ASIO’s warning on foreign interference

A recent study by Ardavan Khoshnood, a researcher at Sweden’s Lund University, outlines how Iran, too, “has employed assassinations and proxy violence as tools of statecraft”, where the regime has targeted, threatened and killed dissidents in exile. Iran has conducted terrorist attacks and deployed assassinations against its perceived enemies in foreign countries since the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979. Though the regime has always sought to deny involvement, journalists and intelligence organisations pointed to evidence linking Iran and its security arm, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, to such attacks. Khoshnood cites an interview this year in which a former commander admitted that the IRGC was behind a number of assassinations and detailed how the corps outsourced these plots, often to criminal outfits, creating a “multilayered structure that shielded Iranian officials from direct attribution”.