Warnings come as Tehran promises reprisals against Israel for deadly April 1 attack on Iranian consulate in Syria.

On March 29, a friend of mine, the Iranian journalist Pouria Zeraati, was crossing the road outside his Wimbledon home in southwestern London, to get his car. A man approached him and asked for change; then another man, with his face covered, gave Zeraati a bear hug while the first man stabbed him several times in the back of his thigh.

This was no petty street crime. The assailants left Zeraati’s iPhone, brand-new AirPods, pricey watch, and wallet full of cash untouched. With the help of a driver, they fled the scene and then the country, to an undisclosed destination, according to British authorities. The London police are investigating the attack as a potential case of terrorism. Its methods suggest that the assailants’ intention was not to kill Zeraati but to hurt him in a way that would warn all of us Iranian journalists working in the West: You could be next.

[Mary Louise Kelly: Why I went to Iran]

The Islamic Republic chose Zeraati as a target for a reason. For the past three years, he has been a lead anchor on Iran International, a Saudi-funded Persian-language broadcaster based in London and Washington. Launched in 2017, the channel has made itself a thorn in the side of the Iranian regime. (Some of my friends were among the channel’s founders, and I have done occasional work for it as a writer and commentator.) Iran International was an unapologetic champion of the nationwide protests that broke out in Iran in September 2022; the network spread the opposition’s message and gave airtime to its would-be leaders. In short, it played a similar role to that of Al-Jazeera during the Arab Spring of 2011.

The regime’s response was ferocious. The minister of intelligence declared that Tehran considered the channel to be a terrorist organization. In November 2022, with no hint of subtlety, a major Iranian news agency published a wanted: dead or alive poster emblazoned with faces of four anchors from Iran International. Zeraati was one of them. Since then, he has only added to the government’s fury: He interviewed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel in March of 2023 and continues to host harsh critics of the regime on his show.

Another face on the poster was that of Sima Sabet, a journalist who had worked for BBC Persian for more than a decade before joining Iran International in 2018 as a lead anchor. Back in December, an ITV News investigation uncovered a plot, commissioned by associates of Iran’s closest ally, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, to assassinate Sabet and a fellow anchor on the channel, Fardad Farahzad (also a friend of mine). Sabet and Farahzad got lucky: The people-smuggler hired to do the job turned out to be a spy working for a Western intelligence agency, and he broke the story to a British outlet.

When Sabet first heard about the attack on Zeraati, she felt “shock and rage,” she told me in a phone conversation. “An indescribable anger: How can you be in your own home in Britain and be attacked right outside it?” Shortly afterward, police told her to leave her residence. I spoke with her more than a week later, and she still hadn’t been able to return home.

Farahzad now runs a popular Iran International show from Washington, where we met for coffee recently. “To be honest,” he told me of the London attack, “I was hoping that this was just a criminal action by local gangs. But the evidence so far shows that this is probably not the case.”

This month, the Indian-born British American novelist Salman Rushdie will publish Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, his first book since the attempt on his life in August 2022. Hadi Matar, the young man who tried to kill Rushdie with a knife and cost him his left eye and use of one hand, was from New Jersey, born to immigrant parents from Lebanon. But his inspiration was unmistakable: a 1989 fatwa by the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, which continues to be supported by Tehran, complete with a promised bounty of $3.3 million.

With all the murder and mayhem that the Islamic Republic causes inside and outside its borders, the thankfully unsuccessful attempts on the lives of Rushdie and my friends from Iran International might seem secondary. But the fact that such attacks could take place on Western soil, in leafy Wimbledon or sedate Chautauqua, makes them especially harrowing.

They also fit a disturbing but familiar pattern. The Islamic Republic has tried to kill its opponents abroad ever since its founding in 1979. In 2020, the State Department counted that the Iranian regime had carried out as many as 360 assassinations in about a dozen countries over the past 45 years. Most of the victims were Iranian dissidents who threatened the Islamic Republic in one way or another: A social-democratic former prime minister, diplomats from the Shah’s regime, Marxist leaders, and a TV showman are on the long list. In 2019, the regime shocked Iranians by luring Ruhollah Zam, a prodemocracy journalist based in Paris, into Iraq before kidnapping him and sending him to Iran. He was executed two years later.

Attempting to gun down opponents abroad is very on brand for the Islamic Republic. The pace of such activities slowed for several years but then picked up again over the past decade, during which time the regime has kidnapped or assassinated several of its opponents on European soil as well as plotted to bomb an opposition gathering. A Belgian court sentenced the Iranian agent responsible for the bombing plot to 20 years in prison, only to release him last year as part of a prisoner exchange.

