TERRORISMIran and Terrorism: What the U.S. Strikes Could Mean for Homeland Security
The longer the war in Iran goes on, the greater the incentive for the Islamic Republic to apply all forms of asymmetric warfare, including retaliation that could affect the U.S. homeland, in hopes of coercing Trump to abandon his war aims.
After the United States and Israel began attacking Iran on February 28, questions have arisen about the potential dangers for the U.S. homeland. The Department of Homeland Security has reportedly warned of potential lone-wolf attacks and cyberattacks in the wake of the strikes, and state and local authorities have moved to heightened alert for any retaliation on American soil. A shooting in Austin, Texas, over the weekend, in which two people were killed and fourteen wounded, is now under investigation by the FBI as a potential act of terrorism. This has further ramped up tensions and security concerns that have emerged in the United States since the strikes on Iran began.
To assess the scope of the threat and better understand Iran’s past use of terrorism and asymmetric tactics, CFR spoke with Bruce Hoffman, the council’s senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security. Hoffman traces Iran’s history of sponsoring attacks against the United States, explains how the current conflict could embolden new threats, and raises pointed questions about whether the U.S. government—and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in particular—is positioned to respond.
Iran is considered a state sponsor of terrorism. What does that mean? How has it engaged in that activity in the past?
For Iran, state-sponsorship of terrorism has been a critical instrument of its force projection and foreign policy since the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979. The pivotal event in this long-sustained campaign was the November 1979 seizure of fifty-two American hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran by a group of militant Iranian “students.”
For 444 days, these so-called students—who claimed to have acted independently, without government support or encouragement—held the world’s most powerful country at bay. Throughout that protracted episode, they earned unparalleled worldwide media attention for their anti-American cause, ultimately costing an American president his reelection to office.
As events would later show, this incident was only the beginning of an increasingly serious and extensive state-sponsored terrorism campaign directed by the Iranian regime of the then Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini against the United States as well as other Western countries.
