(OTTAWA) For the Canadian government to include Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) on its list of terrorist entities is desirable “in principle”, but in practice it is “unrealistic”, says an expert from the ‘Iran.
Posted at 9:34 p.m.
The Liberals are struggling these days to justify the fact that, even though they supported a conservative motion in June 2018 calling for the Iranian regime’s armed wing to be “immediately listed” on its list, they still have not done so.
The issue resurfaced after young Mahsa Amini was beaten to death in Tehran for exposing wisps of her hair in public. If the government announced that sanctions would be imposed on the regime, it seems annoyed by the issue of the GRI.
“We will continue to [évaluer] the situation with our officials, ”said Public Security Minister Marco Mendicino, for example, in a press scrum on Wednesday, without explaining why the file was delayed.
PHOTO ADRIAN WYLD, THE CANADIAN PRESS
Public Security Minister Marco Mendicino
Adding this force to Ottawa’s list is not as simple as it seems, said Thomas Juneau, associate professor of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa, in an interview.
“The force is made up of 150,000 people, and there are also thousands of veterans who have been conscripted,” explains the specialist in Iranian politics. Some of them were therefore enlisted against their will, and sometimes as support staff, not as soldiers.
“If the IRGC is designated as a terrorist entity, the task of the intelligence agencies would be enormous. Their ability to control all the sanctions that Canada has imposed is already overwhelmed,” adds Thomas Juneau.
The political scientist advocates “targeted sanctions”, for example against leaders of the Iranian regime who send to Canada children who live in opulence and whose presence in the country is “extremely demoralizing” for the Iranian diaspora.
On Monday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced sanctions against “dozens of Iranian individuals and officials,” including “several members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard leadership.”
It was still unclear on Wednesday who was being sanctioned.
Canada’s list of terrorist entities includes nearly 80 groups and organizations.
It includes the al-Quds Brigade of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, “the clandestine unit of the IRGC in charge of operations carried out abroad and the diffusion in the world of the ideology of the Islamic revolution through, among other things, activities that facilitate terrorism,” one describes on a government website.
The latest groups to be blacklisted are Aryan Strikeforce, James Mason, Three Percenters, and Islamic State — Democratic Republic of Congo, in June 2021.