‘Entirely on form’: Why Iran’s Revolutionary Guard targeted Australia

Former Spanish politician Alejo Vidal-Quadras was returning from a walk in the park near his home in Madrid in November 2023 when a man wearing a motorcycle helmet approached him. “Hola, señor,” the stranger said before shooting him in the jaw with a pistol.

The former vice president of the European Parliament only survived the broad daylight attack because the assailant had failed to pierce his neck, as Vidal-Quadras later wrote.

Vidal-Quadras had no doubt who was behind the attack. When he was being taken to hospital, he took the mobile phone of a first responder and typed out the word IRAN. He has been a passionate critic of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Spanish police have since arrested eight individuals in several countries in connection with the crime. Although a link to Iran has not been proven, Vidal-Quadras argues the sophisticated operation points to the planning and financing of a state.

Following the stunning revelation that Iran had orchestrated at least two arson attacks on Jewish targets in Sydney and Melbourne, Vidal-Quadras congratulated the Albanese government for breaking diplomatic relations with Iran and designating the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a terrorist organisation. He called on the European Union to follow suit.

Spy agency ASIO’s discovery that Iran was fomenting terror in Australia was dramatic news, but not a surprise to those who have followed the workings of the Iranian regime and the Revolutionary Guard in particular. In recent years, ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess has been warning that Iran, alongside China and Russia, was among the most pernicious practitioners of foreign interference in Australia.

The then home affairs minister, Clare O’Neil, revealed in a 2023 speech that “ASIO disrupted the activities of individuals who had conducted surveillance in the home of an Iranian-Australian, as well as conducted extensive research of this individual and their family”.

“I just want to step back and say again – we have someone living here, in our country, who has been followed, watched and photographed,” O’Neil said. “Their home was invaded by people at the direction of a foreign power. This is happening in Australia, and it’s something that ASIO was onto like a shot.”

Burgess announced in 2022 that “espionage and foreign interference has supplanted terrorism as our principal security concern”. But the two threats are not mutually exclusive, as the fire attacks on the Sydney deli and Melbourne synagogue reveal.

Deakin University’s Greg Barton, a leading scholar of Islam and terrorism, said messing with Australian society made sense for Iran. “The conduct is not surprising if you’ve been paying attention,” he says. “This is entirely on form for Iran. Western democracies, including Australia, are a priority for them.”

He points out that Iran is in a weakened state following devastating airstrikes by Israel and the United States, and the decline of proxy allies in Lebanon (Hezbollah) and Syria (the Assad regime). “There is the possibility that the IRGC was looking to gain traction with conservative elites in Tehran by saying: look at what a mess Australia is in.”

Borrowing Churchill’s dictum that Soviet politics was like watching dogs fight under a carpet, Australian National University Middle East expert Ian Parmeter says Iran is a particularly opaque and difficult-to-understand regime.

Unlike Barton, he believes the decision to target Jewish sites in Australia is a “puzzling one” because of the risk it would heighten sympathy for Jewish and Israeli interests at a time public opinion was turning against Israel because of the war in Gaza.

“It doesn’t make a lot of sense in the first instance,” he says.

He suggests the possibility that the terror plots reflect competing factions within the Iranian security apparatus and perhaps a rogue element, which would help explain why Australian authorities do not believe the Iranian embassy in Canberra was involved in the plot.

Kasra Aarabi, an analyst at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, wrote in a 2020 parliamentary submission: “For over 40 years, the IRGC has been responsible for plotting and executing global terrorist attacks, hostage-takings, maritime piracy, political assassinations on foreign soil – including in Europe – human rights violations and suppressing domestic dissent within Iran.”

In November 2020, Assadollah Assadi, an Iranian diplomat in Vienna, and three fellow Iranians were charged with plotting to bomb a 2018 rally in France of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, a dissident exile group calling for the overthrow of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s theocratic regime.

The trial established that Assadi had smuggled explosives from Tehran to Europe and was acting on instructions of high-ranking Iranian officials. All four defendants were found guilty of attempted murder and terrorism and jailed for between 17 and 20 years.

Maryam Rajavi, the leader of the group targeted by the plot, described the conviction as “a brilliant victory for the people and resistance of Iran and a heavy political and diplomatic defeat for the regime”. Rajavi this week applauded Australia for expelling the Iranian ambassador to Australia, saying Iranian diplomatic posts around the world “are in fact nests of terrorism and espionage”.

Often, it is Jewish sites, including Israeli embassies, that are being targeted, reflecting Iran’s fierce rivalry with the Jewish state for dominance in the Middle East and across the globe. Referencing the Revolutionary Guard’s suspected support for terror attacks on Jewish sites in Bulgaria, Thailand and Argentina, Australian Jewish Association chief executive Robert Gregory told a 2023 Senate inquiry: “This is one of the reasons why, in Australia, Jewish preschools, synagogues and our community centres, you may have noticed, are protected by armed guards. It’s from the fear of the Iranian regime-sponsored terrorist organisations.”

In 2012, a group of Iranians were arrested and charged for allegedly blowing up a building near the Israeli embassy in Bangkok and injuring civilians in a botched attempt to assassinate Israeli diplomats.

The 2023 Senate inquiry called for Australia to take the necessary steps to formally categorise the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp as an organisation involved in supporting and facilitating terrorism. The Albanese government declined to do so on the basis of advice from the Attorney General’s Department that, under the existing Criminal Code, state actors could not be listed as terror groups. The government will now amend the legislation to allow the corps to be listed, prompting cries of “I told you so” from the Coalition and the Iranian diaspora, which had demanded the move for years.

In the US, former attorney-general Merrick Garland said last year: “There are few actors in the world that pose as grave a threat to the national security of the United States as does Iran.”

Garland was speaking as he revealed the US Justice Department had charged an asset of Iran’s regime with directing a network of criminal associates to help assassination plots, including against Donald Trump. The Justice Department also made arrests related to an alleged Revolutionary Guard plot to silence and kill an American journalist who has been a prominent critic of the Iranian regime.

“We will not stand for the Iranian regime’s attempts to endanger the American people and America’s national security,” Garland said.

While Iran’s foreign plots have often been exposed, the regime makes concerted attempts to extract revenge for actions taken against it.

Barton, the Deakin University expert, says he welcomes the strong action against Iran but now has grave fears for the estimated 3000 to 4000 Australians living in Iran. “They have a target on their backs,” he warns.

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