Four men were arrested in London shortly after one in the morning on Friday, March 6, accused of surveilling the city’s Jewish community on behalf of Iranian intelligence. Metropolitan Police officers detained them in Barnet, Watford, and Harrow under Section 3 of the National Security Act 2023: assisting a foreign intelligence service. One was an Iranian national. Three held dual British–Iranian citizenship. Six others were arrested for assisting the alleged offenders. They stand accused of operating on British soil as agents of a state that has spent decades targeting Jewish communities across Europe.
The current war did not create this threat. But it has almost certainly removed the last constraints on it. The Supreme Leader is dead, the regime’s command structure has been decapitated and its regional proxies are degraded. The diplomatic leverage that once gave Tehran reason to calibrate – to keep its European operations below the threshold of open confrontation – no longer applies.
And the infrastructure Iran needs to strike at European societies – through intimidation, covert violence, and psychological pressure – is already in place, built over years in which European governments saw the threat clearly and chose not to dismantle it. Every delay in designating the IRGC, every plot prosecuted and then bartered away, every intelligence assessment filed and forgotten, gave Tehran more time to entrench the very networks it can now activate.
European governments are aware of the danger. In the opening hours of the conflict, French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez ordered reinforced security around diplomatic sites and sensitive locations. Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, its domestic intelligence agency, warned that the regime in Tehran could target Jewish institutions, synagogues, and schools. The question is whether these warnings will translate into anything durable—or whether Europe will again revert to the pattern of crisis response followed by quiet withdrawal.
The immediate concern is opportunistic violence. The March 1 shooting in Austin – in which a gunman wearing clothing bearing the Iranian flag opened fire at a downtown bar, killing three and wounding fourteen – illustrates how quickly a distant conflict can metastasise. The FBI is investigating the attack as a potential act of terrorism. A separate gun attack on an Iranian dissident’s gym in Toronto the same week underscored the scale of the threat. In Europe, the fear is that radicalised individuals inspired by the conflict could act in similar ways.
The deeper concern, however, is the infrastructure already in place. A group calling itself Ashab Al Yamim has claimed responsibility for a series of attacks on Jewish targets across Europe this week. The first incident occurred on Monday, when a synagogue in Liège, Belgium was bombed. A second attack followed in Greece on Wednesday, and on Friday a synagogue in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, was targeted in an arson attack.
Since 2015, according to a French intelligence assessment, Iranian services resumed terror operations in Europe after a prolonged lull, reducing their exposure by outsourcing the work to criminals. In 2023, investigators uncovered a plot targeting Israeli interests in southern France and Jewish community members in France and Germany. Eight people were indicted, among them figures from organised crime who likely had no idea they were acting on behalf of a foreign state. The Islamic Republic does not limit itself to ideological operatives. It buys capability wherever it can find it, and it has turned Europe’s criminal underworld into an operational asset. As the French domestic intelligence service, the DGSI, has noted, Iranian services now systematically prefer to use criminal proxies – a shift that makes detection exponentially harder.
Germany’s own parliamentary record confirms the pattern. In February 2023, responding to a formal Bundestag inquiry, the federal government disclosed that the Quds Force – the external operations arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – had been active on German soil for over a decade, with activities directed particularly against pro-Israeli and pro-Jewish targets.
The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution held intelligence on 160 individuals with IRGC connections and ties to Germany. A separate conviction, by the Berlin Court of Appeal in 2017, established that the Quds Force runs its own intelligence division, security service, and counterintelligence capability – independent of the broader IRGC apparatus, operating agents abroad on its own authority. This means the Quds Force’s European networks were built to function with a significant degree of autonomy, not dependent on centralised command. The decapitation of Tehran’s leadership does not necessarily deactivate these cells – it may unshackle them.
