al-Ashtar Brigades Joins the State Department’s List of Terrorist Organizations

On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of State designated al-Ashtar Brigades (AAB) as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. This comes one month after the governments of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, and Egypt added the group to each of their respective lists of terrorist organizations. Ahmad Hasan Yusuf and Alsayed Murtadha Majeed Ramadhan Alawi, known affiliates of the secretive group, were designated as global terrorists in March of 2017. Yusuf has been described by the Department of State as an Iranian based senior member of AAB, and Alawi is a known affiliate of the terror group.

Al-Ashtar Brigades is a small, secretive, Iranian-backed terrorist group that operates primarily in Bahrain. The AAB’s primary goal is to overthrow the Sunni-led government of Bahrain and replace it with a Shia-led governmenthat can be controlled by Iran. To date, the AAB has claimed over 20 attacks, most of them directed at police and security forces. The most notorious of these happened in 2014, and it saw the death of three police officers and one advisor from the UAE. Since then, the Bahraini government has seized shipments of armaments and have found ties to training camps within Iraq and Iran that are designed to train terrorists for the AAB.

AAB is a subgroup of a larger collective of proxy organizations that Iran patronizes. Iran has backed the AAB and other terrorist groups on the Arabian Peninsula in an effort to seize power from its regional competitor, Saudi Arabia. Funding AAB will add to this effort and works toward Iran’s strategic goal of gaining hegemony over the Strait of Hormuz which has been effectively controlled by the U.S. Navy since 1949.

The United States will assist Bahrain in reigning in this violent terrorist group. They will also continue to denounce Iran and expose their ties to other terrorist groups across the globe. The designation of AAB as a terrorist organization by the U.S. is the first step toward destroying them. This could be used as precedent to justify levying more sanctions on Iran while pressuring U.S. allies in Europe to do the same.