On the morning of May 17, 2024, a shooting occurred near the Israeli embassy in Stockholm. Panic broke out around the embassy and in the surrounding streets, but the attack was over after just two minutes. No one was killed or injured.
And because of the high police presence near the embassy, the suspected perpetrators were quickly caught. They were three young people: a 14-year-old who presumably fired the shots, a 15-year-old who was driving a taxi in which more weapons were discovered, and his 16-year-old passenger. The media reported that IS was probably behind the attack.
But this theory quickly turned out to be wrong. According to Swedish police, none of the three suspects had any connections to the terrorist organization. Despite their young age, they were not TikTok jihadists who had become radicalized online. Instead, the police knew them as members of the so-called Rumba Gang, a Stockholm youth gang.
At first glance, this made no sense: what interest would a local gang have in attacking the Israeli embassy? It was not the first incident of this kind. In January, there had already been an attack on the Israeli embassy in Stockholm, for which the public prosecutor had blamed a gang.
Just a week after the shooting on May 17, there was an attack on the Israeli embassy in Brussels, in which the perpetrators also came from the gang milieu. The surprising explanation was that the groups did not act on their own initiative, but had an unusual client, namely the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran. (…)
Iran was responsible for eleven attempted attacks in Europe between 2018 and 2024.
For decades, the Iranian government has been waging an often ruthless shadow war against its opponents, especially the United States and Israel. The spearhead of this war is the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (Irish Revolutionary Guards for short), an independent military organization that was founded by revolutionary leader Khomeini immediately after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Over the years, the Revolutionary Guards have grown into a “state within a state” and now have their own armed forces, a secret service, the feared “Basij” militias that take action against dissidents throughout the country, and a “gigantic” economic empire.
Over the years, the Revolutionary Guards have grown into a “state within a state”
Under their leadership, an informal alliance has also been created with which Iran fights its enemies inside and outside the region. This alliance is both political and military in nature and includes both state and non-state actors. Its most prominent members are the Lebanese Hezbollah, the Palestinian Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ, another group with roots in the Muslim Brotherhood), the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad, the Yemeni movement “Ansar Allah” (better known as the Houthis) and a number of Shiite militias in Iraq. (…)
The Iranian Revolutionary Guard was responsible for at least eleven attempted attacks in Europe in the six years from June 2018 to June 2024. Only three of these targeted Iranian opposition members or opponents of the regime, while eight were directed against Jewish and/or Israeli targets. This makes it clear that Iran continues to see Europe as a battlefield in its conflict with Israel and the West.
A closer analysis reveals the approach of the Revolutionary Guards. In most cases, the attacks were not carried out by them themselves, but by “proxies” – presumably in order to conceal or deny the responsibility of the Iranian government. The first three of the planned attacks were carried out by “local supporters”, i.e. Iranian exiles who had been living in the respective locations for a long time and who sometimes acted as “sleeper agents” there.
Since 2021, the Revolutionary Guards have been cooperating with local “professionals”
But from 2021 onwards, the pattern changed: Since then, the Revolutionary Guards have been cooperating with local “professionals”, i.e. contract killers or criminal networks or gangs, such as in the attacks on the Israeli embassies in Stockholm and Brussels. The fact that they were not able to carry out their plans was in most cases because the targets of the attacks were very well protected or because the Israeli foreign intelligence service Mossad tracked them down in time. In some cases, it was probably pure luck.
The Revolutionary Guards are not only concerned with Israel or alleged “Zionists.” This is illustrated by a first example from April 2021. At that time, an attempt was made to kill two prominent Swedish Jews: Saskia Pantell, the head of the Zionist Federation, and Aron Verständig, the chairman of the Swedish Council of Jewish Communities. The assassins were an Iranian couple who had lived in Sweden since 2015 and had been commissioned to carry out the attack during a stay in Iran. Immediately after their return to Sweden in February 2021, the two began spying on their victims.
