How Iran Turned Street Gangs Into Assassins Across 3 Continents
How Iran Turned Street Gangs Into Assassins Across 3 Continents
He told the Danish court he was 16 years old when he threw the grenades. He also told them he had been working for the network since he was 12. On the night of October 2nd, 2024, he and a 19-year-old accomplice walked onto a residential street in central Copenhagen. Next door was the Israeli embassy.
[music] Two grenades detonated on the terrace of a family home. Nobody died. The court handed each of them 12 years. What the prosecutor told the jury is the part you need to hear. He said the criminal network that dispatched these two Swedish teenagers was acting his [music] words as the armed wing of a Middle Eastern terrorist organization [music] in Denmark. He meant Iran.
He meant a state. And the kid who threw the grenade had been on the payroll since he was in sixth [music] grade. This is not an isolated case. [music] Since January of 2022, the director general of MI5 has publicly confirmed that his service along with British police has disrupted more than 40 Iranbacked plots against [music] people in the United Kingdom.
Not 10, not 20, more than 40 in under four years. [music] And the United Kingdom is not the center of gravity. Sweden is Germany [music] and the Netherlands are catching up. New York is a recurring address. Thrron has industrialized something and most of the world hasn’t caught up to what it is yet. [music] Here’s what I want to show you tonight.
Iran didn’t get better at assassinations. Iran stopped doing them. The Islamic Republic has built a system in which it no longer sends its own officers to kill the people it wants dead. It outsources the killing [music] to someone else’s citizens, someone else’s criminals, someone else’s children.
And the structural reason it keeps working. The reason the disruptions you read about in the news are not actually setbacks is the part I want you to walk away understanding. To see what changed, you have to see what this used to look like. In September of 1992, four Kurdish [music] dissident sat down to dinner at a Greek restaurant called Mikonos on Prager Straasa in Berlin.
Two men walked in and opened fire. The target was said Deg Sheriff Kandi, the secretary general of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan. He died at the table. So did three others. After 246 trial sessions, a German court ruled formally in the judgment that the killings had been ordered by Iran’s committee for special operations.
The court named the people it believed had signed off. Supreme Leader Ali Kam, President Rav Sanjani, Foreign Minister Velati, Intelligence Minister Ali Falahan. [music] The presiding judge said in open court that the political leaders of Iran had ordered the murders for the sole purpose of staying in power.
Every member state of the European Union recalled its ambassador from Thrron. They came back 6 months later. That is the part most people miss. A European court named [music] the Supreme Leader of Iran as the ordering authority of a quadruple murder on European soil. And the consequence was a six-month diplomatic timeout. That was the price.
[music] And Thrron filed it away. A year before Myonos Shapur Baktiar, the last prime minister under the sha was stabbed to death at his home [music] in Surzan outside Paris. One of the convicted killers was parrolled 19 years later and received a hero’s welcome in Thrron. A year before that, Kazim Rajavi was shot in his car near Geneva.
A 13-man Iranian team flew in on service passports. Before that, Abdul Rahman Gasumlu, the leader of the Kurdish Iranian opposition, [music] was killed in a Vienna apartment during a negotiation meeting that the Islamic Republic had itself arranged [music] to set him up. These were all Iranian operatives, Iranian passports, [music] Iranian travel records, Iranian fingerprints, and every time the forensic trail walked back to Tyrron, then came the Arbabs case and the seams of the old model started to show.
In October of 2011, a failed used car salesman from Corpus Christi, Texas [music] named Mansor Arbabs sat in a hotel room trying to hire the Los Zetas cartel to bomb a restaurant in Georgetown. The target was the Saudi ambassador to the United States. The restaurant was Cafe Milano. Arbabsiar was Iranianamean and he was taking his orders from a cousin in Thran, a senior officer in the coups force.
The cartel hitman he was negotiating with was a DEA informant. When the informant pointed out that bombing [music] a crowded restaurant would likely kill dozens of American bystanders, our Babsar on tape told him they want the guy done and if a hundred go with him, so be it. $100,000 moved from a Cud’s forced bank account into an FBI controlled account in August of that year. Arbabs was arrested at JFK.
