A fifth suspect has been arrested by police in the Netherlands investigating an explosion at a synagogue, amid concerns Iran is using Shiite proxies to attack Jewish targets in Europe.
The Rotterdam synagogue attack was preceded by an attack on a Jewish school in Amsterdam and followed the firebombing of a synagogue in the Belgian city of Liege.
“In the investigation into last week's explosion at the synagogue, a 19-year-old man from Tilburg was arrested in his hometown today,” said Dutch police. “His role is under investigation. This is the fifth suspect in this investigation.”
The four other suspects, aged 17 to 19, were detained shortly after the incident.
Justice Minister David van Weel said the possibility that Iran was involved in the attack was being investigated.
Responsibility for the attacks has been claimed by a new group calling itself Islamic Movement of the Companions of the Right. Social media posts from the group have included a video of the front of the Liege synagogue engulfed in flames.
The social media activity was directed through channels linked to Iraqi Shiite militia groups that are aligned to Iran and its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).
That raised fears that that Iraqi Shiite militia are co-ordinating the activity using messaging platforms such as Telegram.
Parallels have been drawn with Iran’s use of the Foxtrot criminal network in Sweden to recruit teenage criminals to attack Jewish and Israeli targets. The network's founder, Rawa Majid, has been sanctioned by the UK and the US as a result.
The attacks in Belgium and the Netherlands follow an explosion at the US Embassy in Oslo, for which three brothers of Iraqi heritage have been arrested. Two Iranians in the UK have been charged with spying for Iran after allegedly carrying out “hostile surveillance” of the Israeli embassy and Jewish targets in London.
While there have so far been no casualties, experts believe the attacks are part of Iran’s psychological warfare against Europe and a warning to its populations that more attacks may follow should it send military forces to fight alongside the US and Israel.
Phillip Smyth, who has been researching Iran’s proxies, told The National that it’s his “working assumption” that the Iraqi militia Kataib Hezbollah is co-ordinating the attacks and the accompanying social media.
“I don't actually think it's a real group. I think this is a front group that was manufactured to claim attacks for disparate cells that the Iranians have influence over in Europe,” he said.
“Kataib Hezbollah was the first one to put up links to this new group and it has accounts linked with them.”
Mr Smyth said the new group’s logo, with a gun being held in a clenched fist and the language being used, would suggested a reworking of a formula.
“They've done this same exact move before. They create a ton of different little groups to make you think the network is much larger than it may actually be.”
But he said the efforts of the Iranians to distance themselves from attacks by the use of proxies is not convincing and is “something that I like to call implausible, plausible deniability”.
He explained that the IRGC or Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence may have been cultivating links within the Iraqi Shiite diaspora.
Mr Smyth said “there are a lot of Iraqi Shia that are living in Scandinavia and the Netherlands” and there has been what he described as examples of a “propagandistic push” aimed at supporting the Iraqi Shiite militias.
He said that the IRGC and the militias could draw upon a “few different models, including the Foxtrot one in Sweden”.
“There's probably a pre-existing series of networks that they have that they can either turn to by electronic means or maybe approach them through whatever agent they have in the country.”
All of this amounts to “a new tactic for Europe” that is “a little bit more hands-off”.
Magnus Ranstorp, a researcher on terrorism at the Swedish Defence University, described the Islamic Movement of the Companions of the Right as a “pop-up” organisation aimed at directing members of the Iraqi Shiite diaspora at Jewish targets on behalf of Iran.
He also drew parallels with Iran’s use of the Foxtrot network as part of attempts at plausible deniability.
“The Iranian ambassador was on TV in Sweden and he denied the use of criminals,” Mr Ranstorp said.
“He said: ‘Why do you think we need criminal networks? Prove it.' They use middlemen in order to put a distance between themselves and these different groups.”
Inna Rudolf, a senior research fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence at King's College London, is more cautious about drawing a direct link to Iraqi Shiite militias.
She pointed out that the rifle used in the group’s logo resembles a sniper rifle rather than the AK-47 traditionally used by most of the Iran-aligned Iraqi and Lebanese groups.
Also the name Companions of the Right has never been mentioned before as an armed faction affiliated with Iraq's Islamic resistance and has not been featured as such in the usual Telegram channels used by the groups to promote their armed operations, she argues.
Iraqi Islamic resistance groups have never explicitly called for attacks on Jewish sites of worship, but have focused their rhetoric on the targeting of US and Israeli interests in the region.
“I would never rule out Iran's readiness to deploy proxies or make use of any form of volunteers for the cause,” she told The National.
“However, I would rule out that at this moment there is a direct link to Iraq's Islamic resistance movement as their attention now is on the region and they have all hands on deck attacking US and Israeli targets in the region – inside and outside of Iraq.
“This does not mean that the new facade group cannot have included Iraqis or other Arabic-speaking supporters of the Islamic resistance cause residing in Europe who have decided to take on this task with or without IRGC support.”
Dr Rudolf stressed there is at this stage no evidence directly linking the attacks other than the most recent rhetoric deployed after the Amsterdam attack.
“If there is an Iranian involvement, it would aim to have the psychological effect of dissuading the Europeans from intervening in the war, while increasing the pressure on them to co-ordinate better in convincing their American and Israeli allies to end the conflict as soon as possible, in order to avoid potential spillover attacks in Europe.”
