Inside America: How Iran’s regime built a decades-long influence network inside the United States

At a time when the niece and the grandniece of former IRGC Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani were found to have been living in blasphemous Western luxury in the United States, a new report has documented something far more serious: the Islamic Republic’s patient and institutionalized influence network on American soil.

For years, discussion in the West about Iranian activity in America has tended to focus on the dramatic: sanctions busting, cyber operations, assassination plots, sleeper cells, and the occasional spy story that makes headlines and then disappears. That is only part of the picture.

According to a new report by the National Union for Democracy in Iran (NUFDI), Tehran has spent decades constructing what it describes as a durable, institution-based influence architecture across the United States – one built around properties, schools, mosques, clerical pipelines, youth programming, nonprofits, and community ecosystems designed to outlast administrations, sanctions cycles, and media scrutiny.

If the report even scratches the surface, then what it describes is not simply “influence” in the loose, modern sense of messaging or social media propaganda. It is something more deliberate and more recognizable to students of revolutionary regimes: ideological infrastructure.

In other words, the Islamic Republic has spent 47 years trying to root itself inside America – from Washington to Dearborn, from Potomac to Houston, from Virginia to Texas – building a network of institutions designed to shape influence in Washington along the Islamic regime’s ideological lines.

In truth, this should not surprise anyone who has paid attention to the Islamic Republic since 1979.

Revolutionary leader and the first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, did not conceive of the Iranian Revolution as a purely national event. From the outset, it was framed as civilizational and transnational, an Islamic awakening with a universal mission. The regime that emerged in Tehran has always believed that exporting its ideology is integral to its raison d’être. It was a belief carried on by his successor, the recently deceased Ali Khamenei, whose infatuation with the ummah – the concept of a global Muslim brotherhood – overrode his duties and concerns for Iranian citizens living under his rule.

Usually, that export took visible form through proxies and militias: Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shi’ite militias in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen, and various armed and ideological affiliates across Syria, Latin America, and beyond.

But the American case is different.

You cannot build a Hezbollah in suburban Maryland. You cannot openly operate an IRGC command node in Michigan. What you can do, however, is something subtler: Establish institutions that appear on paper to be local, religious, educational, or charitable, while serving as long-term vessels for personnel, worldview, loyalty, and legitimacy.

That is NUFDI’s central argument.

At the center of this, it says, sits the Alavi Foundation, a New York-based nonprofit whose principal asset is a 36-story Fifth Avenue office tower that has helped fund affiliated institutions across the country. The report cites court filings and public reporting that describe Alavi as operating under the direction of Iranian officials and notes that the foundation’s own disclosures show support for more than 35 organizations in the United States.

This suggests that what may look like individual mosques, schools, youth centers, or community organizations are, in certain cases, not isolated at all. They are nodes.

A node can host a cleric. A cleric can shape a generation. A school can normalize a worldview. A youth group can provide belonging, identity, grievance, and ideological framing long before politics enters the conversation.

“A commonality across every region we examined is that the regime invests heavily in attempting to instill a pro-regime worldview in children and teenagers. That's a large part of what makes this network durable in a way that short-term enforcement alone can't easily address,” said NUFDI Senior Policy Analyst Tymahz Toumadje.

That is how regimes survive abroad. More by cultivation than coercion.

The report traces the earliest successful iteration of this network to the Washington, DC, metropolitan area. According to NUFDI, the roots of this network go back to the earliest years of the Islamic Revolution.

One of the most interesting episodes highlighted took place in October 1981, when supporters of Khomeini occupied the Islamic Center of Washington and attempted to seize control of the institution. The occupation ultimately failed after legal action, but the report argues that it marked an important turning point.

This, in essence, captures something essential about the Islamic Republic. It is often caricatured in the West as impulsive, fanatical, or purely destructive, yet one of the regime’s most underappreciated strengths has always been patience. It loses tactically and thinks strategically. It gets pushed out of one space and reappears in another, more embedded than before. One of the worries of Iran-watchers during the current war between Israel, the US, and Iran has been that Iran will somehow wait and outmaneuver US President Donald Trump in the long run and hang on to power.

The report’s account of the Washington-headquartered Muslim Student Association Persian-Speaking Group (MSA–PSG) is a case in point.

The group is described in the report as a longstanding pro-regime node that, according to FBI reporting and Senate testimony cited by NUFDI, functioned as an intelligence-gathering and transnational repression platform under the cover of a campus-recognized student organization. Its origins go back to figures who would later become senior officials in the Islamic Republic, including Mostafa Chamran and Ebrahim Yazdi (both of whom began as students in the sciences and went on to serve as deputy prime ministers of Iran for Revolutionary Affairs).