On U.S. soil, perhaps no one has been the target of more Iranian plots than the activist Masih Alinejad, who is best known for her effort to organize Iranian women against the compulsory hijab. The FBI has documented at least two plots to kidnap or kill Alinejad since she moved to the United States in 2014. These have included a plan to send her on a fast ship to Venezuela, or for mercenaries to simply kill her in the United States. Hired killers even showed up at her apartment in Brooklyn and were caught on CCTV. In 2021, the U.S. Congress passed the Masih Alinejad HUNT Act, imposing sanctions on foreign nationals who harass human-rights activists on behalf of Iran’s government.

The Iranian regime’s renewed interest in pursuing its opponents abroad is an ominous sign of the times. Authoritarian regimes—Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a prime example—are leaving nothing to chance, preferring instead to chase down their critics even far from their borders. And the Islamic Republic in particular may well imagine that, having mired the West in multiple interlocking disputes, including those over its nuclear program and its support for terrorist groups in the wider Middle East, it has exhausted the energy or attention its rivals might pay to the abuse of Iranian citizens at home and abroad.

[From the December 2021 issue: The bad guys are winning]

Iran’s regime clearly feels threatened by the journalism of exiled reporters who break its monopoly on truth. And yet, if the threat of assassination was meant to silence these voices, it has failed, and even invigorated those targeted instead. Zeraati is already back on the air. The very fact the Iranian regime is attacking journalists, Farahzad told me, shows how necessary their work is. Sabet has since left Iran International but continues to report; she told me, “We know that the spread of information is the biggest threat for the Islamic Republic. Thanks to the media outlets abroad, there is little that goes on in Iran today without people knowing about it.”

She’s right. Millions of Iranians count on satellite channels based abroad for news because they can’t trust the state media. When I was an anchor on one such London-based channel, a traffic official from northern Iran once contacted me and begged for us to share relevant information about road closures on the air. “It’s on the state broadcaster, but no one watches that!” he said. The Islamic Republic knows that Persian-language media operating abroad have reach and power, and so it now seeks to intimidate these journalists, to injure them, kidnap them, and perhaps to kill them.

When I think of what Western countries might do to counteract Iran’s campaign of terror against its citizens abroad, I recall one of Tehran’s most egregious acts on European soil. In 1992, in a Greek restaurant in Berlin, agents of the Islamic Republic killed Sadegh Sharafkandi, the leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran alongside three of his associates. Sharafkandi was there to meet some leaders of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, including a former prime minister, but the Swedes canceled at the last minute. If they hadn’t, the Iranian regime might have killed them, too. Perhaps for that reason, in April 1997, a German court issued arrest warrants, not just for the perpetrators at the scene, but for their masters in Tehran. The verdict implicated Iran’s foreign minister, intelligence minister, then-President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. That ruling was a devastating blow to the regime and likely changed its calculus. A long lull in state-sponsored assassinations abroad followed, ending only around 2015.

The German response offers a model for other Western countries to follow when the Islamic Republic violates their sovereignty in order to persecute its enemies. As Farahzad told me after the knife attack on his colleague, Iran’s authorities are watching to see whether Western governments will play along with their games of deniability or make Tehran pay for its role: “If they know it comes with a high cost, they’ll probably think twice before doing anything.”

Tension continues to mount in the Middle East as Israel said it will defend itself against a suspected Iranian retaliatory attack for April's deadly airstrike on a consulate in Syria.

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To win over more voters on the issue of abortion, Donald Trump has tried to push responsibility onto the states—whose varied approaches, even just in recent weeks, demonstrate the uncertain future of abortion access.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Matt Gaetz is winning. A child’s-eye view of 1970s debauchery Larry David learned nothing, and neither did we.

A Question for the States

Donald Trump has a history of flip-flopping on abortion. On Monday, he released a video in which he claimed credit for the fall of Roe v. Wade before suggesting that abortion access should be left up to the states. He did not weigh in on whether he would support outlawing abortion on the federal level—a ban he’d favored during his 2016 campaign and first term. Then, pressed by reporters in Georgia yesterday, he said that, if elected, he wouldn’t sign a nationwide ban.

Trump seems to be responding to the political toxicity of harsh abortion restrictions, likely softening his current stance to win over more moderate and swing-state voters. Most Americans say in polling that they support legal access to abortion in some form, with certain limits, so his statements this week should be viewed not as some kind of fundamental shift, my colleague Elaine Godfrey advised, but as a purely political play.

