First published in Israel National News on November 3, 2026.
In mid-September, Fars, the agency close to the Revolutionary Guard, published a clip announcing the launch of Alaj (Persian for “cure”), a monitoring and intelligence system.
Hamshahri, a newspaper tied to the Tehran municipality, and Mashregh News, a site close to the security agencies, carried the story. The system’s stated goal is to identify and punish “traitors” living abroad, including separatists and those who promote sanctions or military action.
The situation
The platform threatens to strip targets of citizenship privileges, to cut off their financial and media access, and urges citizens to report them through the system’s website, Telegram and Bale, an Iranian app, while promising that informants’ identities will remain confidential and encrypted.
Here, the regime defines itself: the Iranian dissident is a disease in need of a “cure.” The system promises concealment to the informant while publicizing the target. According to IranWire, the platform publishes the names, photos, national ID numbers and fathers’ names of targeted people, and claims to have monitored 1,600 people, 600 of them identified through public reports.
The campaign is a call to turn Iranians in the diaspora into watchers of each other, and to keep those who have escaped the regime’s direct control inside a circle of fear. This is no minor detail in the record of repression. The campaign is evidence that the mullahs’ regime regards emigrants as a front line and treats them with the instruments of war. In London, Berlin, Toronto and Los Angeles live Iranians beyond the reach of the regime’s immediate grip, yet the regime tries to pull them back into the dominion of fear.
In my assessment, herein lies the paradox: the Iranian regime, which fills the world with noise about confronting “global arrogance,” is waging a campaign against Iranian people who have chosen freedom. In June, Mizan, a newspaper affiliated with the judiciary, quoted the head of the judiciary in Isfahan province, Asadollah Jafari, as saying that seizing expatriates’ property would make their gatherings outside embassies in Europe and America “emptier, weaker and more hopeless.”
In September, the authorities announced the seizure of 240 properties and assets, including 143 in Tehran, and the freezing of 182 bank accounts. The measures covered property belonging to journalists at Iran International and Manoto and to activists living abroad, on charges of “propaganda in favor of hostile governments.”
For this regime, success means silencing citizens abroad. The judge who boasts of emptying protest squares in Europe is describing a deterrence operation conducted through the courts. Recent years reveal an Iranian intelligence apparatus with expanding tools and a single purpose. The apparatus lured the journalist Ruhollah Zam to Iraq in 2019, transferred him to Iran and executed him a year later. The same apparatus lured Habib Chaab, a resident of Sweden, to Turkey in 2020, transferred him to Iran and executed him in 2023.
The apparatus kidnapped Jamshid Sharmahd, a California resident, while he was traveling in 2020. Tehran later announced his execution in October 2024, and Germany responded by closing Iran’s three consulates. In July, a British court imprisoned two Romanian men for stabbing the media figure Pouria Zeraati in London. The judge stated that she was certain the attack had been carried out for, and in the service of, a foreign power.
So, the message to the Iranian dissident: living outside Iran does not, by itself, make dissidents safe. Alongside physical violence, the regime exploits the trust Iranian dissidents place in their acquaintances in order to penetrate their devices. On 15 September, Britain, the United States and the Netherlands warned of an Iranian spyware program that begins by impersonating friends on messaging apps, then installs itself on computers to steal messages and activate the microphone.
In this way, the spyware reaches what direct surveillance cannot: private conversations, contacts inside Iran, and information that can be used to put others under pressure. Seizing homes and freezing accounts turns the families of Iranian dissidents into silent hostages and makes an Iranian’s freedom abroad costly for relatives inside the country.
The home becomes more than private property. The home becomes a means of subjugating the owner, and family ties become an instrument of blackmail. The regime can silence many without direct force, simply by making them weigh every word for fear that a relative will pay the price. Iranian dissidents end up imposing censorship on themselves, and fear does the work the agencies would otherwise have to do.
Denunciation is the most corrosive of these tools for trust within the Iranian community, because denunciation targets the fabric that binds dissidents to others as much as denunciation targets dissidents themselves. Assassination kills an individual. Planting doubt damages an entire community.
When the Alaj intelligence platform claims that more than a third of those targeted were named in public reports, the message is that the danger may be your neighbor or colleague. The message lands more heavily when an Iranian in London reads about the trial of three members of their community, which began on 6 October, on charges of surveilling journalists at Iran International as a prelude to targeting them – charges the defendants denied.
Yet the possibility of infiltration does not mean the whole community is compromised. This is what the regime wants people to forget, because its aim is to raise the cost of trust until organizing becomes exhausting, meeting becomes risky, and every initiative becomes suspect.
If the diaspora had no impact, the diaspora would not warrant this effort. Iranian emigrants run media that reach homes despite blocking, maintain contacts inside the country that bypass the regime’s control, and can address foreign governments in their own languages. Their presence demonstrates that leaving the country does not sever their engagement with public life there.
The regime can ban a newspaper or arrest a protester inside Iran. The regime cannot monopolize what Iranians say about their country beyond Iran’s borders. The regime can harm Iranian dissidents, but the regime cannot persuade them.
What can be done
Host countries should treat this cross-border repression as a threat to their own national security, not merely as an asylum matter. They should combine the pursuit of assassination and financing networks with protection for targets against the blackmail that often precedes or substitutes for violence.
Protecting a journalist remains incomplete if the route to work is secure but the family remains a lever for threats. Protecting a media organization’s headquarters falls short if staff remain exposed to data collection and defamation.
Governments should also shut down the channels of an Iranian apparatus that presents itself as an intelligence service and solicits information about residents abroad, and close the accounts that apparatus uses on global platforms. Protecting targets requires disabling the tools used to monitor them.
The greater the assurance Iranian dissidents have that threats will meet a serious response, the less able the regime becomes to isolate them and convince them that silence is the only way to survive. Iranians should recognize that those who seize their homes, kidnap their relatives and publish their photographs on denunciation platforms sit in Tehran, not in neighboring capitals.
The regime gains whenever disagreements among Iranians themselves, or with their neighbors, turn into feuds that drain the energy needed to confront the regime. Every hostility directed at a neighbor diverts effort from the real adversary who is pursuing them.
Whoever seizes a home in Tehran to silence a banner in Berlin is admitting that an Iranian’s departure from the country’s borders does not extinguish the ability to influence events there. This is the antinomy of the Iranian regime. The regime is strong in state apparatuses, insecure in legitimacy, capable of harm and incapable of persuasion.
In my assessment, the Alaj platform points to the regime’s own disease rather than curing the diaspora, and the fear Tehran exports is a reflection of the fear that lives within the regime.
