Iran’s hybrid warfare in Europe
- Jihad as Hybrid warfare
‘Hybrid warfare’ is a concept ‘adopted and adapted’ by NATO in 2014 (Libiseller, 2023) ‘after which academic interest suddenly sky-rocketed.’ As we can read in the NATO website: ‘To put it simply, hybrid warfare entails an interplay or fusion of conventional as well as unconventional instruments of power and tools of subversion.’ Other than an ‘academic fashion’, as Libiseller portrays it, we can see it as a good way to translate into our contemporary vocabulary what was meant by Maulana Maududi in 1927 in his seminal writing ‘Jihad in Islam’ – ‘Modern Jihad’ as I called it – (SADF, 2017, p. 4).
In his foundational pamphlet of modern Jihadism, Maududi sets the revolutionary and global aims inspiring all contemporary modern jihadist currents, including the Iranian (SADF, 2017, op. cit).
This is clearly reflected in the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran; in the preamble we can read:
‘An Ideological Army
In establishing and equipping the defense forces of the country, the focus shall be on maintaining ideology and faith as the foundation and the measure. Consequently, the Army of the Islamic Republic and the Islamic Pasdaran Revolutionary Corps are formed in accordance with the aforementioned objective. They will undertake the responsibility of not only guarding and protecting the borders, but also the weight of ideological mission, i.e. striving ( jehād) on the path of God and struggle on the path of expanding the sovereignty of the law of God in the world’
Whereas the term ‘Jihad’ was commonly used to designate ‘religious wars’, much as the term ‘Crusade’, the term can be used in various other ways. Maududi’s concept, however, defined Jihad as a multifaced revolutionary tool to attain Islamic domination over the whole world. In other words, modern Jihad is itself an ‘hybrid war’ tool, comprising both conventional and non-conventional war elements.
In several particular respects, the ‘Modern Jihad’ enshrined in the Islamic Iranian revolution goes beyond the original Maududi vision. This is particularly so as concerns the most stunning and barbaric disregard for the life of women and children.
Further in the preamble of the Constitution we can read:
‘Women in particular had a visible and active presence at all the stages of this great campaign (jehād). Images that showed a mother embracing her child rushing toward the battleground and the barrels of machine guns were illustrative of the decisive and essential role that this great segment of society played in the struggle.’
Following Walter Laqueur, I reassessed what was commonly referred as ‘suicidal terrorism’ into a sort of selfish terrorism (Casaca, et al p.42, 2017), wherein weaker members of society such as women and children are seen by the terror ideologues as expendable cannon fodder. Contrarily to Laqueur, though, who considers such type of terrorism to have been initiated by anti-Jewish Arabs (Palestinians), I think we shall refer the creation of this sort of terrorism to the Iranian Islamic Revolution.
Whereas the example chosen by Laqueur (Casaca, et al p.41, 2017) relates to a single act on a flight wherein the terrorist was willing to sacrifice the pregnant woman he was living with (and apparently, without her knowledge), the Iranian Islamic Revolution endorsed such actions as a rule, an objective duty, both in the Constitution and in practice. This was so namely during the war with Iraq, wherein children were used by the thousands as pure cannon fodder.
It was only after the Islamic Iranian revolution that we have seen this logic extended across the Jihadi political spectrum, becoming the trademark of terror outfits such as Hamas.
- Eighty years of terror
The core element of this Modern Jihad is terrorism. The first terror attack with the hallmarks of the Iranian contemporary terror we can identify dates from 1945 (first failed attempt) and 1946 (successful second attempt). It targeted the high-profile religious dissident Ahmad Kasravi, whose assassination Ruhollah Khomeini called for in a booklet in 1943. The sentence was executed by the terrorist outfit he inspired, named Fada’iyan-e Islam. (Zahed, M. in Casaca et al, 2017, pp. 57-83).
The logic and modus operandi of this crime were reminiscent of the ones by the old Assassins sect (see Bernard Lewis, 1967), and much of it is still patent on the latest of the targeted assassinations of high-profile dissidents. At the time these lines are being written, we witness the elimination of a German citizen and US resident, Jamshid Sharmah, four years after he was abducted in Dubai.
Notwithstanding, the nature, degree and dimension of the Iranian terror machine continued to develop during these decades. From targeted assassinations of high-profile dissidents, the regime evolved into mass murder of its opponents – mainly targeting the members of the most important opposition Iranian movement, the People’s Mujaheddin of Iran. Javaid Rehman, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran, described this as ‘genocide’.
Just as important, Khomeini’s Islamic revolution brought two new gruesome traits to terrorism which were absent in the past. The first we already refereed to: the use of the weaker elements of the society as cannon fodder. The second is mass, random murder through suicidal terrorists. The bombing of the Iraqi Embassy in Beirut in 1981 (Casaca, p.7, 2017) – followed by similar attacks on US and French military and diplomatic representations in the country – marks a new era of savagery characterised by the slaughter of masses of people by suicidal operations.