He got 25 years. Everyone at the time called it amateur hour. Iran watchers said the plot didn’t [music] fit the profile. It was too clumsy, too exposed, too reliant on a random relative. [music] What nobody fully appreciated at the time was that the Islamic Republic had just run a live experiment, not on whether the plot would succeed.
They knew it was [music] high risk on whether they could contract out the killing to a foreign criminal organization and keep their own officers a full layer back. That part worked. The coup’s force officer was safe in Thran. The plot collapsed, but the architecture didn’t. 6 years later, the architecture collapsed.
In a way, Thrron couldn’t ignore. Four shocks, all in the same stretch of time, forced the Islamic Republic to rebuild. [music] The first was a warehouse in southern Thran. On the night of January 31st, 2018, fewer than 24 MSAD operatives cut their way into that warehouse with 3600 degree torches and walked out just over 6 hours later with [music] 50,000 pages of documents and 55,000 pages stored on 183 CD ROMs.
It was the entire clandestine nuclear archive of the Islamic Republic. What the heist told Thrron was not just that its nuclear program had been mapped. It was that its counterintelligence was catastrophically penetrated. Anyone operating abroad had to be assumed compromised. The second shock came in May. Trump pulled out of the Iran deal and maximum pressure sanctions began choking every budget line the intelligence [music] services drew on.
The third shock is the one I want you to sit with because [music] it’s the hinge and it involves a Pizza Hut in Luxembourg. Stay with me on that because it’s going to come back. On July 1st, 2018, Belgian police arrested a man named Acadola Assadi while he was on holiday with his family in Germany. Assadi was not a foot soldier.
He [music] was the third counselor at the Iranian embassy in Vienna. A diplomat with a service passport and full accreditation. He was also a Ministry of Intelligence officer with the internal designation department 312. What he had [music] done 4 days earlier was personally carry 550 g of the high explosive TATP on a commercial flight from Tyrron to Vienna and then hand that explosive wrapped to two couriers at a Pizza Hut in Luxembourg.
The couriers were supposed to drive the bomb to Paris. The target was a rally at Vil Pont outside the city where 25,000 [music] Iranian exiles were gathering to hear Mariam Rajavei speak with Rudy Giuliani and N. Gingrich [music] on the stage. The code word for the explosive was PlayStation 4.
Antworp court convicted Assadi of attempted terrorism and sentenced [music] him to 20 years. The ruling did something no other European court had [music] done in a quarter century. It named the specific intelligence directorate, Department 312, that had ordered the operation. A red notebook recovered from Assad’s car [music] listed payments to contacts in 11 European countries.
Thrron had just been caught sending a credentialed diplomat to deliver a bomb at a fast food restaurant in Luxembourg. The message to the Islamic Republic was not complicated. Stop using your own people. Your own people are visible. The fourth shock was targeted killings on Iranian soil. In January of 2020, an American drone killed Casim Solmani, the commander of the Koots force at Baghdad airport.
In November of that same year, Mossad killed the nuclear scientist Mosen Fakriad on a road outside Thran using an AI assisted remote machine gun fired from a pickup truck that nobody was driving. Iran’s Supreme Leader publicly swore revenge. [music] The new coup’s force commander, Esmile Ghani, gave the doctrine out loud at a memorial.
He said, “We take revenge against Americans with the help of people on their side [music] their own homes. Without our presence.” Without [music] our presence. That phrase is the whole new system in four words. What Iran did next is the part I want you to understand because it explains [music] everything that follows.
Tehran restructured its entire external assassination doctrine around one principle. No Iranian officer at the trigger. [music] No Iranian passport anywhere near the scene. The IRGC officers stay in Thran. A diaspora criminal, usually Iranian-born, usually with an international warrant already on him, becomes the middleman. The middleman subcontracts to a local gang boss in the target country.
The local gang boss hands the actual job to somebody disposable. a teenager, [music] a drifter, an addict, a foreigner on a tourist visa. Four layers, every layer, designed to be cut off without exposing the one above it. And the laboratory where Iran built and tested this model, more than anywhere else on Earth was Sweden.
