When the United States ignited a war against Iran in February, counterterrorism analysts braced for reprisal attacks outside the Middle East. What materialized was a string of about 20 small-scale arson and bombing attacks against Jewish and American targets in Europe and North America.
Then, last Sunday, outside a British air base that Iran had branded a “legitimate target,” the police arrested and later released five men in a murky plot that counterterrorism experts said echoed the previous pattern.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham of Britain said there were “strong indications that Iran played a part,” and a British-Iranian national was also arrested. In addition, the British counterterrorism police charged two Iranian men on Friday in a suspected terrorist plot targeting Jews in the Manchester area. The men assembled components for homemade explosives and conducted reconnaissance on potential targets, the authorities said.
While the previous attacks often occurred at night, with no loss of life and often superficial damage, an assault on an air base would represent a serious escalation, experts said.
“That would be a jump in ambition and an evolution of the proxy campaign,” said Adrian Shtuni, a counterterroism expert and security consultant based in Washington. Unlike the soft, symbolic targets in the previous attacks, he said, the British military base was used for U.S. strikes on Iran.
This style of terrorist attack is sometimes referred to as the “gig economy hybrid model of warfare.” Iran adopted it after Russia used it in Europe, experts said. It involves “disposable agents” or “cutouts.” Identified through Telegram chat groups or other online venues, they do not know who is hiring them.
“Criminals, teenagers and cutouts are cheaper and replaceable, and a chain of intermediaries sits between them and any I.R.G.C. handler,” Mr. Shtuni said of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. “So a failed arson does not produce an expelled diplomat or a casus belli.”
The earlier attacks all followed a similar model, the authorities and analysts said. They were carried out by local criminals or disenfranchised young men hired through anonymous online transactions and paid in cryptocurrency, with a front organization for the Revolutionary Guards ultimately claiming responsibility.
The attacks stopped in May, after an Iraqi man suspected of being the organizer was arrested in Turkey and extradited to the United States to face terrorism charges.
The suspects are often bumbling, and in the case involving R.A.F. Fairford in England, one of them called the police.
“They often lack even basic criminal skills like operational security,” said Colin P. Clarke, a terrorism expert who is executive director of the Soufan Center, an intelligence and consulting firm in New York. “This is pay for play; this isn’t like somebody was radicalized by ISIS propaganda and is willing to lay down his life,” he added, referring to the Islamic State.
The suspect indicted in the United States in May, Mohammad Baqer al-Saadi, was identified as a high-ranking figure in Kataib Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy force in Iraq that the United States designated as a terrorist organization. He helped establish a front organization called Harakat Ashab Al-Yamin al-Islamiya, according to the criminal complaint.
The group posted videos claiming responsibility for arson attacks against synagogues, Jewish schools, American bank offices and other targets that it described as centers of “Zionist influence” in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, France and England, as well as in Canada.
Mr. al-Saadi was recorded trying to arrange an attack on a synagogue in New York, as well as Jewish centers in Los Angeles and Scottsdale, Ariz. The authorities said he wired $3,000 in cryptocurrency and promised $7,000 more to an undercover federal agent.
It is likely easier for Iran to operate in Europe than in the United States, experts said, because the United States developed a far more robust counterterrorism strategy after the catastrophic failures before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
In general, having locals carry out such attacks is designed to aggravate differences within society, experts said, including polarization, failed integration and antisemitism.
“A recruited local makes the story about Europe’s own fractures,” Mr. Shtuni said.
Although President Trump suggested the thwarted attack aboard a FlyDubai airplane en route to Tel Aviv was also linked to Iran, he presented no evidence. If the co-pilot accused had been radicalized, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel suggested without elaboration, it would be considered more likely an operation by a jihadist organization.
Given the wars embroiling Iranian proxy forces, including Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, one of those groups might undertake such radicalization. But so far, no government or security agency has provided evidence of any such link, noted William F. Wechsler, the senior director of the Middle East programs at the Atlantic Council and a former top Pentagon counterterrorism official.
European nations have been divided in their responses to the low-intensity attacks, with some categorizing them as terrorist episodes and England treating earlier ones as criminal cases.
Ultimately, they are extensions of the war in the Middle East, experts said. “It spreads the battlefield; it’s another layer; it’s beyond the proxies,” Mr. Clarke said.
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