{"id":236746,"date":"2021-03-24T10:55:54","date_gmt":"2021-03-24T15:55:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ncr-iran.org\/en\/?p=236746"},"modified":"2023-02-01T05:02:26","modified_gmt":"2023-02-01T04:02:26","slug":"recent-threat-to-u-s-general-highlights-irans-commitment-to-terror-and-brutality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ncr-iran.org\/en\/news\/terrorism-a-fundamentalism\/recent-threat-to-u-s-general-highlights-irans-commitment-to-terror-and-brutality\/","title":{"rendered":"Recent Threat To U.S. General Highlights Iran’s Commitment To Terror and Brutality"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"IRGC's<\/p>\n

Last week, American intelligence sources revealed via the Associated Press that they had intercepted communications in January pointing to an Iranian plot against a military base in Washington, DC. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC<\/a>) apparently considered deploying operatives on U.S. soil in an effort to kill U.S. Army Vice Chief of Staff Joseph M. Martin at Fort McNair. The attack would have been at least the second attempt at revenge for killing IRGC Quds Force<\/a> commander Qassem Soleimani<\/a> almost exactly one year earlier.<\/p>\n

For anyone who has been paying attention to the rhetoric coming out of Iran, the A.P.’s report should have come as little surprise. In the days before the specific plot was uncovered, IRGC officers and other Iranian officials had openly boasted about their plans to kill Americans on their soil and demonstrate their lasting outrage over the killing of an individual whom the regime had lionized for his work in projecting Iranian power beyond its borders.<\/p>\n

Soleimani had been instrumental in the defense of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and was the de facto leader of numerous paramilitary organizations in Syria and Iraq and the chief backer of the Hezbollah terrorist group in Lebanon and the Houthi rebels in Yemen.<\/p>\n

Tehran has struggled to project power as effectively in his absence, and the recent threats can easily be read in the context as an effort to save face. Like much of the regime’s militant rhetoric, those threats are overblown. But that is not to say that Western policymakers or intelligence services should regard them as toothless.<\/p>\n

Last week’s report was by no means the first nor the most significant indicator of this commitment. In the summer of 2018, about a year and a half before Soleimani’s death, multiple European law enforcement agencies cooperated in thwarting a terror plot that saw explosives smuggled into Austria by an Iranian diplomat, transferred to an Iranian-Belgian couple in Luxembourg, and then seized by Belgian police en route to a target venue in France.<\/p>\n

The diplomat at the head of that plot, Assadollah Assadi<\/a>, went on trial in Belgium last November along with three co-conspirators. All four were convicted in February, and Assadi was sentenced to 20 years in prison for plotting to commit terrorist murder. Prosecutors made it clear throughout the proceedings that the terrorists’ actions had not been independently motivated but were ordered from high within the Iranian leadership in response to growing threats of organized Resistance to the theocratic system.<\/p>\n

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Iran\u2019s Terrorist-Diplomat, Assadollah Assadi, Led a Large Espionage & Terrorism Network in EU<\/div><\/div>
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