His real name is [music] Rawa Majid. In the Swedish press, he’s called the Kurdish Fox. He was born in Kerman Sha, Iran in 1986 to Iraqi Kurdish parents who were fleeing Saddam Hussein. He arrived in Upsala, Sweden when he was 1 month old. [music] He did 8 years for cocaine trafficking and when he got out around 2018, [music] he started building what the Swedes now call the Foxtrot Network.
By 2023, Foxtrot was the most violent criminal organization in Sweden. Majid himself had skipped the country, bought Turkish citizenship through the Golden Passport program for somewhere around $3 to $400,000, and was running his empire by phone from a $2.1 million mansion in Marmaris. I covered Cyprus a few months ago, where an investigation found that 53% of the golden passports the Republic had issued turned out to be illegal.
Sweden’s most wanted criminal didn’t need Cyprus. Turkey sold him the same product for $300,000, no questions [music] asked, about what he was running. The golden passport industry doesn’t just sell citizenship, it sells untraceability, and Iran knows exactly where to shop. Here is the moment the whole new model locks into [music] place.
On October 6th, 2023, the day before a Hamas attack pulled Israel into a regional war, Iranian police detained [music] Raa Majjid near the Turkish border and they gave him a choice. Cooperate with V AJA, Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence, or go to prison. He chose to cooperate. I honestly think that day at the Iranian border is the most important single moment in this whole story because within weeks, one of Europe’s biggest drug traffickers was a functioning Iranian intelligence [music] asset with thousands of foot soldiers already on
European streets. [music] And then the children started arriving. On January 31st, 2024, a live grenade was found in the grounds of the Israeli embassy [music] in Stockholm. The US Treasury, in a sanctions designation issued the following year, put the sentence in writing. In January 2024, the Foxtrot [music] network orchestrated an attack on the Israeli embassy in Stockholm on behalf of the government of Iran.
Swedish investigative reporting later [music] described that first grenade, which never detonated as Majid’s admission ticket to Iran, not an assassination attempt, a demonstration. Then came the shooters. On May 16th, a 15-year-old boy from Vestos received a text message. Go to Tire Soapo, locate weapons, go to the embassy, take the gun quickly, load it, and conceal it.
He was [music] arrested before he got there. The next day, on May 17th, a 14-year-old boy fired a 9mm pistol at the Israeli embassy at 2:00 in the morning. Under Swedish law, he was below the age of criminal responsibility. He was not prosecuted. On October 1st, a 16-year-old fired a modified tear gas gun through the [music] embassy window.
He later told a Danish court he had been working for Foxtrot since he was 12. Before I go further, I want to ask you [music] something directly. What would you honestly pay a 14-year-old to walk up to a foreign embassy in the middle of the night with a loaded gun? Because someone worked that number out. Sapo, the Swedish security service, has the receipts.
€120 for a petrol bomb. €1,500 for an assassination. Photos recovered from a juvenile’s phone showed stacks of 500 croner notes, about $50 each, in an envelope. On Telegram channels, CNN found recruitment messages offering $150,000 for a hit in Denmark. Shooter needed. Message [music] read. Shoot to the head.
What do you think it’s worth? Tell me in the comments because I find the fact that someone answered that question and wrote the number down almost more disturbing than the attacks themselves. Meanwhile, [music] the network was expanding. On October 2nd, the Copenhagen grenade attack I open this video with. On October 10th, a 13-year-old shooter was dispatched to a site owned by the Israeli defense contractor Elbit Systems in [music] Goththingberg.
The head of counter intelligence at SAPO, Daniel Stenling, went on the record in May of 2024 with the clearest statement any Western intelligence service has made on this. He said, “Iran has been carrying [music] out security threatening activities in and against Sweden for several years. To carry out these activities, the Iranian regime has on occasion made use of criminal [music] networks.
