Iran directed arson attacks in Australia and ‘fanned the flames’ of antisemitism, country’s spy chief says

The Iranian government “lit the matches and fanned the flames” of antisemitism in Australia, directing at least two arson attacks in the last year – on a Melbourne synagogue and a Sydney Jewish restaurant – Australia’s spy chief has said.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Tehran’s paramilitary defenders of the 1979 revolution, will be proscribed by Australia as a terrorist organisation.

As Australia’s prime minister announced his government had expelled the Iranian ambassador, on Tuesday local time, the head of the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (Asio), Mike Burgess, said Tehran was “likely” behind even more antisemitic attacks across the country.

Iranian diplomats posted to Australia were not involved, Burgess said.

Ambassador Ahmad Sadeghi and three other officials have been given seven days to leave the country – the first expulsion of an ambassador from Australia since the second world war – and the Iranian embassy in Canberra has been shut down.

Since the 1979 revolution, Australia had consistently maintained diplomatic relations with Iran as well as an embassy in the capital until it was shuttered in June in the wake of US bombing raids on Iran.

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All Australia’s diplomatic staff are already out of the country.

Australians have long been urged not to travel to Iran, and the government has repeated those warnings, recommending Australians leave now if it is safe to do so.

Lewis’s Continental Kitchen, a kosher cafe in the Sydney beachside suburb of Bondi, was targeted in an arson attack in October last year. There was an arson attack on Adass Israel synagogue in Ripponlea, in south-east Melbourne, in December. Both suburbs are home to significant Jewish populations. There were no injuries in the attacks.

Anthony Albanese said it was likely the Iranian government had directed further attacks on Jewish targets.

“These were extraordinary and dangerous acts of aggression orchestrated by a foreign nation on Australian soil,” he said.

“They were attempts to undermine social cohesion and sow discord in our community. It is totally unacceptable. The Australian government is taking strong and decisive action in response.”

Burgess said the IRGC had used “a complex web of proxies” to mask its involvement in the attacks, and that investigators had uncovered a “layer cake of cut-outs” between the IRGC, “organised crime elements offshore” and alleged perpetrators in Australia. Some of the alleged perpetrators were paid for their role in arson attacks on Jewish premises, Burgess said.

“We have investigated dozens of incidents,” he said.

“Iran and its proxies literally and figuratively lit the matches and fanned the flames … there’s a direct connection that the IRGC are directing, through a series of cut-outs, people in Australia to undertake these crimes.”

British Australian academic Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert – who was held for 804 days by the IRGC, most of it in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison – accused the Iranian embassy in Canberra of long playing a “sinister role in sponsoring the surveillance of dissidents here in Australia”.

“For years now the Iranian-Australian community and other victims of the IRGC, including myself, have been literally screaming … that Iranian agents are operating brazenly and with few consequences here on Australian soil.”

Moore-Gilbert welcomed Australia’s “decisive action against a brutal regime”, but lamented that it had taken so long to act.

Iran’s government has long been accused of a malevolent presence in Australia, with Iranian-Australians reporting they have been surveilled and intimidated for attending protests against the Iranian regime.

Two years ago, the then home affairs minister, Clare O’Neil, confirmed the threats, saying, “We’re not going to stand back and have Australians, or indeed visitors to our country, watched and tracked by foreign governments on our soil.”

The IRGC was established as defenders of the country’s Islamic regime, but has since become a feared and repressive paramilitary and political force inside Iran. It also has a clandestine foreign intelligence and paramilitary wing, the Quds Force, and IRGC personnel – estimated at 190,000 – also operate outside the country.

The IRGC has been proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the US, Canada, Sweden, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia, among others.