A framed photograph of Soran Mansournia’s younger brother, Borhan, sits on a bookshelf in his office in the Dutch city of Groningen. The picture was taken in Iran’s Kurdistan province in August 2019; Borhan is seen smiling and surrounded by trees. Three months later, the 28-year-old was shot dead while standing next to Mansournia at an anti-government protest in the city of Kermanshah.

“He was a very close friend of mine—he wasn’t just a brother,” Mansournia said of Borhan. “We knew every detail of each other’s lives.”

Iranian security forces are alleged to have killed at least 323 people in a nationwide crackdown over five days in November 2019, according to an investigation by Amnesty International and the Hertie School. The protests began after the government announced significant fuel price increases, but they quickly turned into a broader expression of discontent with the regime.

After Borhan’s death, Mansournia says he was interrogated 24 times by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the elite military organization that reports directly to Iran’s supreme leader. In 2021, Mansournia left Iran for a job as a lecturer at the University of Groningen. He continued his activism for human rights in Iran from abroad, regularly posting on social media and speaking at rallies.

But Mansournia, who is now 36, has also faced a relentless wave of threats, harassment, and intimidation by people he believes are linked to the Iranian regime. After the start of the Iran war in February, it got worse, he said.

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As conflict among Iran, Israel, and the United States escalated in the last year, so did Iranian transnational repression in Europe. In March, a man of Iranian descent who was a vocal regime critic was shot and seriously injured in the Dutch city of Schoonhoven. Dutch Justice and Security Minister David van Weel said he could not rule out the possibility that Iran was behind the attack.

Iranian dissidents in Europe say they are growing more fearful—and they don’t think their host governments are taking threats from Tehran seriously.

In 2022, after giving a speech at a rally in The Hague during the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests, Mansournia said he caught someone trailing him as he walked around the city with his partner. Three weeks later, Iran’s intelligence service showed his partner’s parents in Iran a video of them, he said.

Mansournia has been under Dutch police surveillance for his protection since the 12-day war between Israel and Iran last year, although “they’re not doing enough,” he said. In the last 10 months, the police have checked the security of his office twice and his home once, he said, and installed an application on his phone to track him. They told him they could take him to a safe house in the Netherlands—but only if he reduced his activism, he said. “I said, ‘If I do that, I don’t need your protection, and actually the regime wants this,’” he recalled telling authorities.

On April 9, Mansournia received a call from a French number, he said. A man speaking Farsi told him: “Watch yourself because we are watching you. We will come to you soon,” according to Mansournia. He said, “It was terrifying. I’ve received many threats from the regime before, but it was the first time that they called me directly.” He believes that the caller was an Iranian agent.

Mansournia said he has also received scam emails inviting him to fake conferences as well as phishing emails sent to his colleagues falsely accusing him of online harassment. A couple of days after the April phone call, the Iranian government posted Mansournia’s contact details online and wrote that he had “betrayed the country.”

All these threats have made him more careful in his daily life. He uses different routes to and from work and is planning to move in with a friend for a few months. “I really don’t know why [the Dutch government and the European Union] don’t take the regime’s long arms seriously,” Mansournia said.

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The EU officially proscribed the IRGC as a terrorist organization on Feb. 19, but Iran’s threats and violence against dissidents abroad long predate that designation. In 2019, Dutch intelligence agencies found “strong indications” that Iran had orchestrated the assassinations in 2015 and 2017, respectively, of two Dutch citizens who were Iranian dissidents.

EU counterterrorism coordinator Bartjan Wegter said Iran’s hybrid warfare tactics to silence dissidents have intensified in the last few years, including via cybersurveillance, blackmailing, assassination attempts, and relying on criminal groups “to allow for deniability.” Now, the terrorist designation “gives access to a toolbox of sanctions through asset freezes and limiting visas, limiting travel possibilities for people linked with the IRGC,” he said.

“If people feel unsafe, we have to take that seriously,” Wegter said. “Dissidents are both a target but also I would argue an important source of information for our law enforcement and therefore also for our policymakers at [the] EU level.”

Another common repressive tactic used by the Iranian regime is coercion by proxy, in which a person’s family in Iran is harassed, threatened, detained, or killed to apply pressure to dissidents. Ali, a 57-year-old Iranian journalist based in France who declined to provide his last name or precise location because of his fears of reprisals against his family, said his relatives in Iran had received threats and that his wife had to leave home for a while as a result.

