The Trump administration should add Iran’s intelligence organization to the list of foreign terrorist groups in order to hold Tehran’s agents accountable for the various terrorist acts they have allegedly committed over decades, a leading Iranian opposition group said Wednesday.
Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence Services, or MOIS, whose agents operate closely with the Quds Force — the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ directorate that trains proxy forces across the globe — remains “heavily involved with terrorism” either through groups like Hezbollah or in direct operations against Tehran’s enemies, said Alireza Jafarzadeh, deputy director for the National Council of Resistance of Iran.
“If [the U.S.] wants to fight terrorism, you designate the MOIS” as a terror organization, he said during an event Wednesday, unveiling the council’s latest assessment of Iranian intelligence activities in Europe and the West.
The council’s call to add the MOIS to a State Department list that now includes al Qaeda, Hamas and the Islamic State came a day before the Trump administration’s deadline to end waivers for some of Iran’s biggest energy importers to buy Iran’s oil and natural gas.
The move, a fallout from President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the 2015 international nuclear deal with Iran, is designed to eliminate a major source of the regime’s cash and force Iran back to the bargaining table.
“We will no longer grant any exemptions,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said. “We’re going to zero across the board. Our goal has been to get countries to cease importing Iranian oil altogether.”
China, India and Turkey are among the biggest consumers of Iranian oil, and it’s not clear if the U.S. threat will result in an immediate shutdown of Iranian sales.
The Trump administration also recently added Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps on the official terror list — the first time an official military branch of a sovereign country had been so designated. Iran vowed to retaliate, in part by saying it now considered all U.S. forces in the region to be terrorists as well.
Mr. Jafarzadeh said that, based on the record, MOIS merits the same treatment as the IRGC.
“They are kind of two faces of the same coin,” he said. The Iranian intelligence ministry actually began as an IRCG directorate, created by Tehran in the wake of the failed 2009 overthrow of then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said Mr. Jafarzadeh.
Operating from its European hub in their embassy in Austria, Iranian intelligence officers have reportedly
Source:
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/may/1/irans-intelligence-service-tagged-by-exile-group-a/
Global News 
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