Salman Rushdie and John Bolton are still alive today, but maybe not thanks to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Intelligence officials say the guy accused of stabbing novelist Salguy Rushdie Friday in New York City was “in direct contact with members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on social media,” Mitchell Prothero tells Vice News. While “there is no evidence that Iranian officials were involved in the organization or orchestration of the attack” against Rushdie, one official said the knife attack gave the impression of being a “guided attack,” in which an intelligence service “convinces after acting, without direct involvement or participation in the attack itself. “”
The attack on Rushdie came two days after federal prosecutors charged Shahram Poursafi, a member of the body, with plotting to assassinate John Bolton, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser known for his hard-line views on Iran. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is reportedly also reportedly the target of the scheme. “While not much can be said publicly at this time, one point is indisputable: Iran’s leaders are liars, terrorists and enemies of the United States,” Bolton said.
Why would the Revolutionary Guards target these men?Here’s everything you want to know:
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which includes the Quds clandestine force, is “one of the toughest paramilitary organizations in the Middle East,” the Council on Foreign Relations said in a 2019 statement. After the 1979 revolution that overthrew the Shah and installed an Islamic government, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini created the IRGC “to protect the new regime from a coup, like the one in 1953 that overthrew the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadeq and restored the Shah to power. The organization is guilty of protecting Iran’s Islamic government from all threats and operates “beyond the limits of the law and the judiciary. “the Basij Resistance Force, whose main function has been to brutally repress the regime’s national belligerent parties.
But the influence of framing is also felt beyond Iran’s borders. The organization “exerts influence in other parts of the Middle East by offering money, weapons, technology, education and recommendations to allied governments,” the BBC said in a 2020 preview, and terrorist teams such as lebanon’s Hezbollah movement and the Palestinian Islamic Movement are known to be terrorists. Jihad. (The force is also believed to have commanded Hezbollah’s 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people. )Their attempts at violence even reached the shores of the U. S. Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States by bombing a restaurant in Georgetown. “Its strength lies not only in its muscles, notes the BBC: “The IRGC is also believed to control around a third of Iran’s economy through a number of subsidiaries and trusts. .
The United States can be said to have been at war with the IRGC for much of the past two decades. After the U. S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Quds Force “emerged as a risk difficult to understand but fatal to U. S. troops. “William Branigin of the Washington Post reported in 2011. He has supported Iraqi Shiite militias, and the Pentagon has said the organization is concerned about “smuggling. “Sophisticated bombs and other weapons in Iraq to be used against U. S. troops.
In 2019, Trump designated the framework as a “foreign terrorist organization,” a prestige that was accompanied by far-reaching sanctions against the organization and its members. (President Biden left this designation in place. )And in January 2020, Trump ordered the assassination of Quds Force commander Gen. Qassem Soleimani, saying the general was “developing plans to attack American diplomats and army workers in Iraq and the region. “conceived as an act of revenge for the killing of Soleimani.
The attack on Rushdie and the plot against Bolton (as well as an obvious assassination attempt on an Iranian-born journalist living in New York) come at a time when the U. S. is in the dark. nuclear program. This purpose will now be more difficult to achieve.
These incidents “have strengthened critics of the nuclear deal,” Nahal Toosi tells Politico. “The news also underscores the delicate nature of the U. S. -Iran relationship, which is contentious and fatal, even as the two countries are negotiating sensitive issues. “Bolton believes it’s time to end the negotiations. ” The malevolence of the ayatollahs is complete, with nuclear weapons, assassinations and terrorism, all elements in their full spectrum of capabilities,” he wrote Monday in the Washington Post.
But Biden “does not imply that he will abandon efforts to repair the nuclear deal,” Toosi reports. The underlying idea? The Iranian government, and the IRGC in particular, is murderous enough with assassins and other thugs at its disposal, an unnamed official told Politico, but nuclear weapons would only make the government more dangerous. The weapons “would cause all other very serious disorders. “we have with them, and we have many of them, much worse,” the official said. Will the assassination attempts continue as well?
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