The man with a thick black beard and his hair tied into a bun is curious. ‘Are you celebrities?’ he asks. His English is flawless but the accent is unmistakably Iranian. His clothes are dark, but he’s wearing rolled-up tracksuit bottoms with trendy trainers. The look is Tehran theocrat meets London hipster.
He has seen Kasra Aarabi, director of the campaign group United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), and me posing for photographs outside the gates of the Islamic Centre of England.
It’s a registered charity that describes itself as a ‘religious and cultural centre’ with a mission ‘to provide services to members of the Muslim community, in particular, and the wider community at large’.
But, in reality, the large white building set behind railings and trees is the de facto British headquarters of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei – and it’s clear that the people here are keen to safeguard their privacy.
As we finished our shoot, the bearded man takes pictures of us on his phone and then follows as we walk a few hundred yards up the street and round a corner. He is what Iranians call a ‘nocheh’, a man (and it is always a man) paid to keep watch outside regime buildings.
‘So, why were you taking photos?’ he asks. We fob him off and carry on walking.
This bearded man is what Iranians call a ‘nocheh’, a man paid to keep watch outside regime buildings, in this case the Islamic Centre of England in Maida Vale, north-west London
Later we see him standing on the opposite side of the road jabbing at his phone. ‘Sending our details straight to Tehran,’ Kasra and I joke. Eventually we move off.
The centre, situated on a quiet street in Maida Vale, in north-west London, is the second stop on my tour of what I have nicknamed ‘Little Tehran’, an area of the capital in which the Islamic Republic maintains several institutions that it uses to spread its malign and subversive influence across Britain.
And Iran has rarely been on more bellicose form. Ever since the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran at the end of last month, the world has been waiting to see how the Middle East’s most sadistic theocracy will react.
Our first stop, just minutes earlier, had been the School of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a few streets away. A low, beige brick building with white sloping roofs, it used to have a sign with the institution’s name on it, but that has been taken down.
Ofsted has deemed the school ‘inadequate’ four times since 2016. That doesn’t surprise me. In July 2022, video footage emerged of rows of its pupils, aged from eight to 15, singing what Kasra described to me as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ affiliated propaganda anthem.
In the film, the children pledge allegiance to Khamenei. ‘We wait for you under the flag of our leader,’ they trill. Then, chillingly, they plead: ‘Do not see me as too young, from the 313 I will answer the call.’ This refers to the 313 mythical ‘special commanders’ of Shia theology, who will rise from the dead to wage an apocalyptic war against those seen as infidels.
‘It’s an anthem designed to radicalise kids,’ Kasra says, and he should know he is an expert on the IRGC.
Included in this divine force from beyond the grave is Qasem Soleimani, who was assassinated by the Americans in January 2020. He was the leader of the feared Quds Force branch of the IRGC, notorious for its foreign operations and designated a terrorist organisation by the US.
After Soleimani’s death, the Islamic Centre for England held a candlelit vigil in his honour, in which he was described as a ‘great martyr’. It was rebuked by the Charity Commission for putting its reputation at risk by staging the event.
In 2022, when protests erupted in Iran after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in police custody after being arrested for not covering her head with a hijab, the centre’s director, Seyed Hashem Mousavi, described the demonstrators as ‘soldiers of Satan’ and women who took off their hijabs as ‘poison’.
Mousavi is Khamenei’s personal representative in the UK. Indeed, the centre’s ‘constitution’ requires that its director always holds this role.
It is important to understand just what this means. The traditional route of Iranian-UK relations runs diplomatically in a clear chain of command: from the Supreme Leader to the Iranian President to the Foreign Minister and then to the ambassador to London.
But Mousavi, as director of the Islamic Centre of England, does not have to bother with any of that: he reports directly to the Supreme Leader. A powerful man indeed.
The final stop on our tour of Little Tehran is the Islamic College of London, two and a half miles north of the Centre. Behind the red-brick facade, the college teaches ‘Islamic studies’ and until 2023 its degree programmes were validated by Middlesex University.
Kasra tells me that it is affiliated to the Iran-based Al-Mustafa International University – a claim echoed by pro-regime Farsi news websites – and is affiliated to the IRGC.
In the words of Al Mustafa’s ‘Vice President of International Communications’, a cleric called Mohsen Ghanbari, ‘our graduates are known as soldiers and children of Imam Khomeini in many countries of the world’.
In December 2020, the US government described Al-Mustafa as ‘a recruiting platform for the IRGC Quds Force’ and sanctioned it under anti-terror legislation. Kasra tells me that it ‘radicalises and recruits for IRGC militias in the Middle East and cells elsewhere’.
‘I can’t believe this place is still open,’ he adds. Many would surely echo that sentiment.
