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After setbacks in Lebanon and Gaza, Tehran is finding new ways to go after Israeli interests

Iran and its allies, battered by Israeli attacks and the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, are running out of options to strike back without risking a regional war that could set them back even further.

But there is one area where Western security agencies and experts fear Iran will try to hit Israel: by hiring criminal gangs in the West.

Iran has long used local militias to pursue its goals across the Middle East. In recent years, Tehran has exported that model to Europe, allying with drug lords and gangsters to go after Jewish or Israeli targets and other perceived opponents.

A recent wave of suspected Iranian-ordered attacks include a hand grenade thrown at the Israeli Embassy in Stockholm and a Spanish politician shot in the face in broad daylight.

Last week, Danish police arrested two Swedish men ages 16 and 19 and charged them with terrorism in connection with two explosions, likely from hand grenades, near the Israeli Embassy in Copenhagen. Swedish media said the young men were affiliated with a gang leader accused of ordering violent plots in Scandinavia on behalf of Tehran, where he is hiding from arrest warrants.

On Thursday, Swedish police arrested a suspect in connection with a shooting near a facility belonging to the Israeli defense-electronics company Elbit Systems in the city of Gothenburg. The Swedish public broadcaster said the suspect was 12 or 13 years old. Police didn’t say whether the attack was linked to Iran. Swedish intelligence has previously accused Tehran of hiring teenage criminals to conduct violent plots in the country.

As Iran and its allies seek ways to respond to recent Israeli attacks in Lebanon, but with limited options in their region, Europe provides an accessible arena to strike Israeli interests, experts say. Russia, too, has noticed the opportunity. The head of the U.K.’s domestic spy agency on Tuesday said both Russia and Iran were increasingly using low-level criminals to carry out arson and sabotage attacks against dissidents and sow chaos across Europe.

MI5 Director General Ken McCallum said Russia is using criminal networks after its spy network was largely dismantled by the expulsion of 750 diplomats following the Kremlin’s move to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Israel’s National Security Council, meanwhile, said in late September that it had identified a sharp increase in efforts to target Israeli interests around the world since Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7 last year.

Covert operations in Europe have increasingly become a tool of asymmetric warfare for hostile actors, said Daniel Byman, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and an expert on terrorism and insurgencies. While Hezbollah’s military command has been decimated, plots in Europe require few resources.

“It enables you to strike a range of targets that are often undefended. Small groups of individuals can do it without much training and money,” Byman said.

Iran has a history of orchestrating attacks against Jewish and Israeli targets abroad. In April, an Argentine court ruled that Hezbollah, on behalf of Iran, was behind a bombing in 1994 against a Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people.

Prosecutors in Bulgaria linked Hezbollah, a U.S.-designated terrorist group, to a 2012 bus bombing there that killed five Israeli tourists and a Bulgarian driver. Two Lebanese nationals were sentenced in absentia to life in prison.

New opportunities are emerging, too, thanks in part to relatively open borders and a rise in organized crime in historically safe countries such as Sweden, the U.K., the Netherlands and Germany.

Early this year, in a quiet corner of Stockholm, a member of a notorious local gang threw a hand grenade into the compound of the Israeli Embassy. Months later, members of a rival gang fired live shots near the same building, leading police to arrest a 14-year-old boy.

The two criminal organizations, called Foxtrot and Rumba, are mortal enemies, fueling a wave of violence rocking Sweden, often using teenagers. But they both take orders from Iran, Israeli and Swedish intelligence have said. The night before the embassy shooting, police had arrested a 15-year-old boy for possession of a semiautomatic weapon while he was heading to the compound.

Foxtrot members were also behind last week’s embassy explosions in Copenhagen, Swedish media reported.

“Iran for years has conducted security-destabilizing activities in Sweden, mainly aimed at the Iranian diaspora,” said Fredrik Hultgren-Friberg, a spokesperson for the Swedish Security Service. “This spring we established that the Iranian regime had been using individuals connected to criminal networks in Sweden to carry out violence” against Israeli targets in Sweden, he said.

The Israeli Embassy in Brussels was also attacked with two grenades in May by criminals recruited by Iran, according to Israel’s spy agency Mossad.

The same month, a Paris court charged a known drug trafficker, on probation from a 10-year murder sentence, with plotting to kill Jews in Germany and France on behalf of Iran.

This alliance between Iran and European criminals can be traced back to decades of network-building in the Middle East, where militias in Iran’s self-described axis of resistance—including Hezbollah—are involved in international criminal networks, smuggling drugs, weapons and other goods to fund and arm their operations.

