Egyptian rebel Jamshid Sharmahd was visiting Dubai in July 2020 when he was unavoidably kidnapped. Before the signal went silent, mobile phone data afterward found that his movements were to Oman’s switch town of Sohar.
Weeks later, he reappeared in Iran, accused of leading a terrorist group and organizing problems in Iran, charges his household denies. After years in confinement, he was executed in October 2024.
Iran’s behavior are portion of a historic structure. Since the 1979 Revolution, its government has targeted rebels elsewhere. Significant incidents include the 1991 stabbing death of the Shah’s final prime minister in Paris and the 1992 murder of four Iranian-Kurdish rebels at a Berlin cafe.
These incidents appear to have rekindled, with an Iranian journalist abducted in Iraq in 2019, an opposition leader abducted in Turkey in 2020, and a foiled try to abduct an Egyptian blogger in the US that year as well.
Performance governments have a monopoly on violence and confinement within their edges, including the death penalty and legal prison. In conflict areas, these powers often extend into disputed regions, fading legal distinctions.
But, Iran’s extrajudicial operations are a trend that smaller countries are exceedingly restraining from traditional powers and obstructing international laws.
To observe people, arrange a hit, and evade detection, secret operations targeting your own citizens in other countries demand significant resources and cleverness. The rise in political killings by violent and criminal organizations in the early 1970s influenced these operations in part by the current era.
Institutions responded with their own secret activities, both domestically and internationally, broadening their goals to include political activists and opposition numbers.
Globalization, interconnected community systems, and advances in monitoring technologies have more enabled these activities. States act with growing violence and plausible deniability as the political impact declines and global enforcement declines, especially from the US, which has faced criticism for its own remarkable rendition and helicopter strikes on US citizens abroad.
Residents who are not involved in political disputes often find themselves in conflict, further lowering the importance of national sovereignty.
Some nations are as ruthless as Iran has been for ages, but others are also demonstrating their approach. In neighboring Pakistan, regional forces recently detained a Pakistani federal in Myanmar in October 2024.
Turkey, however, has escalated its extrajudicial businesses the most in recent years in response to the 2016 coup attempt. Turkish officials claim to have abducted over 80 people from 18 states between 2016 and 2018 only. Six Greek nationals were kidnapped in Kosovo and returned to Turkey in one event in 2018, which caused a diplomatic split between the two countries.
Turkey’s assertive policy of targeting its citizens abroad has not stopped another institutions from using it as a setting for their own actions. Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist from the United States, was killed inside Saudi Arabia’s consul in Istanbul in 2018. The Turkish government’s powerful condemnation of the dying drew widespread outcry and outcry. But, Washington’s hesitancy to implement significant effects on Saudi Arabia emboldened additional says.
In 2021, Algeria abducted a rebel in neighboring Tunisia, continuing a discipline that has become popular in some parts of Africa. South Sudan, for example, kidnapped two of its people from Kenya in 2017. In a more well-known case, three Congolese officials were arrested in 2014 after being linked to the death of a previous Rwandan intelligence key and the attacks on two different Rwandan exiles.
In Eastern Europe, during the political and social revolution of the 1990s, assassinations of state officials became a tragic reality. Institutions frequently responded in form, targeting people outside of their borders. Russia’s strategy has been notably renowned for its persistent and constantly evolving techniques.
Numerous Chechen separatist supporters and those affiliated with organized crime have been murdered in various nations, with Chechens frequently carrying out operations to conceal Moscow’s strong presence. These include the 2011 and 2019 deaths in Germany and Turkey.
Russia’s social deaths in the UK have even drawn international attention. Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB broker, was mortally poisoned with a nuclear material in London in 2006. In 2018, another former Soviet intelligence broker, Sergei Skripal, survived a poison effort, though a native citizen was killed. These scandalous episodes showed that no one is out of reach for Russia, even in the country’s knowledge capital of Europe, despite their high-profile attacks.
Further inland, Russian officials are reportedly looking into Russian private military firms and are responsible for the 2018 murders of three Russian editors in the Central African Republic. And since the start of the Ukraine conflict, Russian authorities are alleged to be responsible for at least one defection in Spain in 2023, as well as many deaths of prominent Russian people in different nations.
Russia’s deeds have set a precedent for another post-Soviet state. Uzbekistan has a record of pursuing dissidents abroad, starting with the arrest of Kyrgyzstan-born Uzbek human rights activist Muzafar Avazov in 2006. Since then, allegations have been made of including a suspected role in the 2014 death of an Uzbek Islamic preacher in Turkey and an attempted execution of a Uzbek resident in Sweden.
In order to board the plane and hold a journalist, Belarus forced a Ryanair journey through its aircraft to land in Minsk in 2021. Although physically located in Belarusian airport, it was in violation of international standards for the safety of civil aviation.