The Islamic Republic appears to have understood very early on that campuses and youth networks were fertile ground; a familiar pattern.

If Washington was the proving ground, nearby Maryland and Virginia appear in the report as the places where Tehran’s US model matured.

One of the report’s crucial observations is that the regime’s most effective footprint does not rest on sermons alone. It rests on ecosystems. Specifically, on what it describes as a replicable school-mosque model.

The Islamic Education Center in Potomac, Maryland (IEC-M) is presented as a foundational example. According to NUFDI, after the failed Washington takeover, members of the same Khomeinist network used Alavi Foundation resources to establish IEC-M in 1981. The center later re-registered as an independent nonprofit but continued to operate on Alavi-owned property. The report says that the center and its co-located K-12 school received at least $3.6 million from Alavi.

The report alleges that IEC-M repeatedly served as a venue for officials of the Islamic Republic, including for events tied to the Iranian Interest Section in Washington. It notes that as recently as May 2024, the center hosted senior Interest Section officials after the deaths of former Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi and foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, prompting backlash from Iranian-American protesters.

“It’s an open secret,” said NUFDI Policy Analyst Nader Sadeghi. “The IEC-M encapsulates all aspects of the regime's influence operation under one roof. Childcare centers, youth clubs, a school, daily prayer services, all led by a Qom-educated cleric with close ties to Khamenei.” That episode is especially telling because it shows the problem in miniature.

Institutions like these are not controversial because they are Shia, Iranian, or religious. America, rightly, protects all of those things. They become controversial when they appear to function as platforms for a foreign revolutionary state and its official representatives, which is a very different issue.

It is also one that Western governments are often still reluctant to confront clearly, partly because they fear being accused of conflating state-linked ideological influence with religion itself. That caution can lead to paralysis and is something many European governments are dealing with today in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood, which follows a similar model.

If Potomac represents the polished institutional model, the report’s section on the Manassas Mosque in Virginia is where the story becomes darker and more difficult.

NUFDI identifies the mosque’s founder as Abolfazl Bahram Nahidian, a longtime Khomeinist organizer in the United States. According to the report, Nahidian’s history stretches back to the earliest revolutionary agitation in America, including the occupation of the Islamic Center of Washington and activism on behalf of Khomeini during the 1979 revolution.

But the truly explosive part of the report is the way it links Nahidian’s network to one of the most chilling episodes in the history of Iranian operations in America, the 1980 assassination of Ali Akbar Tabatabai in Bethesda, Maryland.

Tabatabai, a former Iranian diplomat and outspoken critic of Khomeini, was gunned down at his home by David Theodore Belfield, later known as Daoud Salahuddin, who fled to Iran and has remained there ever since.

The report says Nahidian’s world intersected with Salahuddin’s during the period leading up to the murder, citing press accounts and intelligence reporting that place the two in close proximity. It further notes that Nahidian later expressed satisfaction over Tabatabai’s killing.

It is a reminder that Tehran’s American story is one of human lives and bloodshed.

And yet the remarkable thing is not simply that these histories exist. It is that, according to the report, they were followed not by disappearance but by institutional reinvention.

Nahidian, NUFDI says, later founded the Manassas Mosque, which received Alavi Foundation funding in the mid-2000s.

The report also cites a long pattern of hardline rhetoric and symbolism at the mosque, including public praise for Soleimani, anti-Israel conspiracy rhetoric, open support for Hamas after October 7, and, most recently, social media condolences for Ali Khamenei after his death was reported in joint US-Israeli strikes in March 2026.

The Islamic Republic has thrived because it keeps producing these murky ecosystems in which names and institutions can become submerged in old cadres, new institutions, and ideological successors, sustaining one another.

Michigan is where the report suggests Tehran’s American project has come closest to maturity.

The section on Dearborn, a majority-Muslim city, is one of the most revealing in the entire document.

NUFDI describes Michigan as the place where the Islamic Republic’s ideological model is “nearing completion on American soil.” In Dearborn, it argues, multiple institutions – mosques, schools, clerical lineages, youth programs, and media-facing initiatives – reinforce one another, creating an environment in which Tehran-aligned narratives can become part of ordinary communal life.

The report singles out the Islamic Center of America as a central anchor, describing it as an institution that has often projected moderation publicly while incubating clerics and networks that later advanced more explicit hardline positions elsewhere.

