The arrest of eight men – seven of them Iranian nationals – across the United Kingdom in two separate counter-terrorism operations is a chilling reminder that the Islamic Republic of Iran is not a distant threat. It is here, embedded within our cities, probing the limits of our law, our patience and our willingness to defend our democratic integrity. Scotland Yard has revealed only sparse details: a suspected plot to target a ‘specific premises’, and a parallel but unrelated investigation into national security threats. But while the particulars remain classified, the pattern is anything but new. The Islamic Republic has waged a campaign of covert hostility against the UK, Europe and the United States for decades, deploying terrorism, assassination, cyberwarfare and hostage-taking as its sick tools of statecraft. Yet each plot disrupted, each life threatened, is not an isolated outrage but a symptom of a deeper malignancy – so when will we treat the disease, not just its fevers?
The West cannot continue to meet cruelty with abstraction, or terror with denial
This regime, forged in revolution and maintained through repression, has mastered the art of using terror for influence – from the bombing in 1994 of the AMIA Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people, to the IRGC’s alleged hiring in 2021 of a fugitive Hells Angels gang leader to orchestrate attacks on synagogues in Bochum and Essen in Germany. As with this week’s arrests, the Islamic Republic has always made clear it views the sanctity of foreign soil as no barrier to its ambitions.
Then there is its hostage-taking: not merely a tactic but a signature of the Islamic Republic. Much like its proxy Hamas, which dragged civilians into Gaza to use as bargaining chips and human shields, Tehran has long abducted innocents to instil fear, extract concessions and silence dissent. The strategy was born in 1979 through the storming of the US Embassy in Tehran and the seizure of 53 American hostages, all but one held captive for 444 days – a calculated, theatrical rupture with the international order. Since then, the regime has wielded human beings as bargaining chips with shameless precision, targeting dual nationals and dissidents in order to exact silence, secure concessions or demonstrate impunity.
There is a long list of British nationals seized by Tehran’s security apparatus – a roll call of names the public barely knows. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe arrested in 2016 while visiting family and held for six years; Anoosheh Ashoori, held hostage from 2017 to 2022, seized on a routine trip to see his mother; Kamal Foroughi (2011 to 2018), detained in Tehran on baseless espionage charges; Morad Tahbaz (2018 to 2023), an environmentalist with dual UK-US citizenship, left languishing for five years despite government intervention; Mehran Raoof (2020 until today), a labour rights advocate still imprisoned in the brutal Evin prison, with little international outcry; Kameel Ahmady (2019 to 2020), an anthropologist accused of working with ‘hostile governments,’ released on bail; Kylie Moore-Gilbert (2018 to 2020), a UK-Australian academic held in solitary and traded in a secret prisoner swap; and Jolie King (2019), a British-Australian travel blogger jailed for flying a drone, then quietly released in a likely diplomatic exchange.
All were accused of vague, fantastical charges – espionage, regime subversion, cooperation with hostile powers. Most endured years of arbitrary detention, interrogations, solitary confinement, and psychological and physical torture. Some, like Alireza Akbari, a former Iranian defence official and British national, were executed. And just this year, Craig and Lindsay Foreman, a British couple on a round-the-world motorbike journey, were seized and charged with espionage – another hostage narrative in a long, brutal tradition. Yet today, more people in Britain take to the streets to decry Israel’s actions to free its hostages than to call for the release of our own compatriots.
Alongside its hostage diplomacy, the Islamic Republic has pursued a brazen campaign of extraterritorial terror. MI5 has confirmed that at least 20 Iran-backed plots have been disrupted since 2022. These include attempts to kidnap or assassinate Iranian dissidents and journalists on British soil. In one chilling case, Pouria Zeraati, a presenter with Iran International, was stabbed outside his London home in an attack widely believed to have been orchestrated by Tehran. Across the Atlantic, the regime’s reach extends just as far. In the United States, agents of the Islamic Republic have plotted to murder former National Security Advisor John Bolton, kidnap journalist Masih Alinejad and even target Donald Trump for assassination. These are not the actions of a rational, defensive government. They are the machinations of a terror state, operating with impunity under the cloak of diplomatic ambiguity.
At the heart of these operations stands the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – the IRGC. Unlike Iran’s conventional army, the Artesh, the IRGC is not a national military but an ideological militia loyal solely to the Supreme Leader. It controls Iran’s ballistic missiles, nuclear facilities and shadowy proxy forces abroad. Its elite Quds Force conducts asymmetrical warfare, including terror plots and assassinations. The IRGC is not merely part of the regime – it is the regime’s iron fist, projecting violence across borders while enforcing tyranny at home. The United States rightly designated the IRGC a terrorist organisation in 2019. The UK, for all its moral posturing, has yet to do the same.
Still, the Islamic Republic is treated not as a pariah but as a player – one the United States still tries to reason with in talks, even as it races toward nuclear capability. The absurdity is profound: the West negotiates politely with a regime that plots murder in our cities while enriching uranium to secure permanent immunity. The Islamic Republic has declared its enmity to us, not only in speeches but in blood, in broken families, in shuttered newsrooms and targeted exiles. This is our struggle, whether we choose to face it or not. For those who still hope that the regime can be moderated, coaxed, or reasoned with, the record offers only contempt.
The Islamic Republic has tested every limit of Western tolerance and found it elastic. Its operatives sharpen knives in foreign capitals while its diplomats sip coffee over polite conversation with America. Its threats are not hidden – they are broadcast. Its violence is not theoretical – it is lived, by journalists under protection, by exiles hunted in the streets, by citizens imprisoned on fabricated charges. It has long crossed every threshold of reason, every red line of sovereignty.
This is not a call for recklessness, but for moral equilibrium. For a foreign policy that matches its values with its thresholds. The West cannot continue to meet cruelty with abstraction, or terror with denial. The Islamic Republic of Iran has declared, again and again, what it is. If we are not ready to say the same, then the question is no longer about the regime – but about ourselves.
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