Iran's
European Hit Men
by Abigail R. Esman
Special to IPT News
December 14, 2018
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It is just before dusk when gunshots
sounded on a quiet, residential street in November 2017. A man falls to
the sidewalk. A dark BMW races off, into the growing darkness of the night.
The victim, Ahmad Mola Nissi, dies that night of his wounds – including
several shots to the head. He leaves a family grieving, but not surprised;
there have been threats against him for some time, and efforts by the
police to protect him. Those who know Nissi know who he is: the founder of
the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz (ASMLA), an Iranian
separatist group which seeks independence for the Arab people of the
Iranian province of Ahwazi, or Khuzestan. Iran calls it a terrorist group.
Yet this murder occurred not in Iran, but in Europe, in the Netherlands,
where Nissi has lived since 2006; and although a year later the killer
still has not been found, Dutch authorities were quick to pinpoint the one
who was responsible: the Iranian regime.
It was also not the first time an Iranian dissident was murdered in the
Netherlands. In 2015, Reza Kolahi, was killed in Almere. Kolahi was a
member of the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran, or MEK, considered
the regime's largest opposition group. Iran and Iraq both list the MEK as a terrorist group, though Europe,
Canada, and the United States all had dropped that designation by 2012. The
U.S. now classifies it as a "cult." In fact, many of Donald
Trump's supporters, including Rudy Giuliani and John Bolton, have expressed
their support of the group in its efforts to overthrow the ayatollahs,
despite its Islamist-Socialist roots.
Still, neither the MEK nor the ASMLA are innocent bystanders. The MEK is
suspected of killing several Americans in the 1970s,
and for bombing American corporations in Iran. Iran blames
the ASMLA, together with the UK military, for a 2006 bombing in Ahvaz which
killed at least eight people. And the two groups are responsible for other
terrorist attacks that have killed dozens over the years.
But the assassinations by the Iranian state of citizens living on
foreign soil is nonetheless inexcusable, say rights leaders in the
Netherlands. Moreover, indications are that Kolahi was killed by criminal
gangs under orders from Iran, suggesting, according to Iranian-Dutch counterterrorism scholar
Afshin Ellian, that "Iran has access to a broad network of
sympathizers and intelligence agents in the Netherlands."
He is not alone in that assessment. In October, the European Council on
Foreign Relations alleged that "Iran's intelligence services have
long placed foreign-based opponents of the regime under close surveillance,
often aggressively gathering information on them."
That view has also been echoed by the Iraqi press. The Iraqi-Kurdish Basnews,
for instance, reported after Nissi's assassination that "the
brutal gangland style of the murder is a trademark of the Iranian regime,
which has had many dissidents in exile assassinated in the same way since
first coming to power in 1979."
The newspaper further noted that Nissi had been receiving threats for
several years, another trademark of the regime "which routinely
attempts to silence dissent both inside and outside Iran by killing dissidents
or terrorizing them into silence."
Indeed, the history of attacks on dissidents by the regime goes back
decades. According to the Washington Institute, the regime since
then "has been intently pursuing foreign assassination plots ... for
some time, in tandem with domestic maneuvers intended to ward of persistent
political protests and intensified media pressure at home." Among the
most notable of those attacks was the September 1992 murder in Berlin of the
then-Secretary General of the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran, Sadegh
Sharafkandi, along with several of his aides.
Other murders followed, including the 1993 assassination of a cleric in Bonn; the 1993 shootings of Iranian dissidents in Copenhagen,
in Stockholm in 1996, and Paris in 2005; and the April 2017 killing
of an Iranian TV executive in Istanbul.
In October, French authorities foiled plans to bomb an MEK rally outside Paris, again placing blame squarely with the Iranian state. Rudy
Giuliani was among those scheduled to attend the event.
That same month, the Washington Institute reported that Denmark was
recalling its ambassador to Iran in response to evidence that "regime
intelligence operatives had plotted an assassination on Danish soil."
The target in that case was another ASMLA member.
For its part, Iran continues to deny government involvement in any of
these killings, even as it blames
ASMLA and the United States for a September attack on a military parade in
Ahvaz, Iran, an attack for which ISIS has claimed credit.
Despite these atrocities, European leaders, even those quick to condemn
Saudi Arabia for the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, have been reluctant to take action
against Iran. Only Denmark has called for re-imposing sanctions following the
assassination plot there. Yet, as the European Council on Foreign Relations
cautions, "if Europe refrains from punishing state-sponsored
assassinations and disappearances, not only will authoritarian regimes
continue their repressive tactics, but the EU will lose its ability to
defend its common area of freedom, security, and justice."
Abigail R. Esman, the author, most recently, of Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy in
the West (Praeger, 2010), is a freelance writer based in New
York and the Netherlands. Follow her at @radicalstates.
Related Topics: Abigail
R. Esman, Iran,
dissident
murders, Ahmad
Mola Nissi, Reza
Kolahi, MEK,
Kurds,
Afshin
Ellian, European
Council on Foreign Relations, Sadegh
Sharafkandi, ASMLA
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