Last July, Israel’s ambassador to Argentina gave an interview to Latin America’s leading news platform, Infobae, where he named Edgardo Ruben (aka Suhail) Assad, Abdallah Cerrilla, and Abdul Karim Paz, three Argentinian-born and Iran-trained Shi’a clerics, as part of an Iran terror network. The network has links to Sheikh Mohsen Rabbani, one of the masterminds of the 1992 bombing of Israel’s embassy in Buenos Aires and the 1994 bombing of the AMIA, the Buenos Aires Jewish cultural center.
The accusation that Iranian-trained Argentinian clerics have links to terrorism may seem unusual. However, in fact, it is consistent with Iran’s efforts to export its revolutionary message abroad. Iran is both a clerical regime and the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism. The clergy takes the lead in giving religious endorsements, moral justifications, guidance, and leadership when it comes to terrorism.
One of the places where faith meets terror is Al Mustafa International University, a religious school based in the Iranian city of Qom—the home of Shiite religious seminars—which focuses on training non-Persian speakers, including a large cohort of converts to Shiite Islam from all over the world. Its extensions, including those in Europe, which have recently come under the attention of German investigators, may be a likely target of closer scrutiny by law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
Both the US Department of the Treasury and Canada’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs have sanctioned Al Mustafa University in 2020 and 2022, respectively. Treasury noted that Al Mustafa “maintains dozens of international branches that facilitate [Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force] operations through the recruitment of international students, including Americans,” while Canada’s designation stated that Al Mustafa is “an entity that spreads the regime’s ideology abroad through its global branches.”
Sheikh Mohsen Rabbani, a mentor to all three Argentinian clerics named by Israel’s ambassador in Buenos Aires, was not just a key figure in the 1992 and 1994 bombings. Since his return to Iran in 1997, he has headed Islam Oriente, the Al Mustafa department in charge of indoctrinating and training aspiring Shiite clergy from Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries. His disciples now run Shiite Islamic centers in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela, among other places.
Alongside Islam Oriente, Al Mustafa runs programs in dozens of foreign languages on its main campus in Qom, Iran, while managing foreign campuses in far-flung places both within and outside the Middle East, including Berlin, Beirut, Johannesburg, and London. Graduates, in turn, have established mosques and cultural centers across the globe, where they propagate the teachings of their alma mater, promote regime propaganda, and recruit converts to its cause. Such centers exist and thrive across Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and North America.
The confluence of militant clergy and terror activities is a result of the indoctrination imparted by Al Mustafa teachers and has reverberated across the globe well beyond the mayhem Iran and its proxies unleashed in Argentina in 1992 and 1994. According to Washington Institute scholar Hamdi Malik, the Iraqi branch of Al Mustafa, for example, is closely tied to the US-sanctioned terror organization Kataib Hezbollah (KH), with two leaders of KH also serving as officials there.
A Tajik graduate of Al Mustafa, Mohamad Ali Burhanov, was implicated in terror plots against Israelis in Central Asia. Another member of the Al Mustafa network, a Brazilian convert and anti-Israel activist, was in close contact with members of the Hezbollah terror cell implicated in Brazil’s Trapiche investigation—which, in November 2023, uncovered a Hezbollah plot to recruit Brazilian nationals to carry out attacks against Jewish targets in Brazil’s capital, Brasilia. The Jamestown Foundation recently revealed the role of a Thai professor at Al Mustafa in mediating Hamas’ release of Thai hostages held in Gaza through his ties with the Iranian regime.
While the US and Canada have sanctioned Al Mustafa, and plots and terror links keep emerging, the organization’s branches continue to operate abroad. Just recently, Al Mustafa’s chancellor undertook an official visit to Brazil, a home to many of its graduates and a key center of Iranian and Hezbollah operations in Latin America. Last year, the German news outlet Bild revealed that over 700 affiliates of the Berlin branch of Al Mustafa were under close watch from Germany’s security services. So far, the Iranian-affiliated school remains active, although pressure is mounting—its PayPal account was reportedly deactivated in November 2024. German authorities have also closed mosques and Islamic centers linked to Iran and Hezbollah, including the Bremen Al Mustafa community center in 2022 and the Iran regime-linked Hamburg Shi’a Mosque in July 2024. The former chairman of the Bremen center, whom German authorities arrested in 2022, was reportedly a former member of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan military unit.
Despite these enforcement actions, Berlin’s Al Mustafa remains open, and so do other Islamic centers which, while not institutionally tied to Al Mustafa, are run by its graduates. That is the case of the Hannover Shiite Payame Nour Mosque, whose sheikh is Radwan Harb, a graduate of Al Mustafa University, according to his Facebook page.
Sheikh Radwan, a Lebanese national, has close family links to Hezbollah. His late brother Ali is a Hezbollah martyr—the sheikh visited his grave and posted a photo of the occasion on his Facebook page. Radwan has also frequently memorialized other fallen fighters of the group. He posted a martyr’s eulogy for Ali Hussein Khalil in 2022, on the anniversary of his death, and on November 28, 2024, he eulogized multiple Hezbollah martyrs from his hometown of Al Mansouri who were killed during the recent war with Israel. “Few are those who ascend the heights of immortality, sublimity and greatness, who give a soul and take souls,” Radwan commented in the latter post.
Radwan’s posts leave little doubt about his sympathies for the Iranian regime and its proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas. His contacts also attest to his closeness to both the world of Iran’s overseas networks and Hezbollah expatriates. One of them is Fadel Raad, whom German authorities arrested on December 3, 2024, on suspicion of being a Hezbollah member. Raad and Radwan are mutual social media friends and have 144 contacts in common.
The sheikh also has connections with the now closed Iranian center in Hamburg, both through social media friendships with the mosque’s leadership and in person—he was their guest, representing the Hannover Mosque, at the opening of a new center in 2017. Beyond Germany’s borders, Radwan is friends with an Iranian center in Ghana and with the former Iranian cultural attaché to Algeria, Ali Moussawi, who was expelled from Algeria for seeking to spread Shiite Islam in the country.
Radwan is but one example of Al Mustafa’s graduates around the world, whose daily work and contact networks faithfully reflect the worldview of the Iranian regime and the institution that trained them. Given the track record that Al Mustafa has—sanctioned for indoctrinating its recruits, counting terrorists among its graduates, and being dedicated to spreading the Islamic Republic’s hateful ideology beyond its borders—it is remarkable that few countries so far have followed the US and Canada in issuing sanctions and continue to let the organization operate unhindered.