Iran is a terror state meddling in the Middle East to wreak havoc – the solution for lasting peace is a regime change
THERE is only one entity that benefits from the current carnage in the Middle East and that is the religious dictatorship in Iran.
Tehran’s long-time extensive financial and military support and training for terrorist groups throughout the region, including Hezbollah and Hamas — facilit- ated through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — is well documented.
In fact, immediately after his inauguration, the current Iranian regime president Ebrahim Raisi met with the head of the Hamas political bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, emphasising the regime’s full support for inciting war in the region under the guise of defending Palestine.
He stated that: “There has never been, and never will be, any doubts about this policy.”
Tehran describes its terrorist proxies jointly as the “resistance front”, which is tantamount to the front-line of its export of terrorism and warmongering in the region, and even beyond.
The regime’s fear and intolerance for peace and stability in the Middle East was laid bare once more on October 3 when the official X/Twitter account reflecting the Supreme Leader’s positions stated: “Governments that are gambling on normalizing relations with the Zionist regime will lose . . . This is the Islamic Republic’s definite position.”
This was only days before Hamas attacked Israel.
Tehran’s destabilising activities and interventions are intended to compensate for the popular total rejection of the regime, on display since last year’s nationwide uprising in Iran.
Senior regime officials in general, and its supreme leader Ali Khamenei, have repeatedly said publicly that if they do not fight in the region, they have to fight for their survival in Tehran and other cities throughout Iran.
More than 120,000 Iranians have been executed for daring to stand up to a tyrannical dictatorship.
Now, more than ever, the regime needs to create a foreign crisis to suppress its people who started to rise up after the death of Mash Amini, 22, who died last year while in the custody of the morality police.
Her alleged crime? To defy the regime’s repressive laws by not wearing her hijab properly.
Mass protests followed her death and Khamenei is starting to lose his iron grip on the population.
In two consecutive uprisings, in November 2019 and 2022, the IRGC and other state security organs killed more than 2,250 protesters, including many women and children.
I know all too well the terror Iran can inflict for I am on its hit-list of dissidents living in Britain.
The regime tried to assassinate me in 1990 and almost succeeded.
Another two attempts were foiled only by luck.
As a member of Iran’s democratic opposition coalition, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, I was in Turkey on humanitarian business and travelling to Istanbul airport with a driver in March 1990 when a car suddenly blocked our path and another pinned us from behind.
Two men in the front car jumped out with automatic weapons, firing nine bullets into my body.
I was rushed to Istanbul’s International Hospital where I spent 40 days in a coma.
My odds of survival were one to 100, but after 14 operations and 154 pints of blood I somehow pulled through.
I had lost 80 per cent of my liver.
Another two attempts were made on my life in hospital.
In one case I was saved by a co-incidental visit by the Turkish president, whose mother was on a ward.
Iranian agents were discovered dressed as local police officers.
They made a second attempt by pretending to be friends paying me a visit but were scared off by the arrival of real friends who had come to see me.
In August Home Secretary Suella Braverman said Iran’s revolutionary guard poses a “significant threat” to the UK.
She also identified 15 ‘credible threats’ to kill or kidnap dissidents living in the UK since 2022.
I have been given instructions by the Met Police on how to keep myself safe that I cannot discuss but I will not stop speaking out about this murderous regime.
The National Council of Resistance has been warning for decades that Iran is a major threat and the epicentre of the export of terrorism and Islamic extremism and the violence that emanates from it.
The four biggest concerns are its human rights record, the terrorism of its regime, its meddling in affairs of Middle East countries and its drive to acquire nuclear weapons.
It is the foremost terrorist state in the world and believes its survival is guaranteed only by arming itself with nuclear weapons.
The mullahs have tried to hijack and exploit the Palestinian issue as they once did in Iran, when they hijacked the popular democratic revolution in 1979 to impose a brutal religious dictatorship on the Iranian people.
Their regime has never been weaker than it is today.
The IRGC is its defender and enforcer of its destructive and destabilising policies.
It is time to de-fund and decapitate the Supreme Leader’s private army of terror and repression which is the greatest obstacle to stability in the region, peace in the world and Iranian people living their democratic aspirations.
This can be done by proscribing the IRGC as a terrorist organisation, a decision which has unanimous support in the House of Commons and strong cross-party backing in the House of Lords.
This can be the only way forward as the world reels from the regime in Iran trying to extend its tentacles to the Middle East and Europe.
The solution for lasting peace in our region is a regime change by the Iranian people and the organised resistance.
- Hossein Abedini is deputy director of the National Council of Resistance of Iran and lives in the UK.