While the European Parliament last week voted in favor of designating the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization, dismantling Tehran’s deeply embedded networks across Europe will be a formidable task, security experts warned The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday.
The vote, which included sanctions on 15 Iranian government officials and six organizations, came in response to Tehran’s brutal treatment and mass killing of protesters. While experts welcomed the move as an important first step, they stressed that Iran’s Islamic regime has spent decades covertly entrenching itself across the continent, often under the cover of diplomacy, making removal far from straightforward.
Jonathan Hackett, a US Marine Corps veteran specializing in counterintelligence and the author of Iran’s Shadow Weapons: Covert Action, Intelligence Operations, and Unconventional Warfare, said the effectiveness of the parliamentary decision would ultimately depend on how rigorously it is enforced by individual member states, “and enforcement has been historically inconsistent.”
“Each state will need to establish and enforce financial restrictions and legal rules that will materially mitigate IRGC activities in the EU. The IRGC continues using banks in Switzerland and has shell companies affiliated with the regime's defense industrial base in Germany. These will continue despite the designation unless and until those states actively stop them,” he explained.
Adding to the complexity, authorities will likely struggle to define what constitutes a proscribable offense, Roger Macmillan, a former director at Iran International and a security expert, told The Post. Citing pro-Palestinian protests in London last week, he said banners supporting the Islamic regime created a legal “grey area” that authorities may find difficult to navigate.
Showing support for Tehran or the ayatollah is not the same as expressing support for Hamas or Hezbollah because Iran remains a nation-state, he said. Still, the designation lowers the threshold for security services to intervene, allowing them to respond to threats earlier.
Though the listing may be slow to translate into concrete action, it has generated “political momentum” to “make it incredibly difficult for the IRGC to operate,” Macmillan said.
Europe’s delayed response has allowed the IRGC to establish a “huge” presence across the continent, he warned, meaning any effort to dismantle its networks will require a sustained, long-term approach.
“You have to pick it off by bite-sized chunks,” he said, adding that asset seizures should be the first actionable step.
The IRGC is “incredibly well embedded, [in] charities, business proxies, criminal gangs, cultural centers. They have them all over, education centers, cultural education, religious foundations,” he said, noting that many individuals involved in the group’s proxy networks may not even be aware of their connection to the IRGC.
Beyond forcing negotiations, asset seizures can be implemented relatively quickly, especially when compared with the lengthy processes involved in deportations or criminal prosecutions. “We need action now,” he urged.
In some cases, sanctions do not have their intended impact, he added, pointing to Iranian oil magnate Hussein Shamkhani. That is why asset seizures are a critical tool in weakening the regime to the point where it is willing to negotiate.
Senior Iran official's son bypasses sanctions, funnels billions to regime
Hussein Shamkhani, the son of Ali Shamkhani, a senior political adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, has funneled billions of dollars to the regime. The US Treasury Department has warned that he owns ship-management firms and front companies worldwide, allowing him to continue bypassing sanctions. “He benefits from some sanctions. He doesn't want to see sanctions being lifted,” Macmillan said, arguing that seizures must move forward without delay.
“If you had somebody with 4 billion, freeze 2 billion of it. Straight away, you send the message: ‘We're coming after the rest of it.’ He's not going to say, ‘Over my dead body,’ he's going to say, ‘Can we do a deal here?’” Macmillan explained.
Iranian actors must be made “financially toxic,” he said, so they are no longer useful to the regime. While they may be replaced by new actors, the funding process would become far less efficient, ultimately harming Tehran.
Oversight and a lack of international collaboration have allowed the Tehran leadership to build up fortunes in the West, limiting how the country’s elite has experienced the sanctions, he continued, which in turn has limited their effectiveness.
Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, has expanded the family’s wealth despite US sanctions through an international real estate business, according to a recent Bloomberg investigation. In London alone, his luxury properties were estimated to be worth $138 million, with additional holdings across Europe.
Travel restrictions and deportations may also fall short, Macmillan warned, particularly as much of Iran’s influence can now be exerted online. While most Iranians living in the West seek peaceful lives away from the regime, their relatives inside Iran remain a significant vulnerability.
“Through targeting of families back in Iran, they're persuading the children, the families overseas, to maybe conduct activities which are in the [Iranian] state's interest,” he said. “That's one way that they will operate at reach and digitally. Now they're able to do that in far more effect than perhaps they were even years ago.”
“I would say that shutting down their media in Europe is also critical,” he added, “because that's when you get the people so your Press TV acolytes who start to push the regime narrative, doing that from within Europe.”
“They're like a hydra, and they are embedded everywhere. If you remove one another, one will literally pop up. You have to go and cut it off at the root, find the individuals there and make it even more complicated for them to operate, more complicated for them to set up,” he said.