Iran’s global network of goons

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This podcast was produced on the lands of the Wabakal and Gadigal people.

There was a period of a few months recently where there was a bunch of very strange things happening in Australia.

In the early hours of this morning, the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne's south east was set alight.

Shortly after 4am this morning, emergency services were called to a building fire in Kaluwa Street in Bondi.

Another overnight vandalism attack in the heart of Sydney's eastern suburbs.

A violent act of destruction, clearly anti-Semitic.

Australia's Jewish community was being terrorised by anti-Semitic attacks on Jewish-owned businesses, homes, and synagogues.

And while the attacks were despicable and widely condemned by the community, there was something just a bit off about them.

The graffiti had Israel spelled wrong.

One of the swastikas was backwards.

They were kind of like the graffiti of someone who doesn't know anything about Israel or Nazis.

Now, understandably, this was all terrifying for the community.

Idiotic, incompetent, anti-Semitic attacks are just as scary as deliberate, competent ones.

But the weirdly slapdash nature of these attacks raised a serious question about who was really behind them.

After months of investigation, it now seems that a number of these attacks were carried out by local street thugs, at least some of whom were being paid to carry them out by the government of Iran.

These were extraordinary and dangerous acts of aggression orchestrated by a foreign nation on Australian soil.

The thing about this is like,

what?

Doesn't Iran have better things to do with their time and finances right now?

Why is a large and theoretically powerful and scary sovereign state paying local street toughs to spray paint and set fire to Jewish targets in Sydney and Melbourne?

It turns out this isn't new.

Over the last few years, Iran has been bankrolling low-level attacks like this all over the world, not just against Jewish communities, but against Iranian dissidents.

It seems like an effort to intimidate people and destabilize Iran's enemies, but is it a signal of Iran's strength or is it a sign of a weakening regime?

I'm Matt Bevan, and this is If You're Listening.

I like to think that I've been online long enough that I'm capable of understanding a meme, but in Sweden, there's a meme that was very big a couple of years ago, and

I don't really get it.

So, this guy talking is the leader of a gang.

He's known as the Kurdish Fox, and his gang is the Foxtrot Gang.

He's Kurdish, which is an ethnic group which is spread across Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.

But his parents fled to Sweden when he was a baby.

He is a violent thug who is is accused of several serious crimes.

Here's a little bit of tape of him threatening to shoot an old man in the face.

But this other clip, where he's speaking Swedish.

This is apparently extremely funny.

for some reason that I don't quite understand.

It's gone viral on Swedish TikTok.

People started dressing up as foxes in videos that got hundreds of thousands of views.

The clip was sampled in a rap song released later that year.

It went so viral that someone used AI to translate what this guy was saying into multiple languages, including English.

Here it is.

Hey guys, the situation is to be wild here.

I just wanted to say that Nobody touches Strangnus.

Strangnus is a city in Sweden.

He's telling a rival gang that Strangnus is his territory.

At the time, he was in the throes of a gang war against a former ally known as the Strawberry.

Their war in the early 2020s led to a noticeable rise in crime statistics in Sweden.

A number of the recent wave of shootings and explosions in Sweden have been linked to an internal conflict in his criminal Foxtrot network.

The Fox and the Strawberry might sound like the title of a kid's picture book, but their their war has been deadly.

Men dying of gunshot wounds went from representing 19% of Swedish homicides to 53%.

And perhaps the most devastating element of these killings is that most of the people actually pulling the trigger are children.

Gangs have been exploiting Sweden's age of criminal responsibility laws by getting kids under 15 to commit murders without the risk of prosecution.

And these attacks are gruesome.

The Fox is accused of organizing for two teenagers to kill the Strawberry's mother in 2023.

Both the Fox and the Strawberry have been out of Sweden for years, puppeteering their gangs from the jurisdictional safety of Turkey and Iran.

And so a big part of the way that they recruit these kids involves the use of social media and generating these viral memes.

The interesting thing is that as that particular meme was going off and the rap song was being released, the fox was being drawn into something far more complex than a gang war.

The unprecedented and shocking assault on the Jewish state, described by some commentators as Israel's 9-11.