“He knows which way the political winds are blowing, and they’re against the pro-life camp at this point,” she told me. Trump waited until after the Republican primaries to announce his stance, she explained, because he didn’t want to lose votes from social conservatives. “Now that he’s the presumptive nominee, he can afford to piss off a few anti-abortion people—in the pursuit of winning over moderates in a general” election, she said.

The fall of Roe has been steadily remaking America’s political landscape since 2022, energizing Democratic voters and turning swing areas blue. Seizing on the issue, the Biden campaign has released a series of emotionally wrenching ads telling the stories of American women who were denied access to abortions. One video, released on Monday, features a woman who developed sepsis after a miscarriage for which she was denied an abortion in Texas, where the procedure is banned in most instances. She may not be able to have another child as a result of the infection, and wept as the message “Donald Trump did this” appeared on the screen.

Abortion will shape the 2024 presidential election—and its outcome will determine access to reproductive health care across the country. Biden has promised to restore federal abortion rights if he wins, but such a vow faces massive challenges in today’s political landscape, including legal hurdles and right-wing objections. His success will not be guaranteed—and the measures he has tried to introduce during his current term have suffered from a fractured Congress.

Trump, for his part, has taken policy advice in the past from a group of anti-abortion activists and attorneys, and Elaine reminded me that they will seek to influence his policy decisions if he wins. A major focus of some anti-abortion activists’ efforts, as Elaine has written, would be to revive the Comstock Act, a mostly dormant law that prohibited the shipment of objects used for terminating or preventing pregnancies, effectively criminalizing abortion everywhere. “The idea seems to be that Trump is so uninterested in the technical details of abortion-related matters that he’ll rely on this trusty circle of advisers to shape policy,” she wrote earlier this year. (He privately signaled in February that he supported the idea of a national 16-week ban—in part because he reportedly liked how the even number sounded.)

For the past two years, the issue of abortion access has largely been left up to the states. Americans now face a wide range of reproductive-health restrictions depending on where they live. By last summer, some 25 million women were living in states where abortions had become harder to get. Fourteen states, largely conservative strongholds in the South and West, currently ban abortion in almost all circumstances, and another seven states restrict the procedure earlier in pregnancy than the limit set by Roe.

On Tuesday, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that a particularly restrictive law from the Civil War era—before women could vote—could be reinstated. The law bans nearly all abortions, with no exceptions for rape or incest, and providing an abortion would be a felony that could carry a two-to-five-year prison sentence. Earlier this month, Florida’s top court issued a ruling that allowed for a six-week abortion ban to soon take effect. The state’s ruling also requires any abortion pills to be dispensed in person, effectively outlawing mail orders of the medication.

The overturning of Roe has injected chaos into an established element of American life. Abortion-related ballot measures are expected in a swath of states this fall, and the future of abortion access remains unsettled on the federal level. Now abortion rights are an open question for the states to answer.

Related:

A plan to outlaw abortion everywhere Anti-abortion conservatives’ first target if Trump returns

Today’s News

A vote on a bill to reauthorize a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act failed to pass the House yesterday. Despite House Speaker Mike Johnson advocating for its passage, 19 Republicans voted against the measure. A senior U.S. military commander arrived in Israel amid fears that Iran will retaliate for a strike in Syria that killed several Iranian commanders earlier this month. O. J. Simpson, the retired football player acquitted of killing his former wife and her friend in 1995, died at age 76 from cancer.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Faith Hill dug through The Atlantic’s archival musings on dating. It turns out that romance in America has never been easy. The Weekly Planet: New federal rules require public systems to measure and mitigate PFAS, Zoë Schlanger writes. The U.S. is about to uncover a crisis in drinking water.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Photo collage by Jeff Elkins*

What O. J. Simpson Means to Me

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

(From 2016)

My reaction to O. J. Simpson’s arrest for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman was atypical. It was 1994. I was a young black man attending a historically black university in the majority-black city of Washington, D.C., with zero sympathy for Simpson, zero understanding of the sympathy he elicited from my people, and zero appreciation for the defense team’s claim that Simpson had been targeted because he was black …

Two things, it seemed to me, could be true at once: Simpson was a serial abuser who killed his ex-wife, and the Los Angeles Police Department was a brutal army of occupation. So why was it that the latter seemed to be all that mattered, and what did it have to do with Simpson, who lived a life far beyond the embattled ghettos of L.A.?

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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