resource IRGC (Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps), please click here
<[link removed]>
.



Bolton had resigned from his position three months prior to the January 2020
U.S. airstrike that killedMajor General Qasem Soleimani
<[link removed]>, commander of the
IRGC’s Quds Force, but Iranian leaders have threatened retaliation against U.S.
officials. Militants under Soleimani’s command killed more than 500 U.S.
service members in Iraq between 2005 and 2011, and U.S. intelligence linked
Soleimani to a 2011 assassination attempt targeting Saudi Arabia’s ambassador
to the United States.



The IRGC plot also reportedly
<[link removed]> targeted
former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The IRGC, a U.S.-designated Foreign
Terrorist Organization, is Iran’s primary instrument for exporting the ideology
of the Islamic Revolution worldwide and the country’s main link to its
terrorist proxies around the world. The Quds Force, the IRGC’s expeditionary
force, has played a key role in support of Syrian regime forces in that
country’s civil war and is suspected of involvement in the 1994 bombing of the
AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, which killed more than 80 and
wounded about 300. Under Solemani’s successor,Ismail Ghaani
<[link removed]>, the Quds Force
continues to provide training, funding, and weapons to terrorist groups such as
Hezbollah <[link removed]> and Hamas
<[link removed]>. Weeks after Iran’s Supreme
Leader AyatollahAli Khamenei
<[link removed]> appointed Ghaani to
the Quds Force leadership, Ghaani held phone calls with the leaders of Hamas and
Palestinian Islamic Jihad
<[link removed]> (PIJ). His
first international trip after his promotion was to Aleppo, Syria.



Iran continues to support violent Shiite militias in Iraq, including Asaib Ahl
al-Haq <[link removed]> (AAH), the
Badr Organization <[link removed]>,
Kata’ib Hezbollah
<[link removed]> (KH),
Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba
<[link removed]>
(HHN), andKata’ib Sayyid al Shuhada (KSS)
<[link removed]>. Iran is
also known to harbor senior leaders ofal-Qaeda
<[link removed]>, including Saif al-Adel
<[link removed]>, the likely
successor toAyman al-Zawahiri
<[link removed]>. In February
2020
<[link removed]>
, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) placed Iran on its so-called black
list of countries alongside North Korea for its failure to comply with banking
controls against money laundering and terror financing. The United States
accuses the Central Bank of Iran of financing the IRGC, Quds Force, and
Hezbollah. The Central Bank has itself beendesignated
<[link removed]> since 2019.



To read CEP’s resource Iran and its Proxies, please click here
<[link removed]>.



To read CEP’s resource Qasem Soleimani, please click here
<[link removed]>.



To read CEP’s resource Ismail Ghaani, please click here
<[link removed]>.



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