Iranian President Rouhani
Nowruz and geopolitics: the threat posed by Iran in the Middle East, Europe and Italy
It is celebrated today, March 20, the feast of Nowruz (“New day”), or the Iranian New Year, the legacy of a long Persian tradition that counts at least 3000 years of history. The event, celebrated by over 300 million people in the world and a harbinger not only of spring but of a new season that individuals and communities wish better, is part of a geopolitical framework – especially that of the Middle East – marred by the constant threat of the regime of Tehran.
A threat that for some time has not been configured as only endemic, having extended and penetrated its range of action also within the European continent, thanks to the actions and coverage of the so-called “proxies”, acolytes of the Iranian regime. Among these is the terrorist organization Hezbollah (the “Party of God”), a transnational Shiite Islamist formation born in Iran in 1982 and proclaimed there by Ayatollah Khomeini.
In Italy, a recent motion approved by the Regional Council of Liguria asked the government to fully recognize Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, after years of advocating a substantial differentiation between a fighting “military wing” and a dialoguing “political wing” (dichotomy , however, denied by the same leaders of the militia). A position that should align our country with other European partners, with Germany, Great Britain (at the time still a member of the EU), the Netherlands, Estonia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Austria already pronounced on the matter.
And it was precisely at the Iranian Embassy in Vienna that Assadollah Assadi was stationed, the Iranian diplomat to whom, at the beginning of February, the Antwerp Court imposed the sentence of 20 years in prison, for having been the organizer of the failed terrorist attack. of Villepinte, France, in June 2018. An attack that could have affected over 100,000 people, including civilians and members of institutions, all of whom arrived in the town near Paris to attend the annual meeting of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), main opponent of Tehran.
L’case Assadi gives an idea of how vulnerable European nations are, and exposed to the hostile actions of the intelligence services and heterodirected diplomatic networks of the ayatollahs’ regime. Natan A. Sales, former Coordinator for Counterterrorism of the US State Department, has in fact disconcertingly revealed how deposits, belonging to Hezbollah, of ammonium nitrate (necessary for the preparation of explosives) have been discovered and destroyed in Italy, France and Greece, with our country also home to significant arms stores.
A very dangerous breach, which tears the veil on the heavy infiltration role played by Iranian intelligence and its cyber and cyber attack systems, whose virulence has greatly intensified in the last year (with a pervasiveness tripled since the killing by General Qassem Soleimani, which took place in January 2020). The ghost of CyberWarfare perpetrated by Tehran is therefore a concrete, real and tangible specter, aimed at undermining – as reported in 2019 by an American intelligence report – both the critical infrastructures of the USA and those of allied countries. Italy included.
A third aspect of Iranian aggression concerns the rearmament program and the accelerated development of space, missile and nuclear projects. Tehran has never stopped its race towards the acquisition of a more widespread and effective war potential, on the one hand in contravention of United Nations resolution 2231 on missile armament, on the other by accelerating the enrichment of uranium by up to 20%, although the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) envisaged a mandatory limit of 3.67%.
Summing up, Iran is therefore the first terrorist state in the world, advocating a strongly repressive policy of dissent, both at home and outside its borders. It has the largest and most varied ballistic missile battery in the Middle East and, together with China and Russia, has the technological and intelligence capabilities to carry out targeted attacks on the strategic digital infrastructures of Western powers.
Even contemporary geopolitics, however, can know and indeed has already known its own Nowruz: a new day, a new spring, represented by the signing of the Pacts of Abraham and the consolidation of a libertarian axis which, to the obscurantism of threats and oppression, has tried to replace the pursuit of peace as well as friendly and constructive relations.