There can be no doubt that Iran is actively trying to externalize the pain the U.S. and Israel are inflicting on it.
French police knew exactly what kind of plot they had interdicted over the weekend.
According to prosecutors, the man they arrested with a homemade explosive device attached to five liters of liquid accelerant set out to target Paris’s headquarters of the Bank of America. But the figure in French custody was not believed to have acted alone. On Sunday, French security services revealed that they had made two more arrests in connection with the attempted terrorist incident for allegedly providing scouting and logistical support to the attacker.
France’s Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez minced no words. “In this type of conflict, you have a number of Iranian services that are likely to carry out actions such as these through proxies,” he said. An investigation will determine Iran’s culpability in this attack, but, he added, there is “significant suspicion” that Tehran was behind the plot.
This isn’t the first possible terrorist incident linked to Iran that European security agents have thwarted in the weeks since the U.S.-Israeli war against the Islamic Republic erupted. Jewish sites, including synagogues, schools, and ambulances, have been targeted, some successfully, in Belgium, the Netherlands, and the U.K. Some of these attacks were outright claimed by organizations with links either to Iran or pro-Iran Shia militias in the Middle East.
“Investigations into these events are ongoing, but it is conceivable that pro-Iranian cells aimed to demonstrate their capacity to act,” Belgium’s Coordination Unit for Threat Analysis Director Gert Vercauteren told Le Monde. Typically, though, the Islamic Republic and its allies like to hide their tracks. “This time,” Vercauteren warned, “the difference is that the regime clearly wants to indicate that it is the instigator behind the operations that are conducted.”
An aspiring mass murderer does not need to be in active contact with Tehran to sow chaos. In March alone, the United States almost experienced what could have been four mass casualty events linked to Islamist sympathizers. Although they certainly could have been worse, some of these attacks were deadly. A would-be terrorist cell does not need to coordinate directly with Iran to maximize the prospects for bloodshed.
But just because Iran has not managed to pull off a sophisticated terrorist event in the West yet does not mean its assets are not trying. In a chilling warning over the weekend, Canada’s “shadow” minister for immigration, refugees, and citizenship, Michelle Rempel Garner, warned that there may be as many as 1,000 Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps “sleeper” agents embedded across Canada. What’s more, assets in Iran’s control may have already been activated. “The U.S. has intercepted encrypted communications believed to have originated in Iran that may serve as ‘an operational trigger’ for ‘sleeper assets’ outside the country,” ABC News reported on March 9.
Western security and law enforcement officials have become adept at monitoring and interdicting threats linked to the Islamic Republic, but the threat matrix is intimidating. There can be no doubt that Iran is actively trying to externalize the pain the U.S. and Israel are inflicting on it, and executing terrorist attacks on soft Western targets has been part of the Iranian playbook for decades.
Iran and its sympathizers haven’t achieved the level of bloodshed they want, but they’ll keep trying. And so long as the Islamic Republic survives, the threat it poses to Western civilian life will never completely abate.