Masih Alinejad doesn't look like a threat to anyone. But to the Iranian clerical-fascist regime, she's a potent symbol of the opposition.
Alinejad has been a leading opposition figure in Iran since 2009 when she was one of the leaders of the massive protests against the rigged presidential election. Forced to leave the country that year in fear for her life, she has since dedicated herself to raising awareness around the world of the oppression of women by the Iranian regime.
In 2019, several members of her family were arrested, including her brother Alireza, who was tried and sentenced to eight years in prison, where he remains.
Then, the Iranian government got serious. They came up with an elaborate plot to lure her back to Iran. But her family refused to participate. The Iranian secret police then tried to kidnap her in 2021 and spirit her back to Tehran. That plan also failed.
Finally, they tried to kill her.
In October 2024, Iranian general Ruhollah Bazghandi, along with six other Iranian operatives, was charged in absentia in an alleged plot to kill Alinejad. A separate plot involving the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps was uncovered in 2024; this one was a plot to assassinate not only Alinejad but also Donald Trump.
It was a plot to assassinate her in 2022 that led to two men now standing trial for taking part in a murder-for-hire plot. Rafat Amirov and Polad Omarov, members of the Russian mafia whom Tehran hired to kill Alinejad, are being tried, while several other Iranians in New York are also accused in the same plot.
The statements from the prosecution and defense in Federal District Court in Manhattan provided a glimpse of what was to come during the first detailed examination of what U.S. government officials have described as a brazen and relentless effort by figures tied to the Iranian government to target Ms. Alinejad, a journalist and commentator who left the country in 2009.
Since then, she has emerged as a sharp and persistent critic of the government there, known for starting a campaign against the laws that require women to wear head scarves. In 2018, women in Iran took part in rare protests that seemed tied to Ms. Alinejad’s campaign, removing their scarves in public and waving them on sticks, like flags.
That year, according to prosecutors, government officials in Iran offered to pay Ms. Alinejad’s relatives to induce her to travel to Turkey, planning to abduct her once she arrived. That tactic failed and soon afterward, prosecutors have said, a network in Iran led by an intelligence official named Alireza Shavaroghi Farahani, conspired to kidnap Ms. Alinejad and take her from New York City to Iran.
In July 2022, Khalid Mehdiyev went so far as to visit Alinejad's home in Brooklyn, looking for a way in. He had a loaded automatic weapon in his trunk when police stopped him a few hours later for driving on a suspended license.
Alinejad is the stone in the ayatollahs' shoes that they can't get rid of. She has led the most successful sign of resistance in Iran — the anti-hijab movement — since the beginning. She almost singlehandedly made the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the morality police a national rallying cry. Amini was not wearing her hijab correctly when the police dragged her off the street and off to prison. She died in hospital a few hours later.
The attack on Salman Rushdie in 2022, after the fatwa against him was first issued in 1989, shows that the Iranian regime never gives up trying to kill someone it wants dead. Alinejad will have to live in fear for the rest of her life, as will her family.
It's a price she was willing to accept when she began her opposition crusade against the Iranian clerics.
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