Tangled trail probably leads from Golders Green ambulance attack to Tehran

From Golders Green, where four ambulances belonging to a Jewish charity were set alight in the early hours of Monday, a tangled trail probably leads across two continents to Tehran.British investigators are circumspect. Speaking at an event on Monday evening, Mark Rowley, the head of the Metropolitan Police, described a “very relevant and rolling threat” from Iran to the UK, and specifically to Jewish targets, but warned it was still too early to attribute the attack in north London to Tehran.Others who are less bound by the imperatives of policing and politics are not so cautious. In interviews, experts, security officials and others all pointed to Iran, which has been linked to a series of very similar attacks in recent weeks that have all targeted Jewish sites around western Europe with relatively low-tech incendiary devices.Four days after the US and Israel launched their offensive against Iran, experts noted, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s elite al-Quds Force, which handles international military operations, warned: “The enemy should know that their happy days are over and they will no longer be safe anywhere in the world, not even in their own homes.”Since the beginning of the latest conflict, there have been attacks in Azerbaijan, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. All have been linked to Iran by local authorities.There have also been a series of attacks in Europe, all very similar to that in Golders Green. On 9 March, an improvised explosive device was detonated in front of a synagogue in the Belgian city of Liège. Four days later, another went off outside a synagogue in Rotterdam.Then a Jewish school and a commercial centre were targeted in Amsterdam, also with amateurish incendiary bombs. Two teenagers were arrested overnight between Monday and Tuesday after a vehicle parked outside a Jewish-owned business in Antwerp was torched.Much of the media coverage this week has focused on a video posted on Telegram shortly after the attack in Golders Green by a group calling itself Harakat al-Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia (HAYI), or the Islamic Movement of the Companions of the Righteous, which showed a clip of the burning vehicles and claimed a “historic bond” between Israel and the Machzike Hadath synagogue, where the ambulance service is based.The Telegraph reported on the advent of “Tehran’s newest terrorist proxy”, in effect equating HAYI with organisations such as Hamas, which runs half of Gaza and still has tens of thousands of members, and Hezbollah, a movement with an influential political wing, a powerful if now depleted arsenal of up to 25,000 rockets and missiles and a global web of businesses raising huge sums.Hamas was founded in 1987. Hezbollah, which has been described as a “state within a state” in Lebanon where it is based, was created with Iranian help around 1983. Comparing HAYI to either organisation, both of which have close, if complex, ties with Tehran, is far-fetched. Indeed, it is very unclear if any such group exists.Burnt-out remains at the scene of an arson attack on Jewish charity ambulances in Golders Green. Photograph: Amer Ghazzal/ShutterstockSecurity officials close to the investigation said the current “working assumption” was that “the group doesn’t exist and it is a front and a brand invented by Iranian intelligence or the Quds force”.The video of the Golders Green attack was first broadcast on social media channels affiliated with a pro-Iranian Shia militia, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, which was organised, funded, trained and equipped by the Revolutionary Guards. Its name and visual branding suggest inspiration from other Shia militant groups, researchers say.What is certain is that Iran has used unconventional attacks against its enemies around the world as a key tactic in its efforts to win an ongoing low-level conflict with much more conventionally powerful enemies – although it has been careful to ensure that evidence of its involvement in terrorism is kept to a minimum.Rowley said: “The rapid growth in recent years of Iranian state threats is grave: hostile state surveillance activity, 20 disrupted plots and recent attempted attacks on the Iranian diaspora. None of this is isolated. It is part of a rapidly shifting threat landscape.”Magnus Ranstorp, an author and veteran expert who has long tracked Iranian involvement with extremist and terrorist groups, said Tehran had always tried to maintain “plausible deniability” since its early involvement in the massive bombing of a US military base in 1982 in Lebanon and attacks in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994, when the Israeli embassy and a Jewish cultural centre were bombed in retaliation for Israeli strikes against Hezbollah.However, recent investigations and trials in Sweden, Greece and the US have revealed how Iranian intelligence or Revolutionary Guards officials have recruited individuals to carry out attacks, often working with criminal networks to provide manpower and resources. Two Iranians were charged last week with conducting hostile surveillance on the Jewish community in London for Tehran.Earlier this month, a Pakistani man was convicted in Brooklyn of planning to kill Donald Trump and Joe Biden as part of an Iranian plot. Asif Merchant admitted during his trial that the Guard Corps had tasked him with political assassinations in retaliation for the 2020 killing by the US of their revered commander Qassem Suleimani, and he described his recruitment by the Guards. Among a wealth of detail, he said his Iranian handler named three people in the course of conversations in Tehran.The attack in Golders Green is being treated as an antisemitic hate crime, not a terrorist incident, and there is still a possibility the attack was the work of individuals or a group acting independently.It comes less than six months after an attack on a synagogue in Manchester. According to the Community Security Trust (CST), there were 3,700 antisemitic incidents recorded in the UK in 2025, the second highest level ever and a 4% rise on the previous year.Ranstorp noted that the most recent wave of attacks was not lethal. “The Iranians have a record of killing people or trying to kill people, so for them to clearly try quite hard not to kill anyone is interesting. There is no need for them to put out big statements … but this is still about sending a message,” he said.