The pattern extends across the continent. The Netherlands has documented assassinations of Iranian dissidents attributed to Tehran. Denmark disrupted a plot against an opposition figure. Sweden exposed the regime’s use of criminal networks to threaten Jewish, Israeli, and opposition targets; an unexploded grenade was found inside the grounds of the Israeli Embassy in Stockholm in January 2024.
The United Kingdom – where Friday’s arrests took place – presents the starkest picture. MI5 Director General Ken McCallum disclosed in October 2025 that his agency had tracked more than 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots in a single year.
In 2018, an Iranian diplomat was caught in a plot to bomb a gathering of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran near Paris; TATP explosive and a detonator were seized. After pan-European police cooperation, he was convicted in Antwerp in 2021 – and in 2023, exchanged for a Belgian citizen detained in Iran.
The regime is also involved in propaganda. Days before the US–Israeli strikes, a Paris court convicted Mahdieh Esfandiari, a 39-year-old Iranian national, for managing social media accounts on behalf of the Axis of Resistance, glorifying the October 7 massacre, and inciting hatred and violence against Jews. She walked out under house arrest pending appeal.
And Tehran still holds French citizens Cécile Kohler and Jacques Paris effectively hostage, along with other Europeans, many of them dual nationals, as instruments of state coercion. Accused of espionage, they were arrested in May 2022 while visiting the country and kept in solitary confinement in the notorious Evin prison until November 2025. Since their release, they remained under house arrest at the French embassy in Tehran. For the regime, propaganda, terror, and hostage-taking all serve a single strategy.
In July 2025, 14 governments – including France, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Canada –issued a joint statement condemning Iranian intelligence services for plotting to kill, kidnap, and harass individuals across Europe and North America, and for their deepening collaboration with international criminal organisations. The networks they publicly described remain largely intact. What is required now is the political will to enforce what has already been decided.
Europe took a significant step on February 19, 2026, when the EU unanimously designated the IRGC as a terrorist organization, placing it alongside Al-Qaeda and ISIS on the European terrorist list and ending three decades of engagement diplomacy. The decision was overdue – years overdue. Civil society organisations, security experts, and targeted communities had called for this designation long before the current crisis forced Europe’s hand. That it took a war to accomplish what evidence alone should have demanded is itself an indictment. But a designation without enforcement is meaningless.
European intelligence services must move from episodic cooperation to permanent joint operations: shared databases of IRGC operatives, Quds Force intermediaries, criminal cutouts, and financing routes, continuously updated and jointly acted upon.
The most conspicuous gap is the United Kingdom. Friday’s arrests in London are the clearest possible evidence that the Iranian threat on British soil is active and current. Westminster has been preparing legislation to proscribe the IRGC for years, yet no political decision has been made – even as MI5 tracks lethal plots at a rate of more than one every three weeks.
In the Commons, the Foreign Secretary said the government is “determined” to bring forward legislation but declined to fast-track it. The government’s position is that the IRGC cannot be proscribed under existing terrorism laws because it forms part of the Iranian state – a legal distinction that has become, in practice, a political excuse. Every month that excuse holds, the IRGC’s networks on British soil operate without the legal constraints that 27 EU member states are working to impose.
Iran has already struck European territory in this war. Drones, believed fired from Lebanon by Iran’s main proxy Hezbollah, hit the British RAF base at Akrotiri in Cyprus. Greece, France, and Germany have deployed naval forces in response. NATO has declared it will defend every inch of allied territory. European governments must now treat the domestic threat with equal seriousness. The covert networks operating inside Europe are not a separate problem from the wider conflict. They are its second front.
The hostage calculus that constrained European action for years – the fear that confronting Tehran would endanger detained dual nationals – has been overtaken by events. Much of the regime’s old leadership has been eliminated and the diplomatic channels that sustained the old logic of restraint have collapsed. Continued caution is therefore no longer prudence but dangerous as the incentives that may have once constrained Tehran are gone.
If Iran’s operatives are already embedded in European cities, then dismantling them is not a question of diplomacy but of national security.
Simone Rodan is senior envoy for Europe at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD)
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