November 19, 2021
Turkey has caught the Islamic Republic trying to kidnap another Iranian defector to haul him back into Iran for punishment.
Several other kidnap attempts have been carried out in the Middle East without a hitch in recent years. But this one was foiled and the kidnapers including two Iranian citizens are now in Turkish cells.
Many suspect that Turkey looked the other way and allowed Iran to pull off an earlier kidnaping, but let the latest plot continued only until the Turks could bag the Iranian plotters and bring about maximum embarrassment for the Islamic Republic reflecting the declining quality of relations between the two countries since the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia one year ago.
According to the Turkish media, the target of the latest kidnap attempt was a former helicopter pilot with the Iranian Army, Major Mehrdad Abdar-bashi, who was living as an asylum-applicant in Van, the largest city in eastern Turkey. He said he fled Iran and sought asylum in Turkey after refusing an Army assignment to Syria.
Abdarbashi told Iran International that a woman contacted him pretending that she wanted to learn about how to handle foreign currency exchanges.
Abdarbashi said he always alerted Turkish intelligence when he was contacted by strangers. The Turks bugged the woman’s cellphone and learned she was working for the Iranian government.
Abdarbashi said, “Turkish intelligence told me to accept her invitation to dinner [at her home] and promised to protect me. So, I accepted.”
They said the woman planned to lace his food with drugs so he would pass out and a group of agents could whisk him across the border into Iran.
Almost four weeks after the September 24 dinner date, Turkey announced that its National Intelligence Organization had arrested two Iranian intelligence officers and six Turks working for them before they could kidnap their Iranian target. The Turkish Anadolu news agency said two of the men were arrested as they entered the woman’s residence and the others picked up separately.
The Islamic Republic and its media have been silent about the case.
An unnamed senior Turkish government official was quoted by Al-Monitor as saying, “Iran has been crossing our red lines despite all our warnings. We sometimes need to make a public stand against their habitual attempts at espionage. There are other Iranian soldiers who sought refuge in Turkey and we have been protecting them. It would be unwise for Tehran to think they can come here and act as if this is their backyard.”
This is the fifth known plot launched by Iran to try to kidnap regime opponents living abroad and bring them back to Iran—a presumed effort to frighten regime opponents into silence. But Major Abdarbashi had not been an active opponent of the regime, so why he was targeted remains unclear.
Earlier this year, the United States foiled an effort by Iranian intelligence to kidnap Masih Alinejad, who has vocally battled the Islamic Republic over women’s issues. The US said four men planned to kidnap her in Brooklyn and spirit her to Venezuela by boat, before flying her to Iran. The four men are in Iran and have not been apprehended.
In October 2020, Habib Chaab, an Iranian-Swedish leader of the Arab Struggle for the Liberation of Ahvaz, was lured to Istanbul and then kidnaped. His has confessed on Iranian state television to acts of terrorism. He remains in Iran and the Judiciary announced his indictment for terrorism earlier this month.
One year earlier, in October 2019, Iran lured Ruhollah Zam from exile in France to Baghdad, where they kidnaped him and spirited him across the border into Iran. He was soon tried and executed. Zam had operated an anti-regime website and Telegram channel named AmadNews.
In 2016, Jamshid Sharmahd, a resident of Germany who ran an opposition radio station, was apparently lured to Tajikistan where Pasdar agents grabbed him and smuggled him into Iran.
The kidnapings are a relatively new ploy although they may now end since the last two plots have blown up in the regime’s face. More commonly than kidnapings, the regime has resorted hundreds of times over the decades to assassinations of its opponents.
The rationale for the kidnapings is unclear since the regime has only made a major figure of Zam. The others are being held but without any fanfare or continuing publicity to their cases.