By the end of the year, the Swedish Prime Minister went to the European Union and publicly demanded that the IRGC be designated as a terrorist organization. In January of 2026, the EU finally did it. But the Swedish model didn’t stay in Sweden. To understand how scalable this architecture actually is, you have to follow the paperwork to New York, Brooklyn. [music] July 28th, 2022.
A man named Khaled Medivv gets pulled over for a traffic violation. The officer finds an AK-47 style rifle with the serial number obliterated, two magazines, 66 rounds of ammunition, a ski mask, and $1,100 in cash in the car. Mechv is Azerbaijani. He is a member of an Eastern European organized crime fraternity called the thievesin-law and he is sitting outside the home of an Iranian American journalist named Masi Alinad.
Mev’s handlers were a man named Rafat Amirov, a senior thief in-law living in Iran, and a Georgian mob boss named Pad Omarov living in the Czech Republic. The IRGC had promised Amiraov [music] $500,000 to get Ailen Jad killed. $30,000 in cash had already been advanced to Mediev. On July [music] 27th, the day before the arrest, Omarov had messaged Amiro.
This matter will be over today. The indictment that prosecutors filed was already detailed. The superseding indictment filed in October of 2024 was devastating. [music] It added a senior chapter GC intelligence [music] officer by name, Brigadier General Roa Bazgandi, a former chief of counter intelligence for [music] the Kuds force, a man who had been photographed at official events standing next to Kasum Solommani.
Under the alias Alex Peterson, a Google account traceable to Baz Gandhi’s device had run the search query MSI a lenjad kidnapping plot 93 times over an 18-month period. I want you to hold that for a second. A brigadier general in charge of counter intelligence for the most important expeditionary unit in Iran’s military was personally googling his own target 93 times from a device that traced back to [music] him.
and the operations still very nearly succeeded. What that tells you is that the system does not depend on the competence of the people at the top. It depends on the disposability of the people at the bottom. The jury deliberated for less than 4 hours. Amiro and Omarov were each sentenced [music] in October of 2025 to 25 years.
And the Elanad plot was not the only plot. In August of 2022, federal prosecutors charged a coup’s force member named Shaam Porsafi [music] with trying to hire an FBI informant to assassinate John Bolton, the former national security adviser, for $300,000. Porsafi offered an additional million for a second target [music] reported to be Mike Pompeo.
The payment was to be made in cryptocurrency. Poor Safi wanted it done by the anniversary of Solmani’s death. [music] In November of 2024, the Southern District of New York filed a complaint against an Afghan man named Farhad Shakairi operating on behalf of the IRGC for a plot that included, and the language from the complaint is worth hearing, the surveillance and ultimate assassination of Donald Trump.
An IRGC official had told Shakaryi that the money was not a concern. They had spent enough already. [music] In early 2026, a Pakistani national named Asif Merchant was convicted in Brooklyn on separate terrorism charges for a parallel plot that prosecutors said was aimed at Trump, Biden, and Nikki Haley.
Merchant had met his IR GC handlers in comm. He had paid the FBI undercover $5,000 in cash. The code word for the assassination was fleece jacket. Three different presidents, one journalist, two former national security officials, all on the target list of the same [music] state at the same time being handed out to different criminal networks on different continents.
Because that is the point. The system does not have a single trigger. It has a portfolio. So I want to ask you something and I mean this as a genuine question. What do you call this? Is it terrorism? Is it organized crime? [music] Is it state violence? Because those words each come with a different set of laws, a different set of responses, a different set of allies you’re allowed to call in.
And right now in almost every western capital, no one has settled on the answer. That’s not incidental. That’s the whole advantage. The same model is running in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Turkey. I’ll be brief because the pattern is the pattern. In November of 2022, three coordinated attacks hit Jewish targets in Northrine, Westfailia.
Gunfire into the door of the old synagogue in Essen. an attempted Molotov attack on the Bokeh synagogue. A German federal court later ruled the operation had been carried out, in [music] their words, by an Iranian state agency. The man who had orchestrated them by text message from Thran was a German Iranian Hell’s Angels chapter president named Ramin Yaktapar.