A third characteristic of the Iranian Islamic terrorism is the widespread use of hostage taking. Hostage taking is an old instrument of war revived and strengthened by the Islamic revolution, most famously by the episode of the US Embassy personnel hostage taking in 1979. What is most remarkable about this break with the core of the international legal framework, which was respected even in such dramatic conflicts as the world wars, is that it was plainly successful in twisting the policies by the United States, and eventually by the whole west, in favour of its perpetrators.
Furthermore, whereas this is supported by overwhelming evidence, this particular twist has been classified as a ‘conspiracy theory’ for decades, only recently being seen as a historical fact – although only in relation with the US Presidential elections of 1980 (Marcetic, B. ‘Once Dismissed as Absurd, Ronald Reagan’s “October Surprise” Is Now Confirmed as True’, 2023.03.26).
Hostage taking by the Iranian Islamic Republic, as well as by the Modern jihadi movement as a whole, Hamas being a case in point, continues to be standard procedure and, amazingly, as successful as it was back in 1979.
The recent succession of hostage deals made with several of the most important Western powers (US, UK, France, Sweden, Belgium, etc.) shows how effective this policy continues to be, in spite of the fact it works only as long as the Western powers act in an apparently irrational way.
The recent Iranian deal with Belgium marks a very important precedent, since it was done through an ‘international treaty’, that lent an international legitimacy to the practice of hostage taking, a legitimacy it never enjoyed before.
Also important, the Belgium-Iranian terrorist-for-hostage swap relates to the highest-profile Iranian criminal – a terrorist enjoying a diplomatic statute in Austria – ever caught in a mass-terror attempt, targeting the Iranian opposition leadership in exile as well as leading Western political figures.
The overruling by the Belgian political authorities of the sentence on the terrorist given by the Belgian judicial authorities was seen as a green light for the targeting of important Western political figures in renewed terrorist attempts, including the assassination attempt of Alejo Vidal Quadras, the former Vice-President of the European Parliament and the most vocal supporter of the Iranian self-determination and democratic movement in Europe.
- The theocratic setup
The vital lesson I took from the legacy of Walter Laqueur – whom I considered the most important reference regarding terrorism (Casaca, 2017) – is that terrorism is successful only when part of an overall war strategy.
I am convinced that in the past half century the Iranian theocracy has been the most performant actor in the making of this overall war strategy. Yet, we are lacking works such as ‘Le Montage’ (‘The setup’, 1982) authored by Vladimir Volkov that allow us to understand the functioning of the Iranian tools for influence or even capture.
The first observation we can make is that all victories by the Islamic regime were obtained through complex, hybrid warfare systems, starting with its own creation. Ayatollah Khomeini was able to convince key international actors such as France and the United States (Gary Sick was the desk officer for Iran in the Carter administration at the time) of its benign intentions. He was also able to convince most of the Iranian people. We should bear in mind how Khomeini extensively and repeatedly lies on having no intentions to hold to power as well as to consecrate freedom and democracy.
Khomeini’s victory on the revolution was not the result of any armed struggle but fundamentally of his internal and international capacity to deceive before he reached power – and his ruthless and barbaric power to crush resistance after he attained it.
The same can be said of international victories. Iran did not win the frontal war on Iraq, but it managed to conquer the country by capturing decisive leverages of power within its most important enemies, as the United States and the United Kingdom, in a strategy I called the ‘Hidden Invasion of Iraq’ (2008).
In the same way, the transformation of Lebanon, Syria and Yemen into theocracy satellites was not attained through any form of conventional war, but with a sophisticated use of conventional and unconventional tools wherein deceit, terrorism, proselytism, money and barbarity were cleverly combined.
The Iranian theocracy’s capacity to infiltrate and contaminate crucial defence mechanisms of international actors, literally, putting upside down reality, is remarkable.
As I pointed out several times while a member of the European Parliament, the United States did place the main opposition to the Iranian regime at the time of its creation, in 1997 as a good-will gesture to the Iranian regime, that is, to the number one promoter of terrorism in the world. Al Qaeda would get to the list only in 1999, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards in 2019.
The same holds for human rights – the Iranian regime misused numerous initiatives and organisations, most famously, ‘Human Rights Watch’, in its campaign to crush human rights, internally or externally.
- The religious tool
In 2007, as a member of the European Parliament, I had the opportunity to interview the former Ambassador of the Islamic Republic in Iran in Lisbon in 1990, living in exile under a new identity. What impressed me the most from his declarations was that the main task assigned to him as Ambassador was the organisation of the Shia community in Portugal through an existing network of fourteen mosques.
