BLACKLISTING IRAN’S REVOLUTIONARY GUARD IS A NO-BRAINER

When will the British appeasers wake up? Despite repeated calls from several former cabinet ministers and MPs from all sides of the House of Commons, to proscribe the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – the Iranian regime’s Gestapo – Rishi Sunak has dug his heels in. The Prime Minister claims that it would be a mistake to sever diplomatic ties with Iran at such a critical time. His view has been reinforced by his foreign secretary David Cameron who claims it is vital for Britain to maintain an embassy in Tehran so that the UK can “deliver a direct message to the Iranians”. Winston Churchill must be turning in his grave. He famously said: “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last”.

The Americans added the IRGC to their foreign terrorist list in April 2019, in the final days of the Trump presidency. Trump said: “This unprecedented step, led by the Department of State, recognises the reality that Iran is not only a State Sponsor of Terrorism, but that the IRGC actively participates in, finances, and promotes terrorism as a tool of statecraft. If you are doing business with the IRGC, you will be bankrolling terrorism”. The UK’s refusal to follow the American lead is a sign of wretched weakness, which will embolden Tehran. Maintaining diplomatic relations with a country that rejects the norms of international diplomacy is a grave error. Indeed, the British embassy in Tehran has become a focal point for phoney protests, where thousands of members of the mullahs’ thuggish paramilitary Basij are sent to demonstrate their faux-fury at Britain’s support for Israel.

The IRGC controls over 70% of the Iranian economy. It pays no taxes and is answerable only to the elderly and fanatical Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Corruption among the senior leadership of the IRGC is endemic, with many commanders enjoying an opulent lifestyle with luxury villas in the Gulf States, Turkey and even in Vancouver, while their children are sent to western universities. Meanwhile the Iranian economy is collapsing as inflation spirals and 75 million citizens struggle to survive. The brutality of the IRGC is legendary. Their vicious onslaught on the nationwide uprising in 2022 that followed the murder in custody of the young Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini, led to 750 protesters being killed and over 30,000 arrested, many of whom have been raped, tortured and executed. The UN has now launched a major inquiry into the crackdown, which they have termed as an abuse of human rights and a crime against humanity. 

On the international stage, the IRGC and its extra-territorial Quds Force, has spread like a cancer. Using the excuse of helping their neighbours in Iraq to repel the terrorist ISIS, the IRGC effectively destroyed the ancient Iraqi cities of Fallujah, Ramadi and Mosul, engineering the genocidal massacre of tens of thousands of Iraqi Sunnis in the process and leaving smoking ruins in their wake. The operation was commanded by the notorious Quds Force General Qasem Soleimani, who, together with his friend Abu Mehdi Mohandes, the leader of the brutal Iraqi Shi’ia militias al-Hashd al-Shaabi and Kataib Hezbollah – were killed by an American drone strike ordered by President Trump, at Baghdad Airport on 3^rd January 2020. Soleimani was one of the most vicious criminals in Iran’s history, with the blood of tens of thousands, including hundreds of Americans, on his hands.

Soleimani and his Quds Force successors have fomented conflict across the Middle East for decades, backing Bashar al-Assad’s bloody civil war in Syria, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon and significantly, Hamas in Gaza. Iran and its IRGC/Quds Force has been the main warmongering factor supplying finance, weapons and personnel to its proxies and masterminding the catastrophic Hamas attack on Israel on 7^th October last year that triggered the war in Gaza. Indeed, the Israeli attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus on 1^st April, killing IRGC Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, and 6 other Quds Force commanders, was explicit retaliation for their key role in directing a barrage of attacks on Israel from Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon.

The IRGC’s involvement in international terrorism is also well documented. They have deployed registered Iranian diplomats as terrorist bombers, like Assadollah Assadi, the attaché from the Iranian embassy in Vienna, who was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment for handing over a half kilo TATP bomb to 3 co-conspirators and ordering them to detonate the device at a huge Iranian opposition rally in Paris in 2018. Assadi was disgracefully freed in a sham prisoner-swap deal with a European held hostage in Tehran and sent home to a hero’s welcome. In December 2018, the Iranian Ambassador and First Secretary in Tirana, were declared personae non gratae by Albania’s prime minister Edi Rama and were expelled for endangering the security of the state by plotting bomb outrages from within their embassy. Assassinations have also become a common feature of IRGC activities abroad, targeting ex-pat Iranians, journalists and even senior Western politicians who criticize the mullahs’ repressive regime.

Maintaining diplomatic links with this nest of vipers has echoes of Chamberlain’s attempts to appease Hitler. Proscribing the IRGC would send a strong message to the mullahs that Britain will no longer tolerate their belligerent and hostile behaviour. The UK government’s lame excuse that they have imposed sanctions on a number of IRGC commanders is worse than useless. We have proscribed Hezbollah and Hamas and yet we swerve away from proscribing their main sponsor. Blacklisting the IRGC would also have a profoundly beneficial impact on ordinary Iranians, who hate the mullahs’ regime and all of its adjuncts. It would send a strong signal to the courageous Resistance Units affiliated to the main democratic opposition People’s Mojahedin of Iran/ Mojahedin-e Khalq (PMOI/MEK), displaying that the UK supports their right to overthrow this tyrannical regime and restore democracy, freedom, justice, human rights, women’s rights, and peace to their beleaguered nation.