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.
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—pretty much anywhere it could possibly reach. Many of these plots were haphazard and done on cheap; the regime encourages its global adherents to take any shot they can, even when their chances of success are limited. The point is to intimidate Jews and the West and to show off Iran’s asymmetric capabilities.
The Iranian regime’s reasoning here is baffling on its face. The country is risking diplomatic opprobrium and further isolation just to conduct shoddily executed assaults on civilians who pose no threat to it. But like so much else in Iranian politics, the rationale is tied up in the country’s internal divisions. The elements organizing the attacks are ideological. They seek to burnish Iran’s image as an aggressive, revisionist actor, determined to destabilize the West and unconstrained by practical concerns. Inside the regime, this faction competes with a more pragmatic group that prioritizes trade and seeks to improve relations with the West. Those behind the hits on Australian targets may even see their activities as having a dual use: By striking synagogues and restaurants in Western countries, they intimidate their global enemies and help stymie the diplomatic agenda of pragmatists at home.
The arson attacks have certainly helped make a point that Iranian dissidents and other critics of the Islamic Republic in Australia have been pressing for some time about Tehran’s malign reach. Several Iranian groups in Australia have applauded Albanese’s swift action, among them the center-left Iranian Australian Republicans, which thanked the government and said that its measures “significantly enhance the safety and security of our community and all Australians.”
The Australian scholar Kylie Moore-Gilbert spent two years in prison in Iran on flimsy charges before being released, in a prisoner exchange in 2020. Fluent in Persian and well versed in Iranian affairs, Moore-Gilbert has become a prominent ally of the Iranian democracy movement. She told me that Iranian Australians have sounded alarms for years about “being surveilled, threatened, and harassed by agents of the Islamic Republic at protest rallies, community meetings, online, and even outside their own homes.” She noted that this week, the government appeared to “suddenly discover its resolve, seemingly overnight.”
Paradoxically, the loss of Iran’s embassy in Canberra will even hurt the hard-liners who helped bring it about. As much as they hate the West, Iranian Islamists love to operate on its soils, and diplomatic ties make that easier. With its open liberal democracy and English-language convenience, Australia has been an attractive base for Iranian agents seeking to push the Islamic Republic’s agenda. This has been especially true since 2012, when Canada’s then-center-right government cut diplomatic ties with Iran, reducing the country’s footprint in the Anglosphere.
Iran also has extensive trade ties with Australia: In the 2010s, several Australian cabinet ministers visited Iran, and Iran’s top diplomat at the time, Mohammad Javad Zarif, came to Australia in 2016. Moore-Gilbert’s case generated significant tension between the two countries from 2018 to 2020, but Tehran still appeared to value its ties with Canberra. Earlier this year, Sadeghi boasted of his embassy’s work there, saying that Tehran was pleased to strengthen bilateral ties and hoped to continue to do so.
But Sadeghi’s diplomatic good faith has come into question more than once since 2023, when he was appointed to Canberra by Iran’s president at the time, the hard-line Ebrahim Raisi. Like his fellow hard-liners, Sadeghi cared less about trade and students than about pushing Tehran’s ideological agenda. More than once, Sadeghi praised Hamas and Hezbollah leaders on social media; in one post, he promised the destruction of Israel. Albanese publicly rebuked him for these messages, and the Australian center-right opposition called for the ambassador’s expulsion. Last year, Sadeghi DMed an Iranian Australian on X, asking him to delete his “anti-Iranian comments” online.
The Australian authorities have been aware for some time that Tehran surveils the Iranian diaspora down under. In 2022, the mass-protest movement that would become known by the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” erupted in Iran. Australia’s thousands-strong Iranian community staged protests in solidarity. But they soon found themselves under Tehran’s watchful eyes: In 2023, an activist with the Iranian Women’s Association in Australia received a warning in the form of a decapacitated chicken left on her parents’ doorstep. Others received threatening calls. In a speech that year, Australia’s minister of home affairs confirmed that Tehran was spying on Iranians on Australian soil. A Senate inquiry concluded by recommending listing the IRGC as a terrorist organization.
Canberra didn’t do so then, but this week it has taken definitive action. Iran responded by feigning denial. Its spokesperson declared anti-Semitism a Western phenomenon with no relevance for Muslims—and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said he had to reluctantly agree with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent comments calling Albanese a “weak politician.” Albanese earned the Israeli rebuke in part by pledging to recognize a Palestine state. That he’s being called names by both Israel and Iran means the Australian prime minister must be “doing something right,” Moore-Gilbert told me.
Iran can deny all it wants to; few observers are likely to take its word over Australia’s, given the Islamic Republic’s track record. Last month, the U.S. joined 13 other Western countries (including Albania, Belgium, Sweden, Canada, and Spain) in condemning Iranian attempts at killing, kidnapping, and harassing dissidents, journalists, and Jews on their soil. And in the aftermath of the recent Iranian-Israeli war, the regime has amped up its public anti-Semitism. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, attacked “Iranians who favor the Jews over their own country” in a speech earlier this week. One state-television broadcast last month included a music video promising to “uproot the Jews”; another included a comedy sketch calling on Israeli Jews to “learn how to swim,” presumably because they would be driven to the sea. Books by Jewish and Israeli authors remain available in Persian translation, but the censors now block even the mention of Jews or Jewish themes.
For those in the Iranian establishment who hope to save Iran’s face and rebound from the summer’s bombardment, the blow from Canberra comes at a terrible time. These pragmatic elements are engaged in nuclear negotiations with European countries and attempting to prevent the return of UN sanctions that were lifted under a 2015 agreement. On Tuesday, Iran allowed international inspectors to return for the first time in weeks. The pragmatists are trying to stop the country’s slide into penury or even prevent another war. But the spotlight from Canberra is now trained on the regime’s ugly, dark side. Hard-liners in the Iranian Parliament are busy protesting the return of the nuclear inspectors, and their ideological brethren, who helped organize the arson attacks last year, are no doubt pleased with what they have done to poison Iran’s relations with the West.
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