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Iran’s judiciary announced on 26 September that it has issued indictments against dozens of former and current US officials over Washington’s support for Tondar, a monarchist opposition movement based in the US and outlawed in the Islamic Republic as a terrorist group. 

During a press briefing, a spokesman for Tehran’s judiciary, Masoud Setayeshi, said that the indictment list includes former US presidents Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and George Bush, as well as former secretaries of state Mike Pompeo, John Kerry, Hilary Clinton, and Condoleezza Rice. 

Current President Joe Biden is included on the list. 

Trump also faces a separate Iranian arrest warrant for his role in the illegal assassination of Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani in 2020. 

Tondar, also known as the Kingdom Assembly of Iran, “a dissident group which promotes the restoration of the monarchy to Iran to replace the theocratic Islamic Republic,” has for years enjoyed support from the listed US officials, the spokesman said. 

The group was founded in Los Angeles in 2003. In 2008, It began running a Los Angeles-based radio and television broadcasting station that promotes pro-monarchy beliefs and anti-government rhetoric. 

The Islamic Republic has accused the group of orchestrating a number of attacks inside the country, notably a deadly mosque bombing in the south-central Iranian city of Shiraz in 2008 that killed 14 people and injured at least 200 others. 

US-based members of the group, including spokesman Iman Afar, denied being behind any attacks.

“We are not soldiers. We simply reflect what is going on in [Iran] and what Tondar is doing,” Afar told the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) in 2010. 

However, the same WSJ report cites two members of the group as saying “that Tondar has fighters who want to replace Iran’s Islamic regime with a secular monarchy.”

The group has claimed in the past to have 100,000 active members across the US. It has claimed responsibility for several attacks, including a bombing at a seminary used by Islamic Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) forces in 2019, which it acknowledged carrying out on its website, according to Reuters. 

Since its establishment, it has been involved in leaking classified information about Iran’s defense and security programs, arson attacks, assassinations and bombings, many of which have been foiled by Iran’s intelligence ministry. 

Tondar is said to be inspired by the history of the Persian Empire and supports the establishment of a newer monarchic dynasty rather than a restoration of Pahlavi rule which was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution. 

In 2020, Iran announced the arrest of Jamshid Sharmahd, an Iranian-German national who it claimed was “the ringleader of the terrorist Tondar group.” 

Sharmahd was sentenced to death on 21 February after the Iranian court ruled that he had been involved in plots to carry out 23 terror attacks, five of which were successfully implemented, according to Tasnim News Agency. The sentence was upheld in April. 

Despite admitting that he was already in Iran at the time of his arrest, Sharmahd’s family alleges that he was kidnapped from the UAE. 

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Featured image: Jamshid Sharmahd, who was arrested in Iran in 2020 over links to the Tondar royalist group. (Photo credit: Facebook)