He had fled to Iran after being named the prime suspect in the murder and dismemberment of another biker in 2014. From Thran, he was running attacks on German synagogues. Yakta Paras was shot dead in Thran in May of 2023. Here is where I have to be honest with you. I don’t know for sure who killed him. There are three credible theories.
The first is that MSAD got him. That’s the version the Washington Post and Iran International have reported sourcing Western intelligence. The second is that it was a personal dispute, which is what Iranian state media pushed. The third is that the Iranian regime itself silenced him because he knew too much.
the fact that he was buried in section 19 of Beahesh Zara cemetery in Tehran. The section reserved for Irc and Basage members [music] tells you he was an asset of the state. It does not tell you which side had him killed. In the Netherlands, the model had been running for years already. In December of 2015, a dissident named Ali Mamemid was shot dead outside his [music] home in Elmir.
The killers were two local Biselmer criminals, nothing to do with Iran on paper. They were paid [music] 13,000 each. In a text message recovered later, one of them wrote about the man he had just killed. I don’t know why he has to sleep, and I don’t even want to know. In November of 2017, Ahmad Mhola Nissi, the founder of an Iranian Arab separatist movement, was shot outside his home in the Hague.
He had filed seven police reports warning that Iran was going to kill him. Dutch intelligence later assessed publicly that both killings were almost certainly ordered by the Islamic Republic. The contract [music] had come through the Moroccan Dutch criminal network known as the Macro Mafia, the same organization that runs a sizable portion of the European cocaine market out of the port of Rotterdam.
In Istanbul, a [music] Swedish Iranian dissident named Hhabib Cha was lured to a gas station by [music] his ex-wife, drugged, smuggled across the border into Iran, paraded on Iranian state television, and executed in May of 2023. The man who arranged the abduction was an Iranian drug kingpin named Naji Sharifi Zindashi, who had been given formal sanctuary in Iran in exchange for running MOIS’s [music] assassination logistics abroad.
In January of 2024, the US Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against Zindashti [music] and two Canadian members of the Hell’s Angels for a murder for hire plot targeting two Iranian defectors living in Maryland. The contract price was $350,000 plus [music] 20,000 in travel expenses. The instructions to the recruits were shoot the victim in the head a lot.
Make an example. Erase his head from his torso. So, here is what the full picture actually looks like. And this is the thing I want you to take away from the whole video. Because once you see it, the news stories you read about Iran start looking completely different. There are four layers. [music] I know four layer systems sound like a PowerPoint slide, but stay with me because the design is the whole reason this works.
Layer one, an IRGC officer inside Iran, maybe in Thrron, maybe in Damascus, untouchable in either place. The Bolton plot was run by a coups force member sitting in Iran. The Alenad plot at the command level was run by a brigadier general doing his own Google searches. These [music] people never leave. Layer two, a diaspora criminal who has reasons to cooperate.
Raa Majid picked up at the Iranian border and offered the choice between cooperation and prison. Zindashti, an Iranian drug kingpin [music] sheltered from extradition. Yaktaparas, wanted for murder in Germany, hiding in Thran, willing to pick up a phone and run synagogue attacks in exchange for continued asylum.
These people have a price, and the [music] price is usually not money, it’s protection. Layer three, a local gang boss who owes the diaspora criminal a favor or a drug debt or nothing at all, who just wants the $500,000. The Azerbaijani thiefin-law in the Czech Republic. The Macro mafia figure in Amsterdam.
[music] The Hell’s Angel’s captain in British Columbia. These are people whose CVs have nothing [music] to do with Iran. And that’s the point. Layer four, the foot soldier, a teenager on Telegram, a [music] Pakistani freelancer from comm. A cashstrapped Azerbaijani with a rental car and an AK47. These people are often not told the real target, the real client, or the real mission.
They just know the address and the amount. Four layers. And [music] here is the part that took me a while to understand because it’s counterintuitive. The system [music] is not designed to succeed. It’s designed to fail safely. Every time a teenager gets arrested outside an embassy, the IRGC officer in Thran is not arrested. Every time an Azerbaijani hitman flips on his Georgian handler, the handler’s Iranian bosses are not even named in the court documents for another year.
