Between intent and capability: Assessing the lack of Iranian attacks on the U.S. homeland

Three days into the Iran war, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said the quiet part out loud: The Revolutionary Guard’s Qods Force has long carried out plots around the world and now intended to deploy those capabilities against the U.S. homeland. The United States, a Qods Force statement carried on Iranian television warned, “will no longer be safe” as the Qods Force targets Americans within the homeland and abroad. “The enemy should know that their happy days are over and they will no longer be safe anywhere in the world, not even in their own homes.” U.S. authorities went on a nationwide high alert at the onset of war against Iran, with the FBI mobilizing to “address and disrupt any potential threats to the homeland” and warning state and local law enforcement of “an elevated threat” posed by Iran and its proxies in the homeland.

And yet, as of this writing, two months after the Revolutionary Guards’ threat, authorities have yet to report a single homeland plot specifically tied to Iran. Lone offenders appear to have carried out attacks on their own, some clearly angered by the war, but authorities have yet to establish links between these plots and Iranian intelligence or security agencies, their terrorist proxies, or criminals hired as cutouts to carry out attacks.

This is surprising, not only because of the explicit Revolutionary Guard threat to target the homeland, but because Iranian-linked plots have been thwarted elsewhere around the world since the war began and because Iran has a track record of plotting attacks in the United States. Indeed, Iran and its proxies have spent years investing in what U.S. counterterrorism officials describe as a “homeland option” in the United States.

Read more at War on the Rocks