Renata Kiss, FISM News
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The growing fear of ‘sleeper cells’ in the U.S. is not without warrant.
Witnesses testified at a House committee hearing on Wednesday that a growing number of Iran-backed terrorists are lurking in the United States, threatening the safety of U.S. citizens.
According to their testimony, DHS officials must now assume that hundreds of Iranian-funded terror suspects have relocated to the U.S. with the intent to harm American citizens, including officials, at Iran’s command.
Former counterterrorism ambassador Nathan Sales said that even before the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel, “128 Hezbollah operatives have been arrested…over the years by the FBI.” Sales said there is “no guarantee” that more terrorist “gotaways” haven’t crossed the border given the mass influx of immigrants in recent years.
If the threat to American lives wasn’t enough, Sales went on to say that Iran is also “actively plotting to assassinate a number of former senior U.S. officials here on American soil.”
“Last year, the Justice Department announced charges against an [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] IRGC member believed to be the ringleader of a plot to murder John Bolton, the former national security adviser,” he said. “The would-be assassin reportedly also was targeting former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. These former officials and others like them now live under constant, 24-hour government protection because of the Iranian threat to their lives.”
Iranian-American dissident Masih Alinejad also recounted her experience living in constant fear of Iran in America. Since 2021, she has been “forced to relocate over a dozen times, under the supervision of the FBI.” She shared that on one occasion, a man with an AK-47 showed up at her home in Brooklyn to kill her “on direct orders from the Islamic Republic.”
According to Alinejad’s testimony, the Biden administration isn’t doing enough to hold Iran accountable.
“By not holding the regime accountable, the administration appears weak in the face of Iranian aggression,” she said. “Hamas’s attack on Israel should serve as a wake-up call. It is important for the White House to acknowledge the threats posed by [the] Iranian regime as national security threats.”
Robert Greenway, Director of the Center for National Defense at The Heritage Foundation, echoed these statements.
“Despite Iran’s escalation and warnings from policy experts that pursuing a return to a flawed and already expiring nuclear deal would prove disastrous,” Greenway said, “President Biden shifted American policy from pressure to accommodation in hopes of facilitating the restoration of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).”
He concluded that the Biden administration has directly funded the terrorist state by providing “unprecedented resources to the Islamic Republic” since 2021.
This comes as legal watchdog American First Legal initiated a probe into the Biden administration earlier this week over its suspected diplomatic ties to the Tehran regime. The group seeks to uncover documents that would include the administration’s $6 billion ransom deal with the Islamic State.