As Hamas launched its deadly and horrific attack on Israel from Gaza on the 7th of October 2023, their primary strategic supporter Iran prepared its response.

Iran has denied any involvement, but there is a lot of reporting to the contrary.

Just hours after the attack on Israel, the Kurdish fox, who happened to be hiding out in Iran, found himself under arrest.

The leader of the criminal foxtrot network, Rara Majid, is reported by SVT News to have been arrested in Iran, citing several independent sources.

According to Swedish broadcaster SVT, while under arrest in Iran, the fox was given a choice between a long prison sentence or cooperating with the Iranian regime.

And strangely, this kind of offer isn't uncommon.

Earlier this year, I interviewed the Australian academic Dr.

Kylie Moore Gilbert, who was imprisoned in Iran for more than two years and given a similar offer.

They actually wanted to recruit me.

They saw me as somebody they could leverage and recruit to their side.

She was convicted in a kangaroo court of being a spy and told that if she defected, she'd be released.

After I'd been convicted, after everything had dust had settled elsewhere, and approached me again and asked me, hey, now you've been convicted, we can free you from this prison.

We can make a deal with you if you come and work for us.

Kylie Moore Gilbert decided not to cooperate with them, but that's not the path everyone chooses.

According to the Swedish broadcaster SVT, the Kurdish fox took the other option.

A suspected terror attack on the Israeli embassy in Sweden on Wednesday.

In January 2024, his foxtrot gang carried out their first attack.

Some media reports indicated it was a hand grenade thrown into the compound.

Yeah, so they lobbed a hand grenade over the fence and it failed to go off.

Apparently, Iran was unimpressed and called up the fox's arch enemy, the fearsome strawberry.

Iran offered to kill the fox if the strawberry's gang would join in on the attacks against Israeli and Jewish targets across Scandinavia.

And the strawberry apparently agreed.

A suspected shooting has occurred in Sweden's capital near the Embassy of Israel.

Two Swedish teenagers have been arrested at Copenhagen train station in connection with two explosions near the Israeli embassy in the Danish capital on Wednesday.

As far as we're aware, both the fox and the strawberry remain alive and at large somewhere in the Middle East, but they're not alone.

Similar operations have been set up in other countries where Iranian authorities incentivize criminal gangs to carry out these attacks.

At first, the attacks were not particularly frequent.

There was one every couple of months or so.

But then something changed.

It's been a fortnight of blow after blow against Hezbollah in Lebanon,

beginning with the explosion of pages and walkie-talkies belonging to Hezbollah members.

Iran's most powerful proxy army, Hezbollah, was decapitated in September 2024, with Israeli security and military forces dismantling its communication networks and killing its leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

Israel has confirmed its recent airstrikes have killed some of Hezbollah's top leaders.

At least seven are now dead.

Iran's influence abroad was rapidly shrinking.

Without its most powerful proxy militias, it was forced to rely more heavily on its goon platoons.

Which brings us to Australia in the week after Hassan Nasrallah died.

It started with a text message from James Bond, which read,

I got something good lined

Now, it wasn't actually James Bond, it was allegedly this guy.

Syed Mohamed Mousawi is an alleged former nomad biki.

James Bond is allegedly his screen name on the messaging app Signal.

This guy actually rolls around town in a pink Gucci hat and a diamond-encrusted Rolex.

James Bond would never.

He wears an omega.

Two weeks later, Mousawi, Syed Mousawi, allegedly offered two of his mates four grand each to set fire to a Jewish-owned bakery called Lewis's Continental Kitchen on Curlwis Street near Sydney's Bondi Beach.

According to a police brief of evidence, here's what happened next.

Instead of setting fire to Lewis's Continental Kitchen on Curlwis Street, they allegedly set fire to the Curly Lewis brewery around the corner.

The fire they allegedly set at the wrong place was also not to 007's liking.

He sent a very angry text to his hired goons using language not often uttered over dry martinis.

The text said, You's fed the whole thing now.

If you's fing couldn't do it from the start, then why did you even went there for me?

It's not even done 2% burned.

You dead.

One of the recipients of this text was arrested the following day.

Police allege others were then hired, hired, who this time managed to put the right address into Google Maps.

