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In July 2022, Masih Alinejad was picking tomatoes and cucumbers in the sunflower-filled backyard of her Brooklyn home when she spotted a burly man loitering on her front porch.
He wasn’t there to admire the foliage.
Khalid Mehdiyev, part of an Eastern European organized-crime network, had allegedly been hired to kill Alinejad, the Iranian American journalist and human rights activist, in a $500,000 murder-for-hire plot directed by Tehran.
Police foiled the plan, arresting Mehdiyev after finding an AK-47, 66 rounds of ammunition and a ski mask in his car.
The case highlighted a global threat extending far beyond Iran’s borders. While Tehran’s ballistic missiles, nuclear ambitions and support for proxies like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis dominate news headlines, the Islamic Republic has increasingly pursued activists, journalists and other perceived enemies on Western soil, often by outsourcing violence to local thugs and giving the regime distance and plausible deniability.
Security officials call the practice “transnational repression.” Britain’s domestic security agency, MI5, has tracked at least 20 potentially deadly plots linked to Tehran since 2022.
Fardad Farahzad knows all too well what it means to report on a regime that seeks to silence its critics.
Born in Bandar Anzali, a port city on Iran’s Caspian Sea coast, Farahzad began his broadcasting career as a presenter at the BBC World Service in London. He now anchors 24 With Fardad Farahzad on Iran International, a major Persian- and English-language outlet critical of the regime.
The Islamic Republic’s intelligence minister designated the news channel as a “terrorist” organization in late 2022.
Around the same time, in 2022, as protests swept Iran following the regime’s killing of a 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman named Mahsa Amini, Farahzad was on the frontlines of the coverage.
What he did not know was that the regime was trying to kill him, too.
“I learned about it a year later in 2023 while I was in Israel covering the horrific October 7 attacks,” he told The Post.
An investigative journalist at the U.K.-based outlet ITV News had uncovered evidence of a plot against Farahzad and his then-colleague, Sima Sabet.
The assassination plot was codenamed “The Wedding.”
Farahzad, who isn’t married, was designated “The Groom” and Sabet “The Bride.”
“The ITV reporter came to our office and opened his laptop and there he had all the evidence,” Farahzad recalled. “WhatsApp messages, notes that were communicated between the guy who was supposed to assassinate me and the people who were ordering the attack.”
Farahzad knew that working for an outlet critical of the regime would come with risks, “but it’s something different when you realize the extent the regime will go to assassinate you on foreign soil,” he told The Post.
“That was quite shocking because it was the first time I realized that this was a very well-planned plot to kill me,” he said.
The assassination plot had been greenlit by Mohammad Reza Ansari, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander linked to overseas assassination operations, including the unsuccessful plots to assassinate former national security advisor John Bolton and former secretary of state Mike Pompeo.
Since the January 2020 US drone strike that killed IRGC General Qassem Soleimani, American officials have uncovered Iran-linked plots targeting US figures, including attempts to assassinate President Trump and his youngest son, Barron Trump.
Iran International and other Persian-language broadcasters critical of Tehran’s theocratic government like BBC Persian had long faced threats by the regime. As those threats escalated, Iran International moved its broadcasting operations from London to Washington, DC, in February 2023, following advice from London’s Metropolitan Police.
The threats to Iran International reporters didn’t end with Farahzad.
In March 2024, his colleague, Pouria Zeraati, was stabbed in the leg three times as he walked to his car near his home in southwest London. At least two Romanian nationals were involved in the attack. The judge presiding over the case concluded that it was state-sponsored and carried out on behalf of the Islamic Republic.
Asked whether anywhere in the world was beyond the Islamic Republic’s reach in 2026, Farahzad was blunt.
“Not really,” he said.
“Forget about the Iranian regime,” he added, “but if the government of Maldives wants to kill you, they can kill you. States have enormous power. They have diplomatic immunity. They have financial resources. And that’s a tiny state, let alone the Iranian regime, which has a long history of intimidation and killing its dissidents in Europe.”
Yet Farahzad believes the regime may be more vulnerable than it appears at home.
“With the blockade continuing in the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s lifeline of exporting oil is diminished,” he told The Post.
“There is a lot of fire underneath in Iran,” he added, “and I think the people need one spark to see another uprising again in Iran, especially as the economic situation becomes more difficult.”
Jonathan Harounoff is a British author and the host of “UNscripted with Jonathan Harounoff.”