When I was jailed in Iran, the interrogator showed me a list of Australian sites and began asking questions

In a dimly lit basement interrogation facility sometime in 2020, a middle-aged man wearing a baseball cap, sunglasses and a surgical mask approached me with a list of addresses, typed in English on a sheet of A4 paper.

This man was familiar – I’d glimpsed his face during an earlier session – he was one of the interrogators from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps intelligence branch, a much-feared group which at this point had detained me for more than a year in a special unit within Tehran’s notorious Evin prison.

Typed on the piece of paper were the names and addresses of a number of synagogues and Jewish organisations in my home city of Melbourne, including in suburbs such as Caulfield and Doncaster. He wanted to know if I’d visited any of them, and if so, what was inside.

By this time I had no interest in co-operating with my captors, who had sentenced me to 10 years in prison on ludicrous charges of espionage and were attempting to blackmail me into working for them. I told them where they could shove their list of Australian Jewish intelligence targets.

Many months later and under vastly different circumstances, I was able to report this exchange to the ASIO agents who interviewed me following the prisoner-swap deal that ultimately secured my return to Australia.

Those of us who have kept a close eye on the Iranian regime are not surprised by the Australian government’s revelation that the Revolutionary Guard was involved in a wave of antisemitic attacks against Australian Jewish organisations, businesses and places of worship since the horrific events of October 7, 2023.

Numerous examples of similar incidents have taken place overseas, including in the US and UK, where the regime has a history of contracting organised crime syndicates, often paid in cryptocurrency, to target dissident journalists, anti-regime protesters and Israeli government interests.

As soon as it became clear that the antisemitic attacks in Sydney and Melbourne – including the so-called Dural caravan plot, the attack on the doors of the East Melbourne Synagogue and attacks on Jewish businesses in Sydney – involved individuals with criminal connections who had no known interest in the Jewish community, many of us began to suspect that the Iranian regime was repeating a known pattern of behaviour here in Australia.

Antisemitism is a core component of the Iranian regime’s ideology, and terrorist groups like the Revolutionary Guard have played a key role in spreading antisemitic conspiracies and commissioning antisemitic attacks for decades.

As I know from bitter personal experience, groups like the Revolutionary Guard do not distinguish between the Israeli government, a sworn enemy of the Iranian regime, and Jewish Australian citizens quietly going about their lives in suburban Melbourne or Sydney.

That the Revolutionary Guard has an active presence on Australian soil should, at this point, surprise no one. In 2024 ASIO chief Mike Burgess took the unusual step of specifically naming Iran as one of several malign foreign actors seeking to interfere in Australia’s domestic affairs. These public comments came after years of increasingly panicked reports by members of the Iranian-Australian community of being surveilled, threatened and harassed by agents of the Islamic Republic at protest rallies, community meetings, online and even outside their own homes.

I myself presented to the office of then foreign minister Marise Payne, and later to the office of Foreign Minister Penny Wong, a list of Revolutionary Guard-linked individuals and other Iranian officials directly complicit in my own wrongful detention, as well as that of up to four other Australians, with the request that they be sanctioned. Iranian-Australian community groups have compiled similar lists. To this, I received no response.

Australia remains one of the only Western nations not to have sanctioned the Revolutionary Guard puppet judge Abolqasem Salavati, who presided over my sham trial and conviction, and who is notorious for sentencing hundreds of political prisoners to death.

Advocates have fought for years to get Australia to proscribe the Revolutionary Guard as a terror organisation, which would mean a ban on financial and other material support for the group in Australia, and give law enforcement expanded powers to crack down on and prosecute those who seek to further its activities within our borders. Among those fighting for this change were Australian victims of Revolutionary Guard torture, hostage-taking and other well-documented human rights abuses.

A 2023 Senate inquiry called for a strengthening of the government’s response to Iranian meddling in Australia’s affairs and sought the Guard’s formal listing as a terror group. The government backed away from doing so at the last minute, arguing that under existing legislation the organisation, as a branch of the Iranian state, could not be proscribed.

In the eyes of the Iranian regime, Jewish Australians and Iranian dissidents living peacefully among us are a legitimate target, and the consequences of longstanding Iranian surveillance of both communities are only now being felt. It is striking that, following years of slippery justifications about why the government is unable to proscribe the Revolutionary Guard, or expel the Iranian ambassador over repeated antisemitic remarks, the government has suddenly discovered the resolve to do both, seemingly overnight.

I commend Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong for finally taking decisive action against the Iranian regime’s malign activities on Australian soil, which have long demonstrated that the Islamic Republic of Iran is no friend to the Australian people. I only wish they had listened to us sooner.

Kylie Moore-Gilbert is an academic in Middle Eastern political science at Macquarie University and the author of memoir The Uncaged Sky: My 804 Days in an Iranian Prison.

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