OUT OF SIGHT, NOT OUT OF REACH The Global Scale and Scope of Transnational Repression with its parallel campaigns of bombings and assassinations aimed at Jewish, Israeli, and US targets around the world; Israeli and US forces have also assassinated Iranian officials and agents, both inside and outside Iran.242 Iranian leaders frequently portray its attacks on exiles as part of the same struggle against the United States and Israel, which they accuse of supporting terrorists.243 After a lull in exile assassinations in the 2000s, Tehran has resumed the tactic in Europe and Turkey in recent years. Since 2014, the regime has been linked to five assassinations or assassination attempts in three countries, and plots were thwarted in at least two others. In December 2015, Mohammad Reza Kolahi Samadi, a refugee living in the Netherlands since 1981, was assassinated outside his home in Almere. The Iranian authorities accused him of being responsible for a 1981 bombing in Iran that was carried out by the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), an outlawed militant group. In November 2017, Ahmad Molla Nissi was shot and killed in The Hague, the Netherlands. He had formerly been a leader of the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz (ASMLA), another militant group opposed to the Iranian regime.244 In November 2019, Masoud Molavi, a former Iranian intelligence officer who had gone into exile and begun distributing information about the regime from abroad, was gunned down on the streets of Istanbul. Turkish officials ascribed his killing to the Iranian authorities, an assessment shared by the United States.245 An Iranian media owner, Saeed Karimian, was also killed in Istanbul in May 2017, although Iranian state involvement is less clear in that case.246 Since 2014, the regime has been linked to five assassinations or assassination attempts in three countries, and plots were thwarted in at least two others. Belgian authorities disrupted a bomb plot against a gathering in France of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), a group associated with the MEK, in July 2018.247 An Iranian diplomat was among those arrested and is currently standing trial in Belgium for personally transporting the bomb.248 In September 2018, Danish intelligence officials said they had disrupted an assassination attempt organized by the Iranian regime against the head of the ASMLA in Denmark.249 Albanian 36 @FreedomHouse authorities announced in October 2019 that they had foiled multiple attacks against an MEK compound in that country.250 Another recent tactic is renditions, in which Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) leads operations to kidnap exiles from other countries and forcibly repatriate them. In October 2019, Ruhollah Zam, a refugee in France who ran a popular website and a channel on the social media platform Telegram, traveled to Iraq for unknown reasons and was promptly taken to Iran. The IRGC said the kidnapping was “a complicated intelligence operation,” although Iraqi officials denied that the IRGC had independently taken Zam from Iraqi soil.251 Zam was tried for offenses against the state, convicted, and eventually executed in December 2020.252 In November 2019, Rasoul Danialzadeh, a businessman with connections to the family of Iranian president Hassan Rouhani, was brought from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in an intelligence operation to face corruption charges in Iran.253 In August 2020, the IRGC kidnapped California-based activist Jamshid Sharmahd from the UAE while he was traveling to India. He has been accused of responsibility for a 2008 terrorist attack in Iran. Sharmahd had previously been the target of an assassination plot in California.254 And in October 2020, the IRGC claimed credit for kidnapping a Swedish citizen of Iranian origin—Habib Asyud, another leader of the ASMLA— as he was transiting Turkey.255 In all of these cases, the targets were afforded no due process or opportunity to challenge their removal. Coerced or voluntary recruitment of Iranians abroad is a key component of the regime’s transnational repression campaign. Authorities in Sweden charged a man with spying on ethnic Arab refugees from Iran in November 2019.256 In an August 2020 interview with the Guardian, a US-based Iranian software engineer described being imprisoned for a week on a trip to visit family in Iran, during which he was pressured to act as an agent for the regime. He agreed in order to be released, but then publicized his ordeal and refused to cooperate.257 Despite its relative international isolation, the Iranian state is still able in some cases to use a combination of bilateral pressure and co-optation of other countries’ institutions to achieve detentions and deportations. The rendition of Habib Asyud from Turkey in October 2020 would have required cooperation from Turkish authorities. In December 2019, two participants in the nationwide protests of that year, Mohammad Rajabi and Saeed Tamjidi, fled to Turkey and applied for asylum but were summarily returned to Iran #TransnationalRepression