Shortly after 4am this morning, emergency services were called to a building fire in Kaluwa Street in Bondi.

Now, Mousawi denies these allegations and has pleaded not guilty to directing a criminal group and planning the arson attack.

He is currently on bail.

But this fire was the first in a string of attacks against Jewish-owned businesses, synagogues, and homes.

Anti-Semitic attacks around Australia have escalated dramatically.

The local Jewish community was understandably terrified.

But we're scared.

We're very frightened.

We're scared of,

we don't know who this is or where it's coming from or why it's targeting us.

Then something very strange happened.

This is the discovery of a potential mass casualty event.

There's only one way of calling it out, and that is terrorism.

A caravan full of explosives was discovered on the side of the road in Sydney's northern suburbs with a note inside listing Jewish targets.

Discovery and the detection of the caravan contained with an amount of explosives

was not going to be used in the normal anti-Semitic attack that we have seen.

The last few months have been like a living nightmare, not only for the Jewish community, but increasingly for the wider community.

But just days after the caravan was found, the head of the Australian Federal Police indicated that something strange may be afoot.

We believe criminals for hire may be behind some incidents.

So part of our inquiries include who is paying those criminals, where those people are, whether they are in Australia or offshore, and what their motivation is.

Answering those questions has turned out to be extremely complicated.

Here's where we're at, according to investigations by police and security services.

In the three months between the accidental arson attack on Curley Lewis Brewery and the end of January this year, there were over a dozen attacks on Jewish targets in Sydney and Melbourne.

More than a dozen people have been arrested, most of whom have claimed that they were influenced or paid by someone else to conduct those attacks.

The motivation for these attacks were not ideology, religion, or politics, but they were serious and the threat was serious.

The people involved are not neo-Nazis or extremists of any kind.

Most of them appear to be social housing residents looking to make a quick buck.

But that doesn't take away from the impact that this has had because clearly there was someone behind the scenes coordinating and financing these attacks.

It's true.

that no one was injured in these attacks.

It is not true that no one was harmed.

The Jewish community were harmed.

Other communities who were blamed were harmed, but simply Australia was attacked and Australia was harmed.

Initially, the police said that they believed a man named Syed Akka, an alleged drug dealer who is currently a fugitive in Turkey,

was responsible for all of the attacks.

Sayed Erin Akka, also known as Aaron, is a wanted man who is believed to have fled Australia more than a year ago.

They say that he was also behind the explosive caravan.

The caravan plot was an elaborate scheme contrived by organised criminals domestically and from offshore.

We allege this person paid local criminals to carry out anti-Semitic graffiti and vandalism for weeks whilst planning the caravan plot and we know that this was to create absolute fear and anxiety in the Jewish community to get the attention from law enforcement.

In exchange for providing information of an imminent threat, they wanted to return to Australia without being sent straight to jail.

They say he was creating fear and chaos so that he would be able to exchange information about that chaos that he had created for a more lenient sentence once he returned to Australia.

It's a madcap scheme and it's one that Akka denied when ABC reporter Markmoud Faisal met with him in Turkey.

I didn't have involvement in that and it didn't like that.

I never offered that.

I never offered anything got to do with those anti-Semitism attacks.

He says he was only involved with the caravan.

And even then his only involvement was to intercept it, park it, and tell the police where it was.

I didn't organise the caravan, I just organised the seizure of it.

But authorities continued to accuse him of orchestrating all of the attacks until August, when they said that actually

some of them were orchestrated by Iran.

Iran has sought to disguise its involvement, but ASIO assesses it was behind the attacks on the Lewis Continental Kitchen in Sydney on October 20 last year and the Addis Israel Synagogue in Melbourne on December 6 last year.

AGOS says it is likely Iran directed further attacks as well.

The government says it was an attempt to create division in Australia.

There is anti-Semitism in Australia.

It is real.

It is debilitating.

Yet this attack was driven by anti-Semitism that originated in Iran.

For some some anti-Semitic elements in Australia, the attack has emboldened them.

Any anti-Semitic attack, in fact, any attack based in any dehumanising bigotry, is an attack on Australia.

It's all very weird, though.

