The three ways Iran is targeting Britain

Kasra Aarabi, director of IRGC research at the United Against Nuclear Iran think tank, puts it more starkly: “It is a front for the IRGC Quds force, it has its fingerprints all over it.”

Aarabi breaks down the Iranian method into what he calls the “triangle or terror”.

The first side is the use of “direct operatives” — for instance, the Iranian diplomat Assadollah Assadi, who in 2018 used the cover of his diplomatic passport to fly to Europe on a passenger plane with half a kilogram of explosives with the intent of blowing up the leader of an exiled Iranian opposition group at a talk in Paris.

The second is to employ proxy groups in the form of existing criminal networks to carry out IRGC dirty work. As western intelligence becomes better at interrupting the IRGC’s own proxies, this outsourced approach has become increasingly popular, says Michael Jacobson, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former State Department counterterrorism official.

The third side of Aarabi’s triangle is nurturing homegrown terrorism. Iran’s soft power network has been in development for decades, says Aarabi, in the form of IRGC-linked charities, mosques and educational institutions which “appear on the surface as legitimate entities but actually what they are doing is facilitating hostile activity for the IRGC and nurturing homegrown Islamist radicalisation in a way that is not too dissimilar to Isis and al-Qaeda”.

“They’ve doubled down on this particularly since October 7,” says Aarabi. This involves sponsoring anti-Israel marches and protests in London, intimidation tactics against the Jewish community and stepping up surveillance on the British Iranian community.