Attempt to kill two prominent Swedish Jews
After finding out Pantell and Verständig’s home addresses, they followed them almost daily and took numerous photos. How exactly the murder was to take place remained unclear until the end. But in April, the Swedish police were convinced that the crime was imminent and had the suspected assassins arrested.
As it turned out, the couple were acting as “sleeper agents” for the Revolutionary Guards. When they came to Sweden in the summer of 2015, they posed as Afghans and presented fake documents. This did not go unnoticed for long. The following year, a translator pointed out that the couple’s dialect was by no means Afghan.
Shortly afterwards, the immigration authorities received two anonymous tips stating that the man had given a false identity and was a “potentially dangerous Iranian.” Nevertheless, the couple’s asylum application was approved in 2017 and they were able to stay in Sweden indefinitely. According to the Swedish authorities, they lived there completely inconspicuously for four years before they were commissioned to kill the two Jews. The couple never went to trial: after ten months of legal and diplomatic entanglements, the two were deported to Iran.
Attacks planned on three synagogues in NRW and the President of the Central Council of Jews
A second example comes from autumn 2022 and concerns planned – and partially carried out – attacks on three synagogues in North Rhine-Westphalia and the President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Josef Schuster. The person who commissioned the attack was the German-Iranian Ramin Yektaparast, a criminal with multiple previous convictions and founder of the Mönchengladbach chapter of the biker gang “Hells Angels”. Yektaparast recruited an acquaintance (also a German-Iranian) to carry out the attack on the synagogue in Bochum. Another contact planned an attack on the synagogue in Dortmund. And a third, still unknown person fired four shots at the synagogue in Essen and the home of the rabbi there.
This person was also given the task of investigating Josef Schuster’s living conditions. The only conviction that ultimately came about was that of the Bochum assassin, in which the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court found that the planning had been carried out by “Iranian state authorities” – that is, the Revolutionary Guards.
One of the clients was Ramin Yektaparast, a German-Iranian with multiple criminal records.
Yektaparast was initially spared prosecution because he had already fled to Iran in 2021. At the time, he was suspected of murdering another gang member and was about to be arrested by the German authorities. According to media reports, the Revolutionary Guards helped him escape and then forced him to cooperate. (…)
The main reason the plan was discovered was that the person he had recruited for the attack on the Dortmund synagogue got cold feet and went to the police. The Israeli authorities also apparently followed the entire operation with great interest. But instead of waiting for Yektaparast’s (unlikely) extradition to Germany, they took matters into their own hands: in early 2024, Yektaparast was killed by an Israeli special operation in Iran.
The terrorism sponsored by the Iranian state and carried out by the Revolutionary Guards and their partners in the “Axis of Resistance” is thus the third component of the coming wave. Here, too, it is jihadist terrorism because all the actors – the Revolutionary Guards, Hamas and Hezbollah – are Islamists who justify their violence on religious grounds.
From the perspective of Iran and Hezbollah, Salafist jihadists are a threat
This does not mean that they form a unity or cooperate with other currents of jihadism – such as the ISPK (Islamic State – Khorasan Province) or the TikTok jihadists. On the contrary: From the perspective of Iran and Hezbollah, Salafist jihadists are a threat because they view Shiites as “apostates”. And Hamas also has a complicated, in most cases hostile or even hostile relationship with Salafist jihadists.
What unites them, despite all their differences, is an ideology that sees the advance of Western modernity as a threat to Islam and therefore wants to fight it violently. This is also the reason why the impending wave of terror is a test for Europe and European societies: it threatens not only individuals or groups of people, but above all the idea of a liberal and pluralistic Europe.
Peter R. Neumann is Professor of Security Studies at King’s College London and one of the world’s leading terrorism experts. This article is an excerpt from his new book “Return of Terror” (176 pages, €22), which will be published by Rowohlt Berlin on September 17th. We thank the author and publisher for their kind permission to print this in advance.