China has even taken advanced measures to thwart opposition in different nations. With its growing power, it can coerce some governments to return wanted Foreign nationals, including the expanding use of “overseas authorities stations” to scare expatriates into obeying orders, a practice unmatched in its scope despite various nations having used similar tactics to persuade citizens to return home. But China’s story of violence, in one of the largest foreigner populations in the world, extends decades.
For instance, a pro-democracy advocate was seized in Vietnam in 2002, while a former Chinese diplomat who had sought asylum in Australia was reportedly intoxicated and transported back to China in 2005 via a ship. In recent years, its actions have become more evident, especially in Southeast Asia. A pro-democracy advocate in Thailand abducted a book publisher in Thailand in 2015, and a publisher there followed him the following month.
Thailand has been linked to international efforts to target rebels. The shooting of government official Ko Tee in Laos in 2019 and the targeting of different figures, including an advocate in Cambodia in 2020, both raised concerns of Thai presence.
Kim Jong Nam, the separated half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, was killed in Malaysia in 2017 and North Korea showed its commitment to use foreign officials to silence reviewers. A Asian and Indian member were accused of acting on Pyongyang’s representative. Later that month, Vietnam experienced reaction when its agents were accused of kidnapping an professional from a Taiwanese oil company in Berlin and violently returning him to Vietnam, causing a diplomatic dispute with Germany.
India has increased its efforts against those it claims support the Khalistan democracy movement, which seeks an impartial Sikh state in India.
When evidence emerged linking India to the death of a Sikh separatist president in British Columbia and a foiled plot to kill another head in New York in 2023, hostilities erupted between India and Canada. In addition to the reports that revealed India was expanding its surveillance of diaspora communities in the UK and Australia, the incidents sparked a significant diplomatic row.
India’s actions, in particular, pose a risk to normalizing this behavior further. Countries like China, Russia, and Iran already engage in extraterritorial operations, but India’s status as a growing partner to the West raises the stakes. What might other states feel encouraged to do if a country with close ties to Western democracies can act with relative impunity?
The actions of India could lead to Western nations agreeing to uphold the diplomatic balance, and they could also serve as a catalyst for other countries to make similar concessions to achieve the same outcomes.
Years of US intelligence agencies kidnapping and assassinating Americans living abroad have contributed to the growing willingness of nations like India to test these boundaries. However, after 9/11, the US increased and authorized “extraordinary rendition,” holding hostages of US citizens and foreigners who had been detained for terrorism and who were frequently tortured and later deported to other nations.
The widespread adoption of drone technology has altered government operations abroad, including the targeting of their own citizens. In 2011, US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni American cleric linked to Islamic extremism, was killed in Yemen by a US drone strike. Despite his ties to extremist organizations, his murder raised serious questions about the erosion of due process, despite the strike’s lack of support from the populace.
The US’s policy change in the 21st century was reflected in the operation, which was justified by the idea that military action was permitted where states are “unwilling or unable” to combat terrorism. By 2013, the Obama administration had made it known that four Americans had been killed by a similar number of drone strikes abroad.
Advancements in technology are making it increasingly difficult for individual citizens to evade governments ‘ efforts to track them abroad. States are becoming more daring to cross borders, which is encouraged by Washington’s leniency toward allies engaging in similar behavior.
Concerns are also correlated with the dual citizens ‘ growing presence in these situations. Many nations refuse to acknowledge dual citizenship, which makes their treatment under international law more difficult and diplomatic norms more difficult. This growing trend of defending one’s own citizens in other nations runs the risk of spawning wider attacks on foreigners.
In November 2024, Israeli citizen Zvi Kogan was assassinated in the United Arab Emirates, reportedly by three Uzbek nationals. The incident comes after a year of increased tensions between Iran and Israel as well as years of Israeli operations targeting Iranian citizens both domestically and internationally.
Since the Ukraine War, rising sabotage and covert operations in the West and Russia have demonstrated how quickly foreign powers can smuggle into other countries. The possibility of citizens being attacked by external actors within their own countries is becoming alarmingly real in addition to the growing trend of governments targeting their own citizens abroad.
A world where sovereignty is routinely undermined—where states deny asylum, target their citizens, and strike foreign nationals—threatens to further erode trust, security, and the rule of law in an already fragile global order.
Even powerful countries may find themselves incentivized to curtail these practices if they can occur anywhere, confirming that no state is immune to the effects of unchecked impunity.
John P Ruehl is an Australian-American journalist living in Washington, DC, and a world affairs correspondent for the Independent Media Institute. He is a contributor to several foreign affairs publications, and his book,’ Budget Superpower: How Russia Challenges the West With an Economy Smaller Than Texas ‘, was published in December 2022.
This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute’s Economy for All initiative. It is republished with kind permission.