Why Iran Hit Australia

Tehran is at war with itself over relations with the West.

By Arash Azizi

Australia is not known for picking fights. It prioritizes trade and has diplomatic relations with almost every country in the world—even the reclusive North Korea. But on Tuesday, it did something it hadn’t done since World War II: It expelled an ambassador.

Shutting down the Iranian embassy, the Australian government declared Ambassador Ahmad Sadeghi persona non grata and ordered him and three other Iranian officials to leave within three days. Additionally, it designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as a terrorist organization.

The decisiveness of Canberra’s actions is a measure of the extremity of Iran’s behavior. According to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Australian security forces have “credible intelligence” linking Iran to several attacks on Australian Jews last year.

Iran is specifically accused of organizing an act of arson on a kosher restaurant in Sydney last October and another on the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne in December.

I took an interest in these attacks when they happened last year, because I suspected that Iran was involved. One might think the assaults were too clumsy and amateurish to have been the work of a state apparatus.

But those of us who have tracked the IRGC’s overseas activities through the years recognized the playbook: The militia works with a decentralized network of criminal actors, including drug cartels and crime syndicates, as well as petty thieves here and there.

Its targets have long included ordinary Jewish civilians—the best-known incident in this regard was the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people and remains the deadliest terror attack in Argentine history.