Study on networks: Iran's left-wing extremist allies in Germany

For Mina Ahadi, the threat continues. Just last week, eggs were thrown against the windows of her apartment, she reports to the taz. Not the first time this year. Insults, death threats, police protection, she has known all of this for a long time. The 70-year-old is chairwoman of the Central Council of Ex-Muslims and a vocal critic of the Tehran regime.

Exiled Iranian opposition members like Ahadi sense how far the regime's arm reaches. Secret service agents and their henchmen have attempted and carried out numerous assassinations and attacks in Germany and Europe over the past decades. Recently they have been directed primarily against Jews, synagogues and supporters of Israel. Anti-Semitism, the destruction of Israel and the global “export of revolution” are central components of the regime’s ideology.

For years, regime critics have called for the closure of the Islamic Center Hamburg (IZH), which served as a central bridgehead for Shiite state Islamism in Europe. In July 2024, the center in Hamburg and its branches in Munich, Frankfurt and Berlin were banned by the Federal Ministry of the Interior because they propagated “an Islamist, totalitarian ideology” that would “support Hezbollah terrorists and spread aggressive anti-Semitism.” The center is suing the Federal Administrative Court, but a decision is still pending.

But was the ban effective? “In any case, it was an important signal to the Islamic regime in Iran,” says Ahadi. At the same time, the regime's activities continued and by no means disappeared.

A new analysis by the NGO Democ and the American Jewish Committee in Berlin comes to the same conclusion. The study deals in detail with the consequences of the IZH ban and was published on Tuesday. Accordingly, the ban has weakened central structures of Shiite Islamism. However, decentralized and transnational structures continue to exist.

The Azeri-Turkish network in particular has become more important. It is mainly recruited from Shiites of Azerbaijani origin and is organized around the Imam Riza Islamic Center in Berlin. In addition, there is the informal network of followers of the cleric Muhammed Avcı, who came from Turkey and died in 2019. Frankfurt am Main has developed into an important hub.

At the same time, the Shiite Islamist networks increasingly reached into anti-imperialist parts of the political left. Anti-Israeli and anti-Western interpretation patterns as well as the view of Iran and the so-called Axis of Resistance as “anti-imperialist forces” served as connecting points. Important actors and influencers conveyed this ideology into political milieus to which Islamist organizations had previously only had limited access.

The study cites the Communist Organization (KO) as an example. It is a relatively young splinter of the German Communist Party (DKP) and its youth organization, the Socialist German Workers' Youth (SDAJ). It has nine local groups nationwide. In its own statements, the group expresses solidarity with Russia, China and Iran. She writes about Hamas that their “resistance” is “defamed” as terrorism.

In several statements since mid-2025, the KO has addressed the political left and promoted an alliance with Shiite Islamist forces. A publication from January 2026, for example, insulted the dissidents who took to the streets in Iran at the time as “terrorists” and downplayed the brutal violence in the suppression of the protests, in which regime henchmen murdered thousands of people.

According to the analysis, cadres in the group have taken on roles in local Palestine solidarity groups and used these contexts to increase the reach of their organization's positions. The KO activists thus served as “operational carriers of Iranian influence operations”. Narratives of the Islamic Republic of Iran are carried into the anti-imperialist left, which in turn acts as a social resonance body.

This development is not surprising for Thomas Prüwer. The Leipzig journalist is currently researching a book about the so-called red groups, i.e. dogmatically Marxist-Leninist or Trotskyist organizations. Low-threshold access, action orientation and quick integration into the group have brought them popularity for several years. In their anti-imperialism, the “people” and their supposed national liberation would have replaced the reference to social class. Intersections with Islamism arise from the simple division of the world into oppressors and oppressed, which also simplifies the conflicts in the Middle East in a template-like way. Prüwer warns of this development, which can be observed nationwide.

Omid Nouripour, Vice President of the Bundestag and member of the Bundestag for the Green Party, explained that the ban on the IZH was right and important, but the “present analysis shows alarmingly how the Iranian regime's networks are shifting through decentralized successor structures and, in particular, Frankfurt am Main is developing into a new focus.” The ban on activity must therefore be consistently enforced and successor structures must be taken into account as well as bridges to other political milieus.