Last month, the U.S. Department of State marked the 35th anniversary of the U.S. designation of Iran as a state-sponsor of terrorism. Tehran is part of an exclusive club—partners in crime with other designees North Korea, Sudan, and Syria. Indeed, since at least 1996, in one country report on Terrorism after another, the State Department has dubbed Iran as the “leading” or “primary” state-sponsor of terrorism.
Yet despite the singular nature of these classifications, secretaries of state, past and present, have lagged behind in sanctioning Tehran-branded Shiite groups as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs). With Iran’s status as the Shiite hegemon in the region, the Trump administration should address this terroristic asymmetry in the new year as it implements its maximum pressure campaign. Its next target should be the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) foreign expeditionary Quds Force.
The Terrorist Gold Standard
The secretary of state retains discretionary authority to style FTOs under Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The standard is the group must be a foreign organization. Next it must be engaged in “terrorist activity” or retain the capability and intent to do so, specifically conduct which is unlawful in either the place which it is committed or under the laws of the United States and involves hijacking, hostage-taking, assassination, the use of any biological, chemical, or nuclear weapon, the use of an explosive, firearm, or dangerous device “with the intent to endanger… the safety of one or more individuals or to cause substantial damage to property,” or a “threat, attempt, or conspiracy to any of the foregoing.” The statute also defines “terrorism” as “premeditated, politically-motivated violence, perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.” Lastly, the law mandates that this activity must “threaten the security of U.S. nationals or the national security of the United States.”
There are legal prohibitions that follow an FTO—particularly, it being unlawful for a U.S. person to knowingly provide “material support” to the organization; FTO members being barred from entry to the United States; and asset freezes. Symbolic penalties also flow from the moniker—mainly the reputational risk of being associated with an FTO. While the U.S. government sanctioned the Quds Force “for providing material support to the Taliban and other terrorist organizations” under Executive Order 13224 in 2007, the consequences of such naming and shaming are different, for example in the levying of criminal penalties for knowing provision of material support to an FTO.
An Unequal History
Since 1997, the State Department has denoted 80 organizations as FTOs. As of 2019, 67 remain listed, of which around 50 are predominantly Sunni and only three are Shiite—with Hezbollah, Kataib Hezbollah, and the al-Ashtar Brigades (AAB) each added to the list in almost ten-year increments. Hezbollah is a founding father among FTOs, being a part of the first tranche inducted into the hall of infamy in 1997. Then fast forward to 2009, it was more than a decade later that another Shiite grouping made the cut—Kataib Hezbollah (KH). In applying the legal criteria to KH, the U.S. government highlighted that KH “has conducted attacks against Iraqi, U.S. and Coalition targets in Iraq [... and] has ideological ties to Lebanese Hezbollah and may have received support from that group.”
True to form, almost ten years later, in July 2018, the U.S. government named another Iran-backed Shiite militia as an FTO, specifically the Bahrain-based AAB for its targeting of local police forces, foreign officials, and its incitement of hatred against the United States, Saudi Arabia, Britain, and Bahrain on social media. While Iran also provides aid and comfort to Sunni terrorist groups—for instance, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which are FTOs—the threat emanating from Shiite cohorts remains alive and well. The common denominator in the designations to date has been a focus on Iran’s terrorist satellites—like Hezbollah—rather than the mother ship from which aid flows, the IRGC’s Quds Force.
The IRGC Quds Force Should Be Designated as an FTO
The modus operandi of the Quds Force in each country to which it deploys involves manpower, money, materiel, meddling, and massacres. The commander of the IRGC estimated in 2016 that the Quds Force commands an expansive network of 200,000 militiamen across the region. Iran also provides $700 million per year to Hezbollah alone, with an additional $100 million allocated to various Palestinian terror groups like FTOs Hamas and Palestinian Jihad. It has maintained a well-established arms smuggling operation called Unit 190, a 20-person team which transfers illicit weaponry—namely RPGs and missiles—through front companies via air, land, and sea to Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. The Quds Force’s political interference is legendary, with its operatives doubling as ambassadors in countries like Iraq. That’s not to mention that according to one estimate, in just over one year alone—from May 2011-July 2012—the Israeli government nixed more than twenty terror attacks spearheaded by either the Quds Force or Hezbollah.
The Quds Force meets the FTO classification standards. First, it is a foreign organization, with a headquarters on the compound of the former American embassy in Tehran. Second, it is also engaged in extensive terrorist activity, which is illegal under the laws of the United States. For instance, in the aftermath of the 2011 plot to murder Saudi Arabia’s then-Ambassador to the United States in a popular Washington restaurant, the U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctioned five officers of the Quds Force and the U.S. Department of Justice brought charges against Mansoor Arbabsiar, who it said acted on behalf of the Quds Force, for conspiracy to engage in foreign travel and use interstate and foreign commerce facilities in the commission of murder-for-hire, among other crimes. Also, the conduct here involved an attempted assassination plot and use of explosives, two of the statutorily proscribed activities for FTOs.
Simultaneously, it also satisfies the legislative definition of terrorism, as the scheme was premeditated in the planning of the conspiracy from the spring of 2011 through October 2011 . The Iranian gambit was also politically-motivated in targeting a representative from a rival regime in a dining establishment frequented by civilian Washington power brokers who are generally hostile to the mullah-cracy. Lastly, the Iranian enlistment of a Mexican drug trafficker is evidence of usage of a clandestine agent in furtherance of the conspiracy.
But the dossier on the Quds Force doesn’t end there. Indeed, since its founding in 1983 during the height of the Iran-Iraq War, the Quds Force has been the godfather of Shiite terrorism around the world. Key Quds Force operatives played roles in the 1994 bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina building. And let’s not forget the bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996. This list goes on.
The only variable left to consider is whether it would be in the national security interests of the United States to list the Quds Force as an FTO. Punishing the Quds Force for its bloodstained record is the kind of deterrent that Washington should employ—and it would mark the first time the U.S. government brands an official government organ as a FTO. Some have argued that such an action would endanger U.S. interests in the Middle East, namely U.S. troops stationed in Syria, Iraq, Bahrain, Qatar, and Afghanistan. But with President Trump’s intention to withdraw troops from Syria and reduce commitments in Afghanistan, doubling down on sanctions—like FTOs—will be necessary in order to realize the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign on Tehran.
Read also Pushing Back on Iran: A Different Approach by Ken Pollack