Every time MI5 discloses another 10 plots, no Iranian officer is extradited [music] because no Iranian officer left Iran. The disruption is not a cost to the system. The disruption is the exhaust vent. The whole thing is built to be broken at the bottom without damage at the top. That is the structural payoff. That is why it keeps working.
Every failure is priced in. And now, now I can come back to the Pizza Hut in Luxembourg because that was the last time an Iranian diplomat was caught personally [music] delivering a bomb on European soil. Every assassination attempt [music] since has been run through somebody else’s passport. The Pizza Hut is a monument.
It’s the moment the Islamic Republic decided it would never again put one of its own people in a room with the explosive. [music] And it’s the reason a 14-year-old Swedish boy can end up at 2:00 in the morning pointing a 9mm [music] pistol at an Israeli embassy while the man who ordered the shooting is asleep in a villa in Thran.
If you’ve made it this far [music] and the pattern is starting to look as strange to you as it does to me, a subscribe [music] would mean a lot. There’s more of this coming. I want to bring this back to the children because the machine is a machine and I can draw you a four-layer diagram all night, but this is the part that honestly doesn’t sit right with me.
The Swedish [music] 14-year-old who fired at the embassy in May of 2024 was not prosecuted. He couldn’t be. He was below the age of criminal responsibility. In the Swedish legal system, the line is 15. Someone in the Foxtrot recruitment pipeline knew [music] that someone had worked out that a boy under 15 carries a gun with legal impunity and then built a business around it.
Foxtrot did not stumble into using children. Foxtrot optimized for children. On a Telegram channel somewhere, a channel flashing a Fox emoji over and over. The minimum viable age kept [music] dropping. 15 14 13 12 The Bajelmer hitmen in Amsterdam texted each other about Ali Motoid after they killed him. I don’t know why he has to sleep. I don’t even want to know. Haha.
They did not know who paid them. They still don’t. An entire human being in Almir was taken off the face of the earth by two people who were not told what he had done, [music] what country wanted him dead or why for 13,000 each. Arvin Koshnu, an Iranian dissident [music] and a Swedish citizen, opened his front door one afternoon in Malmo in September of 2024 [music] and a 16-year-old boy was standing there holding a knife.
The boy was a [music] foxtrot recruit. He had been sent to kill a stranger in his own country. One more number and then I want to leave you with a question. In March of 2018, Russia sent two officers from its military intelligence service to Salsbury, England [music] to smear a Soviet nerve agent called Novach on the front door of a former double agent. They botched it.
The Russian officers were exposed. One innocent British woman, a local resident named Dawn Sturgis, picked up the discarded perfume bottle the agent was hidden in and died. In the aftermath, 29 countries expelled 153 Russian diplomats. It was the largest coordinated expulsion of Russian officials in history.
Since January of 2022, Iran has run more than 40 plots against people on British soil. The Iranian ambassador has been summoned. Sanctions have been issued. Not one European country has expelled Iranian diplomats at the Salsbury scale. Not one. Why do you think that is? I’d rather hear it from you than tell you because I genuinely don’t have a clean answer.
The honest version, I suspect, is that the West has decided it can live with this. that prescribing the I RGC [music] is too disruptive, that mass expulsions are too destabilizing, that the cost of real [music] deterrence is higher than the cost of the occasional disrupted plot. And Iran has noticed there is a teenager somewhere in Malmo right now watching a Telegram channel.
The fox emoji is flashing. A message has come through and the amount offered is small. A few hundred, maybe a thousand, and [music] the address is attached. And the instructions are the instructions. A gun in a bag in a park, an embassy in the distance, a simple set of steps. He will not know who is paying.
He will not know why the [music] address matters. He will not know that the officer who chose the address is asleep in a villa 6,000 km away. That the brigadier general who approved the paperwork is sitting in a Thyron high-rise. [music] That the system has planned for him to be caught and does not particularly mind. He is layer 4.
He is supposed to be replaceable. And the question I cannot answer, the one I want you to sit with, is whether the rest of us are finally going to decide that he isn’t.