Writer David Patrikarakos at the Islamic College of London in Willesden, which teaches ‘Islamic studies’. Until 2023 its degree programmes were validated by Middlesex University
And what makes the situation even more absurd is that the Centre is a charity and the College is run by a charitable trust, receiving hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money. During Covid the College received £205,000 in furlough payments and the Islamic Centre just under £250,000. And this after Khamenei banned UK vaccines and claimed the pandemic was a ‘Zionist bioweapon’ and a product of the Jews’ ‘alliance with demons’.
The Charity Commission is in the midst of an ongoing investigation into the Islamic Centre for England, but given that the probe was first opened in November 2022, the Policy Exchange think tank, among others, has criticised its ‘snail’s pace’.
In response, the Commission explained that it has appointed an interim manager to the Centre and blames a legal challenge to that appointment for the investigation’s length of time.
Kasra, though, tells me that when he spoke to a source inside the Commission, they were plain.
‘No one wants to touch this for fear of being labelled Islamophobic,’ he was told. ‘If that happens, your career is over.’ But while the authorities prevaricate, the malign influence of the Iranian regime continues to ripple out of Little Tehran across our country.
Outrageously, IRGC commanders have given openly anti-Semitic speeches to British students and reportedly tried to co-opt them into becoming ‘agents of influence’.
Two of these took place online but one was an in-person event at the Kanoon Towhid Islamic Centre in west London held to commemorate, yet again, the death of Soleimani, at which the crowd screamed: ‘Death to Israel’.
At another event arranged by the Islamic Students Association of Britain, an IRGC commander told students that the Holocaust was ‘fake’, and urged the audience to join ‘the beautiful list of soldiers’. He also enjoined them to enlist in their apocalyptic army to ‘bring an end to the life of the oppressors and occupiers, Zionists and Jews across the world’.
Another IRGC commander, Hossein Yekta, encouraged the students to ‘raise the flag of the Islamic revolution, Islam and martyrdom’, and to become ‘soft-war officers’ for Iran. What is frighteningly clear is that the IRGC has now developed a broad structure in the UK.
This is primarily led by Iranian operatives but it also consists of British Islamists, who pledge allegiances to Ayatollah Khamenei and Iran’s proxies abroad such as Hezbollah and Hamas. They subscribe to an expansionist Islamist ideology with the goal of establishing Sharia law across the world, in clear opposition to British values.
And that’s not all. As well as doubling down on its efforts to nurture homegrown UK radicalisation and extremism, the Islamic Republic regime is now bringing violence directly to our streets.
In 2022, the UK government identified at least 10 credible threats from Iran to kill or kidnap Britons or British residents.
A year later, counter-terrorism police said this had risen to 15. And only last January, Britain imposed new sanctions on members of an IRGC unit that had tried to assassinate two presenters of Iran International, a UK-based TV channel that is critical of the Tehran regime.
Supporters of the Iranian opposition rally against the then president of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi, near Downing Street in 2021
The regime then tried again when a reporter for the TV channel Pouria Zeraati was stabbed four times in Wimbledon, south-west London, in April. Eastern European mercenaries flew into London, attacked the journalist and then flew out just hours later.
And still the British Government refuses to proscribe the IRGC as a terrorist organisation. After the attempted killing, then Foreign Secretary David Cameron declared that it was not in the UK’s interests to proscribe the group. The (presumably unintended) message appears to be: ‘the IRGC can operate on British soil with impunity’.
Tehran’s assassins will return, which is why proscription matters. It would give the Government and Charity Commission clear guidelines on how to deal with the threat. It would equip local communities, the police force, teachers and councils with the necessary tools to identify and prevent further radicalisation.
That the authorities still refuse to take the threat seriously is an outrage. Why are these institutions allowed to continue radicalising children? Why is Britain allowing IRGC proxies to bring violence to our streets, its commanders to come here and proselytise students?
Germany recently took its own stand against regime networks. The Islamic Centre in Hamburg was put under investigation by the authorities for suspected links to Tehran’s mullahs and the terrorists of Hezbollah. Found to be unconstitutional, the centre was shut down last month.
Kasra Aarabi worked with the German authorities on the investigation, and he is keen to see the same thing happen here. ‘The Germans acted quickly and decisively,’ he says. ‘Why can’t we do the same thing here? There is momentum for this now – and it’s so important that we act.’
He’s right, the Islamic Republic of Iran has Britain in its sights. After some vague hopes in recent years that reformers inside Tehran might prevail, that dream is dead. Fanatics now dominate there. Attempts to placate or appease them will fail. We must understand that the regime is both a clear and immediate danger – not just abroad, but at home.
It’s time to shut down these institutions, sanction the IRGC and kick Iranian agents out of Britain. The cost of inaction has already been severe and will only become worse as time passes.
It’s time to end the subversion and violence on our streets, once and for all, for Brits and Iranians alike.