Continuous display of kidnapping Iranian opponents abroad

Eslam Mohamed

The Iranian regime continues to terrorize its opponents outside the country’s borders by kidnapping and assassinating them, while its popular base erodes, especially after it has lost the ability to manage the country’s economic and service files.

The Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz announced that Iranian intelligence has kidnapped one of its leaders, Habib Asyud, who holds Swedish citizenship, in an operation inside Turkish territory, noting that the kidnapping was involved and contributed to by Ahwazi personalities, the details of which will be announced later.

According to Iranian media on Friday, October 30, the Turkish authorities handed Asyud over to Iran, adding that he was arrested in Turkey.

Asyud’s handover took place through the port of Western Azerbaijan province in northwestern Iran. The Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Al-Ahwaz said that the mullahs’ intelligence services carried out this operation in order to limit the activity of the movement, which holds the Iranian regime fully responsible for the life of the kidnapped leader. They demanded that the Swedish and Turkish authorities constructively cooperate in order to uncover the circumstances of the kidnapping.

The movement affirmed that it would pursue legal means to find out Asyud’s fate and ensure he was not prejudiced against.

Ahwazi activist and journalist Mohammed al-Madhaji tweeted that Ankara had arrested Asyud and handed him over to Iran in exchange for Tehran’s handing over three Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) leaders to the Turks.

Habib Asyud is the deputy head of the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Al-Ahwaz was also its former head. In September 2018, the movement claimed responsibility for an attack targeting a military parade of the Iranian forces and the Revolutionary Guards in Ahwaz, which killed 29 people, most of them from the Revolutionary Guards, in addition to wounding about 60 others.

The movement aims to establish an independent Arab state in Ahwaz, Iran. Since hardliners seized power in Tehran in 1979, the country has turned into a large prison, with opposition voices being suppressed, and the mullah regime carried out horrific massacres in the 1980s, in addition to kidnapping and assassinating opponents in the decades since.

When Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei came to power, an organization called the Special Affairs Committee, working under his direct leadership, worked to plan the assassination of Shapour Bakhtiar, the prime minister of Iran at the time of the Shah, who was stabbed and strangled in Paris in August 1991. A similar fate befell Fereydoun Farrokhzad, an actor and social activist who was stabbed to death in August 1992 in Bonn, Germany, while a number of Kurds opposed to the regime were killed by bullets at the hands of the same committee in Germany. In August, it was announced that Jamshid Sharmahd, one of the most prominent opponents of the regime and a member of the monarchist opposition group Kingdom Assembly of Iran, had been kidnapped in California.