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Why Iran Hit Australia
(Atlantic) Arash Azizi - On Tuesday, shutting down the Iranian embassy, the Australian government declared Amb. 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, including an act of arson on a kosher restaurant in Sydney last October and another on the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne in December. 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 criminal actors, including drug cartels and crime syndicates, as well as petty thieves. Its targets have long included ordinary Jewish civilians. The best-known incident 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. In recent years, Iran has tried (and mostly failed) to strike Jewish or Israeli targets in South Africa, Kenya, Sri Lanka, Cyprus, Turkey, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden.