The United Kingdom must act to proscribe Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, before it’s too late. The IRGC must be proscribed before more places of worship are torched, more citizens are violently harassed, more ambulances intentionally destroyed, more peaceful gatherings threatened. The IRGC has the capability and the intent to harm people on British soil with increasing ease. This threat could be nipped in the bud with the right measures, right now.
The IRGC views the United Kingdom as a permissive environment. For the IRGC, the United Kingdom is not just a place to launder money or recruit British citizens to post the regime’s propaganda on social media, though both are certainly happening there. The IRGC is also conducting hostile intelligence operations, evading sanctions, hiding millions of pounds from illicit shadow fleet oil sales in high-end real estate portfolios, incorporating shell companies, running banned media offices, and sheltering their spendthrift children. And, most recently, the IRGC freely influenced local gangs in London under the banner of Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia, or HAYI, to torch and destroy half a dozen Jewish-linked targets there over the span of just a few weeks.
The situation in today’s United Kingdom is not unlike Argentina in 1994. Back then, a young IRGC veteran of the Iran-Iraq War named Ahmad Vahidi worked with local Shi’a militants in Buenos Aires to attack the AMIA Jewish center, killing 85 people. Two years earlier, he had planned an attack on the Israeli embassy there that killed 29 people.
That same Ahmad Vahidi is now leading the IRGC in Iran after the U.S. and Israel killed the previous leaders on February 28, 2026. Vahidi is directing the IRGC to use the same toolkit he personally honed in Argentina to kill, maim, and terrorize people, Jewish or not, in Britain, Belgium, France, and elsewhere across Europe.
The IRGC must be proscribed in Parliament before an AMIA tragedy comes to London. But some argue that proscribing the IRGC may spook Iran into pulling its embassy out of London. Others fear crucial diplomatic and intelligence channels may dry up.
The UK has already sanctioned 1,238 Iranian persons and entities, including sanctions on 84 IRGC affiliates in 2023. And yet Iran’s embassy remains open for business. And so does a branch of the sanctioned, Iran-owned Bank Melli, right across the street from the Whole Foods Market in London’s affluent Kensington neighborhood. Across town, the IRGC’s banker, Ali Ansaari, received the go-ahead to build 33 luxury flats in north London despite UK sanctions specifically designating him the previous year for his help in bringing billions of pounds of IRGC money into British banks. Another beneficiary of the UK’s permissive environment for the IRGC is Mojtaba Khamenei, the erstwhile hidden successor of Iran’s late Supreme Leader. The sanctioned Khamenei counts luxury real estate holdings in London’s Bishop’s Avenue as a crown jewel in his £100 million European real estate portfolio.
Although hundreds of people and entities affiliated with the IRGC are sanctioned by the US, UK, and EU, the IRGC continues viewing the UK as a comfortable place to work. Sanctions are clearly an insufficient antidote to this unscrupulous organization. Sanctions are toothless unless paired with enforcement mechanisms that can cut through the shadowy layers of banks, shell companies, and cutouts the IRGC uses to slip right through onto the streets of London.
Asset freezes under the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2018 and the Iran (Sanctions) Regulations of 2023 are a helpful start. But, as Bank Melli, Ali Ansari, and Khamenei’s son demonstrate, these measures remain largely ineffectual without actually proscribing the IRGC as a Proscribed Organisation. And with people like Ahmad Vahidi in charge of the IRGC, the clock is ticking ever closer to the next attack on British soil. But none of this is inevitable. Indeed, there is a way to stop it.
Keir Starmer noted recently that he has been “very worried” about the IRGC’s ability to use violent surrogate actors inside the UK. Worry is no substitute for action. And the proper action for this moment is a full proscription of the IRGC. People’s lives depend on it.
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