It cites a January 2020 vigil for Soleimani hosted at ICofA, at which senior imam Ibrahim Kazerooni reportedly praised the slain IRGC commander. It also notes later controversy surrounding Kazerooni’s appearance at Amherst College and points to regime-linked media coverage highlighting the Islamic center’s role.

Another institution highlighted is the Islamic House of Wisdom, founded by Mohammad Ali Elahi, described as a longtime regime insider who later cultivated relationships with senior American politicians while maintaining ties to Iranian political and ideological circles. NUFDI notes, for example, his attendance at Iranian events and his visibility in mainstream US political settings, including interactions with then-vice president Kamala Harris.

“It's quite alarming, both as an Iranian and American, that a former regime military officer was permitted to come to the United States and enjoy the same freedoms and opportunities that haven’t been afforded to the Iranian people in 47 years,” argued Sadeghi.

That juxtaposition suggests that one of Tehran’s greatest successes in America may not have been building hidden cells, but normalizing intermediaries; in getting figures and institutions to be able to move between regime-adjacent orbits and respectable public life with little scrutiny.

That is how influence deepens.

The real force of this report lies in what it reveals about the US as much as about the Islamic Republic.

America is built to catch spies. It is less comfortable confronting networks that speak the language of civil society, faith, education, anti-war activism, identity politics, or community representation while also serving the interests of an authoritarian foreign state, whether directly or indirectly.

That is not a uniquely Iranian tactic. Russia, China, Qatar, Turkey, and others have all exploited versions of the same vulnerability.

But Iran’s version is distinctive because, in addition to being geopolitical, it is theological and revolutionary.

The regime that imprisons women for showing their hair, hangs protesters from cranes, tortures dissidents, funds militias across the Middle East, and builds its regional strategy through violence has repeatedly managed to insert itself into Western discourse.

And it is one reason why institutions that would be treated as obvious foreign influence concerns if linked to Russia or China are so often underplayed when Iran is involved. It is how so many regime-linked people have been allowed to make their homes inside the US for years.

Why does any of this matter more in 2026 than it did five or 10 years ago?

It appears that, now that the two countries are in open conflict, confronting Iranian influence within the US has become more urgent, following years of warnings from organizations such as NUFDI.

After years of proxy warfare, attempted assassinations, cyber campaigns, and regional escalation, the Islamic Republic is finally being understood not as a distant problem, but as a state whose conflict with the United States and Israel reaches far beyond the Middle East.

Toumadje added, “The Islamic Republic built this network specifically to outlast any presidential administration that might notice. What remains unanswered for Washington isn't whether this infrastructure exists, it's how it's been allowed to operate in plain sight for forty-seven years, and how to reverse over four decades of entrenchment.”

It has taken the US time to awaken to this.

The real question now is not whether every mosque, school, or cleric named in the report is a covert arm of Tehran. The question is whether Western democracies are finally prepared to distinguish between protected religious life and foreign-state ideological infrastructure.

The answer lies in following money, property, governance, institutional links, clerical pipelines, and official relationships. It means enforcing transparency laws. It means protecting civil liberties while refusing to let civil society become a shield for authoritarian state influence.

Above all, it means abandoning the fiction that the Islamic Republic’s footprint in the West is mostly accidental or symbolic. It is beyond dangerous.

There is one final irony hanging over all this.

The same regime that has spent decades denouncing the West as corrupt, decadent, godless, and spiritually diseased has consistently sought access to its freedoms, institutions, property systems, universities, media space, and legal protections.

Reuters and the State Department reported the detentions; other reporting described a conspicuous contrast between the family’s online lifestyle and the regime they were accused of championing.

Again, it is a story familiar to Iran watchers who have pointed to the hypocrisy within a regime that promotes morality police to enforce women’s hijab laws in Iran, but allows family members to indulge in Western decadence that goes against everything the Iranian Revolution stands for. The same was recently reported when Mojtaba Khamenei, son of Ali, became Iran’s newest supreme leader, and millions of pounds worth of property were uncovered as under his ownership in London.

The Islamic Republic despises the West publicly, exploits it privately, and infiltrates it structurally.

That is why those sitting in Washington should take the NUFDI report seriously. The Iranian regime didn’t arrive in mobs on the streets, nor did it arrive as spies in trilbies and trench coats. It arrived through foundations, schools, sermons, nonprofits, youth programs, conference halls, and community legitimacy.

And that is precisely why it may have gone unnoticed for so long.