“The axis of resistance, the way it operates, is very mafia-like,” said Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, a think tank in London. “That’s why finding gangs and finding people to run these operations isn’t so difficult for Iran. Relations were primarily economic, and now they have developed into something else.”

The attacks are also an indication of necessity. Iran and Hezbollah don’t have the intelligence means to respond in kind to suspected Israeli assassinations, and Tehran’s missile barrages against Israel, in April and early October, were largely ineffective.

“They don’t have the operational capability, and they don’t have the creativity,” Vakil said about Iran.

Aside from Israeli or Jewish targets, criminals have also attacked other figures who might have rankled Iran.

On a Friday afternoon in March, Pouria Zeraati left his London house as usual to host a prime-time news show on Iran International, a Saudi-backed broadcaster. Zeraati has gained prominence for his reports on antiregime protests in Iran and Tehran’s support for Hamas and for interviewing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Zeraati was walking to his car when a man approached him and asked for change. As he began to unlock the vehicle, a second man appeared and grabbed him while the first man stabbed him repeatedly in the leg, Zeraati said.

The attackers are believed to be Eastern European criminals who fled the country after the incident, according to British media. British intelligence didn’t dispute that account. Zeraati said the man’s accent was neither native British nor Iranian.

“It was a warning shot,” Zeraati said in an interview from Israel, where he now lives with his wife in what he considers relative safety and where he works on his show. He is still recovering from his injuries.

In Spain, Alejo Vidal-Quadras, a politician who publicly supports the exiled Iranian opposition group the People’s Mojahedin, or MEK, survived an attempt on his life when he was shot in the face in broad daylight late last year. Six people have been arrested in connection with the attempted murder, including the man suspected of pulling the trigger, a French criminal of Tunisian origin.

Plots have spread to the U.S., too. American law enforcement in July arrested a Pakistani national, whom the Justice Department said had close ties to Iran, after he tried to hire an undercover FBI agent posing as a hit man to assassinate a U.S. politician. The plot was “straight out of the Iranian playbook,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said.

American prosecutors last year charged three members of an Eastern European criminal organization they linked to Iran with conspiring to assassinate Masih Alinejad, an Iranian journalist and activist based in Brooklyn. The FBI also issued a warrant for Naji Sharifi Zindashti, a prominent heroin trafficker wanted for allegedly hiring criminals to murder two residents of Maryland who had fled Iran.

“The Islamic Republic of Iran harbors neither the intent nor the plan to engage in assassination or abduction operations, whether in the West or any other country,” said a spokesperson for Iran’s mission to the United Nations. “These fabrications are concoctions of the Zionist regime, the Albania-based Mujahedin-e Khalq terrorist cult,” he said, referring to the MEK, “and certain Western intelligence services—including those of the United States—to divert attention from the atrocities committed by the Israeli regime.”

Some criminals have received safe haven in return for their work.

Rawa Majid, the kingpin of Foxtrot, one of the Swedish gangs behind the Israeli Embassy attacks in Copenhagen and Stockholm, was arrested in Iran last year, according to Swedish media. He is now accused of directing terror plots across Europe at the direction of Tehran, while hiding from an international arrest warrant, according to Israeli intelligence. He couldn’t be reached for comment.

Ramin Yektaparast, a former president of the Hells Angels biker gang in the German city of Mönchengladbach, for years befriended and offered protection to Iranians, including an Instagram influencer who was the son of an Iranian Revolutionary Guard veteran, Yektaparast told The Wall Street Journal in 2019.

When German authorities in 2021 indicted Yektaparast for a gang murder committed years earlier, he had already fled to Iran, where he had family links and was familiar with the language. The following year, from Tehran, Yektaparast orchestrated two plots against synagogues in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, according to German authorities, alleging he directed the attacks on behalf of Iran. He couldn’t be reached for comment.

By using people such as Yektaparast, Iran benefits in a similar way to how it uses militias in the Middle East, said Matthew Levitt, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and expert on Iranian-backed groups and terrorism.

“They want to do things with plausible deniability to avoid retaliation at home,” he said. “That’s the bottom line.”

And it’s increasingly cost effective.

Iran doesn’t even need to build direct contact with gangs. It can now work through middlemen with contacts in the criminal underground, said Manne Gerell, associate professor at Malmö University with expertise in organized crime in Sweden.

“These are project-based hits, and the people who organize them don’t have to have an affiliation with any gang. They can be independent contractors,” he said.

Sometimes young gang members are willing to kill for as little as $1,000, Gerell said, or sometimes for free if it improves their standing in criminal circles.