“They want to make you retreat,” Ali said. “But there’s a kind of understanding between me and my family … because absolute silence wouldn’t help a poor nation who are brutally suppressed by a fanatic, totalitarian religious regime.”

Ali fled Tehran in 2024 after writing articles he called “mildly critical” of the regime and helping foreign journalists speak to ordinary Iranians and former political prisoners during the Woman, Life, Freedom protests. He vowed to continue reporting on his homeland despite the risks that Iranian journalists face in exile.

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The Islamic Republic’s repression stretches beyond the continent. In 2024, Pouria Zeraati, who worked for the U.K.-based Persian-language news channel Iran International, was stabbed outside his home in London after receiving multiple threats from Iranian authorities. He moved to Israel after saying he no longer felt safe in the U.K.

A report by Reporters Without Borders published three weeks after he was stabbed revealed an “unprecedented” level of transnational threat to Iranian journalists in the country, with London seen as a hot spot. The British government was not doing enough to address the threats, the report concluded.

That is still the feeling for many Iranian dissidents in the U.K., according to Vahid Beheshti, 49, an Iranian human rights activist and the founder of the anti-regime group Iran Front who has lived in the country for the last 28 years. For more than three years, he has protested from a tent adorned with Iran’s prerevolution flag across from the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO) in London.

Beheshti is calling on the British government to officially designate the IRGC as a terrorist organization, as the EU did. The U.K. sanctioned the IRGC in its “entirety” in December 2022, but proscribing it would provide law enforcement with stronger powers, such as criminalizing membership and support of the group. Beheshti was hospitalized in May 2023 following a 72-day hunger strike; he was moved to a safe house for a week after he said a regime cleric had issued a fatwa against him.

“You think, next it’s going to be me,” Beheshti said of the recent suspected Iranian attacks against dissidents abroad. His friend Masood Masjoody was killed this year in Canada in an attack that authorities say was “targeted”; the pair accused of his murder reportedly opposed the Iranian regime and backed the monarchist movement in online posts. Masjoody’s face is pictured in a corner of Beheshti’s camp, alongside photos of Iranians killed by the regime.

Beheshti said threats from the Iranian regime intensified after he visited Israel in January 2024, where he spoke in the Knesset and told Israeli politicians not to be afraid of attacking sites inside Iran. He showed Foreign Policy a photo of himself with a red target on his face that was shared on one of the IRGC’s main Telegram channels this March.

British police have provided Beheshti with only a metal barrier around his camp for protection, he said. Officers from the London Metropolitan Police’s counterterrorism unit warned Beheshti three weeks after the Iran war began that the threat level against him had been raised, telling him to leave the camp. He insists it is the safest place for him: “I know it’s not going to be safe for me if I go home” to Coventry, the town about 100 miles away that is his official residence, he said.

On April 15, a post on the Telegram channel of the Iranian Embassy in London urged Iranians residing in the U.K. to “sacrifice [their] lives” and become martyrs for the regime. The post concluded by saying, “Let us all surrender to killing rather than handing over the country to the enemy.” In response, the FCDO summoned the Iranian ambassador for “unacceptable and inflammatory” comments.

Haleh Blake, a co-founder of the Iranian women’s rights group United4Mahsa who has lived in the U.K. since 2001, said this “makes me think the U.K. is not capable of fighting this regime because they think they can do diplomacy. But there is no diplomacy against violence.” Blake added, “We don’t feel safe here. The government hasn’t done anything.” For years, she has been campaigning for the government to proscribe the IRGC and says London needs to expel “known IRGC networks” in the U.K.

U.K. Defense Secretary Dan Jarvis said in a statement in May that “attempts by a foreign state to coerce, intimidate, harass, or harm individuals on British soil are considered a threat to our national security and sovereignty, and will never be tolerated.” He added that “legislation will be fast tracked in the coming weeks to introduce new proscription-like powers.”

Between February and May, Iran executed at least 39 people on politically motivated charges and arbitrarily arrested more than 6,000, according to Amnesty. Despite these injustices—or perhaps, because of them—Iranian dissidents abroad refuse to be silent. “I am hopeful because I trust the Iranians inside Iran,” Blake said. “They’re living in incredibly hard times. But I trust that they will finish the job.”