Iran threat to UK has increased ‘significantly’

The threat of an Iranian attack on citizens living in the UK has increased ‘significantly’ since 2022, the UK Parliament’s intelligence watchdog said in a report published on Thursday (July 10). The BBC reported that the British Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee has recommended that the government take action, describing the threat from Iran as ‘persistent’ and ‘unprecedented’. The committee says that the Iranian nuclear threat has increased since the United States withdrew from a key international agreement in 2018. The Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee has expressed concern about the increase in the threat from Iran and has recommended that action be taken ‘on a priority basis’. The 260-page report on Britain’s national security in relation to Iran was published on Thursday. The report covers events up to August 2023. The report said there were at least 15 assassination or kidnapping attempts against British citizens or UK residents between the start of 2022 and August 2023. The parliamentary intelligence committee has urged Tehran to take strong action against such activities. The committee’s chairman, Lord Beamish, said Iran posed a widespread, persistent and unpredictable threat to the UK, UK citizens and UK interests. He recommended that the government consider whether it was “legally feasible and practical” to ban Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organisation and make a full statement to parliament on the matter. British ministers have come under pressure to ban the IRGC in recent years, but the committee acknowledged that there were “complexities” in such a decision. The committee warned that Iranian espionage in the UK had increased, but the committee considered the threat from Iran to be lower than from Russia and China.