More than a dozen attacks.

At least three of them were Iran, if you include the attack on the brewery where it wasn't even done 2% burned.

And the rest, dunno?

Maybe this guy, Saeed Aka, who is hiding in Turkey?

Is it the police's opinion that Iran and this guy independently came up with the idea of carrying out very similar attacks in the same month with two entirely separate motives?

Watch this space, I guess.

But as we know, Iran has been instrumental in attacks like this, not just in Australia and Sweden, but around the world.

There are reports of similar operations to intimidate and attack journalists who work for the independent news outlet Iran International.

We now have 45 journalists around the world who have been threatened with assassination if they don't immediately stop working for Iran International.

And 315 family members around the world have also been targeted expressly.

And that includes Australians.

Additionally, the US Justice Department says that late last year the Iranians were trying to get someone to assassinate Donald Trump.

So what can be done about this?

Most of these countries already have heavy sanctions on Iran.

Australia has decided to kick the Iranian ambassador out of the country, while simultaneously saying that he was not involved in the attacks.

No Iranian diplomats here in Australia were involved in this.

This was directed by the ARGC through a series of overseas cutouts facilitators to coordinators that found their way to tasking Australians.

And herein lies the problem.

The only way Western governments can punish Iran is with sanctions or by expelling their ambassadors.

But the thing is, these actions don't have much of an impact on the Iranians who are responsible for these anti-Semitic attacks.

This is really the challenge that Western governments face when figuring out how to deal with Iran.

And it's because Iran's government is a hybrid of a democracy and a theocratic dictatorship.

As we've discussed in previous episodes, the country has regular elections, a judiciary, a parliament, a president, and a a bureaucracy.

But on top of that is the supreme leader who can interfere in those democratic institutions as much as he wants.

And he also has direct control over the armed forces and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC.

Dr.

Kyler Moore-Gilbert says that the folks at the IRGC aren't exactly the sharpest tools in the Shed.

Some of them were just completely incompetent and I would say idiots, like completely uneducated, uninformed.

And this is theoretically Iran's intelligence agency, like the CIA, the KGB or in Australia, ASIO.

I imagine it's hard to become an ASIO officer, but in Iran, if your uncle's an ASIO officer, he'll just bring you into the fold and you could be a complete dumbass.

This is what happens when you promote incompetent people and reward religious zealotry instead of expertise.

Setting fire to a kosher kitchen in Sydney or a synagogue in Melbourne isn't part of some grand scheme plotted out by the Iranian government.

It's simply a sign that the dumbasses are doing whatever they want.

Stopping attacks like this in the age of the internet and cryptocurrency is very difficult.

There will always be people desperate, naive, or stupid enough to do something terrible for a few thousand bucks.

When anyone could be a potential operative, the only thing we can try and do is make these attacks less effective.

These were extraordinary and dangerous acts of aggression orchestrated by a foreign nation on Australian soil.

They were attempts to undermine social cohesion and sow discord in our community.

Yeah, that's the thing that people can do something about everywhere.

Make communities under attack feel like they are supported and accepted and an integral part of a strong multicultural society.

Here in Australia, we are used to bushfires burning through whole towns.

But it only takes a little while before that town is back on its feet and the community is stronger than it was before.

We need to take that same approach to the people orchestrating the attacks.

There's nothing you can burn down that we can't rebuild, and you can't drive a wedge between us.

So don't bother.

Unless you want us to call you a-what was it, Kylie?

A complete dumbass.

Yeah, a complete dumbass.

If you're listening is written by me, Matt Bevan.

Supervising producer is Cara Jensen-McKinnon.

Audio production is by Adair Shepard.

The current plan for next Thursday's episode is to talk about Venezuela, but I mean, Israel's bombing Qatar, apparently, and so we'll keep a bit of an eye on that, too.

Let's say that next Thursday's episode is TBC.

On Tuesday though, I'm going to be getting a Swedish crime reporter to explain that Kurdish fox TikTok meme to me.

And also, like, what is going on with crime in Sweden?

Looking at the crime rate, it's like the Scandinavian version of Gotham City over there.

More on that on Tuesday.

I'll see you then.