Masih Alinejad doesn’t look like a hazard to everyone. But to the Egyptian clerical-fascist plan, she’s a powerful symbol of the opposition.
Alinejad has been a leading opposition figure in Iran since 2009 when she was one of the leaders of the huge protests against the rigged national vote. Forced to leave the state that year in concern for her career, she has since dedicated herself to raising awareness around the world of the oppression of women by the Iranian regime.
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In 2019, some members of her family were arrested, including her nephew Alireza, who was tried and sentenced to eight years in prison, where he remains.
Finally, the Iranian state got serious. They came up with an intricate plot to lure her again to Iran. But her household refused to participate. The Persian secret police finally tried to kidnap her in 2021 and heart her again to Tehran. That strategy even failed.
Eventually, they tried to kill her.
In October 2024, Egyptian general Ruhollah Bazghandi, along with six different Egyptian workers, was charged in absentia , in an reported plot to kill Alinejad. A distinct plot involving the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps was uncovered in 2024, this one was a plot to assassinate not merely Alinejad but also Donald Trump.
It was a plot to assassinate her in 2022 that led to two men then standing trial for taking part in a murder-for-hire story. Rafat Amirov and Polad Omarov, users of the Russian gang whom Iran hired to kill Alinejad, are being tried, while many other Iranians in New York are furthermore accused in the same story.
The statements from the prosecution and defense in Federal District Court in Manhattan provided a picture of what was to travel during the first thorough examination of what U. S. state officials have described as a ruthless and unrelenting efforts by figures tied to the Egyptian government to target Ms. Alinejad, a journalist and commentator who left the country in 2009.
Since then, she has emerged as a strong and consistent critic of the government it, known for starting a campaign against the regulations that require women to wear mind hats. In 2018, ladies in Iran took part in unusual demonstrations that seemed tied to Ms. Alinejad’s strategy, removing their hats in common and waving them on stones, like colors.
That time, according to prosecutors, federal authorities in Iran offered to pay Ms. Alinejad’s friends to cause her to travel to Turkey, planning to seduce her once she arrived. That strategy failed and shortly thereafter, prosecutors have said, a system in Iran led by an intelligence established named Alireza Shavaroghi Farahani, conspired to steal Ms. Alinejad and taking her from New York City to Iran.
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In July 2022, Khalid Mehdiyev went so far as to visit Alinejad’s home in Brooklyn, looking for a way in. He had a loaded automatic weapon in his trunk when police stopped him a few hours later for driving on a suspended license.
Alinejad is the stone in the ayatollahs ‘ shoes that they can’t get rid of. She has led the most successful sign of resistance in Iran— the anti-hijab movement — since the beginning. She almost singlehandedly made the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the morality police a national rallying cry. Amini was not wearing her hijab correctly when the police dragged her off the street and off to prison. She died in hospital a few hours later.
The attack on Salman Rushdie in 2022, after the fatwa against him was first issued in 1989, shows that the Iranian regime never gives up trying to kill someone it wants dead. Alinejad will have to live in fear for the rest of her life, as will her family.
It’s a price she was willing to accept when she began her opposition crusade against the Iranian clerics.