Even for the most informed part of the Portuguese establishment, it was a surprise to know that there was a Portuguese Shia community and even more that it might be organised in fourteen mosques already in 1990.
A mosque does not have to be necessarily a grandiose and public facility – an anonymous apartment can work as such. Otherwise, although the existence of a small expatriate community of Indian origin (mostly from Gujarat) that had to leave Mozambique after the independence was well known, the fact that this Indian community was Muslim and a significant part of it Shia was not noticed.
This small episode allowed me to understand how religious organisation is a very important tool in the expansionism by the Islamic Republic, even where the demographic expression of the Iranian Muslim sect is thought to be insignificant, as is the case in Portugal.
Lebanon is an obvious example of a country where the presence of a large but still minoritarian Shia population was the leverage for Iran to obtain full control of the country.
Syria is an even more interesting case, as the Shia community had only a residual presence before the Iranian armed intervention. The Syrian dictator belongs to an Alawite minority (representing less than 10% of the population) – that is not recognised as such by the Iranian Constitution – theologically closer to the Iranian Shiism. Iran here both tries to pressure Alawites to consider themselves as Shia and uses its power to convert other Muslims to the Shia rituals.
The Shia call was also used to organise mercenary forces from Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Iranian war effort in Syria.
In Yemen, where a fundamentalist Islamic sect represents a large minority of the population that used to dominate the country, the Zaydi (recognised as such by the Iranian Constitution), Iran invests in overcoming the theological gap, to the point of considering the Zaydi as Shia.
But as much as the religious instrument is fundamental for Iranian expansionism, Iran can also develop affiliated forces on the basis of ethnic or religious bases completely alien to Shiism or even Islam, as was the case with some Yazidi militias organised by Tehran in Iraqi Kurdistan.
The Iranian regime has therefore been able to use religion for its expansion and also managed to avoid religion becoming an obstacle to the expansion.
- The European theatre
There is no reason to believe that there is a difference in nature between the Iranian Jihadi threat to Europe and the one existing elsewhere. Europe as a whole is naturally less exposed to this threat for its geographic and religious distance to Iran, as well as, and most importantly, for the relative strength of its rule of law, but it is not immune to it.
The normalisation of blunt criminal acts such as hostage taking, not to mention the gruesome slaughter of civilians and the parading of their remains, goes hand in hand with the normalisation of business with the theocracy – and with its political aims. This has been widely evident in the past year following the October the seven pogrom and the European reactions to it.
As I suggested before (Casaca, 2017) the key for the success of terrorism is its ability to provoke a generalised Stockholm syndrome, and this is what I think we have seen, in different tones, across Europe, during the present war against Israel.
This is sometimes referred only as ‘information war’, but it is more than this, as the same sort of information tools may produce quite different results in different circumstances. It is psychological warfare, close to the ‘cognitive warfare’ defined by Christian Harbulot (2002).
As recent history has also taught us, the ‘Stockholm syndrome’ reaction is not a fatality. The way that the German authorities have reacted to the Iranian onslaught shows that there are other possibilities.
Germany, contrarily to other European countries such as France and the United Kingdom, did not announce any arms embargo to Israel – which fundamentally constitutes siding with Iran on its war for the annihilation of Israel – but stated clearly the Israeli right to defend itself.
In the last few months, German authorities started to dismantle Iran’s destabilising presence in German soil. Last July, the authorities closed the most notorious Iranian Jihadi centre, the so called ‘Blue Mosque’ in Hamburg; in October, a broad investigation into the ‘allegations of Terror Recruitment at Berlin’s Al-Mustafa University’ and finally, in November, the authorities announced the closure of all Iranian consulates on German soil, after the assassination of the high-profile dissident of Iranian origin and German citizenship, Jamshid Sharmahd.
Most strikingly, the German Foreign Affairs Minister, Annalena Baerbock, from the German Greens, has been at the forefront of the present resistance to the Iranian Hybrid warfare in Germany. To assess the importance of this, it is noteworthy to take into account that the German Green Party, just two decades ago, under Joschka Fischer, was the main pillar of the theocratic influence in Germany as well as in Europe.
Still, most of the Iranian influence structure in Germany remains intact. For instance, German Universities partnerships with the ‘University of Religions and Confessions (URD)’ an Islamic Revolutionary Guards outfit based in Qom, Iran, continues. It also remains to be seen how solid the new position of the German authorities will prove to be, and weather it will revert to the unprincipled business attitude of the past.
Nothing is therefore settled in the hybrid warfare European theatre, neither what are the best war tools, nor what will be the long-term position of its political and state actors. Most importantly, we cannot predict what will be the outcome to this war, that is now fundamentally waged in the Middle-Eastern soil.
Still, we think we have shown here some important lessons we must bear in mind if we are to win the war of the theocracy against the human values of civilisation.
