Overshadowing all of this is Iran’s obsession with getting nuclear weapons — which the regime may not hesitate to use, either directly or as a threat.By Robert Williams, Gatestone InstituteIran’s terror axis, thanks to Israel’s military operations, is finally beginning to collapse. Iranian terrorist proxies have been seeming to disintegrate across the region.In Gaza, Israel has degraded Iran’s Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terrorist infrastructure. In Lebanon, Israel has severely decimated Hezbollah’s capabilities and killed its leaders and commanders. In Syria, Hezbollah, along with Iranian forces, have been shown the door.Even though roughly 2,000 Hamas and 7,000 PIJ terrorists are still operating in Syria, while Iran retains proxies in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen, the Shia terrorist “octopus,” overall, has had several of its tentacles detached. Now, what about the rest of the octopus?The Iranian regime will most likely do anything to ensure its own survival – presumably why it used proxies in the first place. Better to have someone else, other than Iran, take the blowback.The regime could start redirecting its terrorist efforts towards soft targets in the West, where it is easier to operate.For years, already, Iran has already been operating an assassination program abroad, in Europe, where it has been recruiting local gang members and drug dealers to murder Iranian dissidents, Israelis and Jews.A report published in September 2024 found that the criminal groups hired by Iran increasingly target Israelis and Jews in Europe, including Israeli embassies and private Jewish individuals.According to Britain’s MI5, the situation is about to get rapidly worse: the UK is expected to see a “staggering rise” in assassination attempts by Iranian-hired criminals.An Israeli official recently warned that Hamas, as their abilities continue to be cut down in Gaza, will increasingly target Israelis and Jews worldwide.Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson recently warned of Iran’s active role in carrying out attacks in Sweden.“Iran is using organized and violent criminal gangs to carry out serious attacks within Sweden,” Kristersson said in a remarkable statement at a conference in January. “Sweden is not at war. But there is no peace either.”According to Sweden’s security service Säpo, Iran was behind two recent attacks on Israeli targets: a shooting at the offices of the Israeli military technology Elbit in Sweden last year carried out by a 13-year-old, who was arrested for it in October 2024, and detonating two hand grenades outside Israel’s embassy in Copenhagen year by two teenagers who had traveled from Sweden to Denmark to commit the terrorist attack.In the US, in the past — many people may have forgotten — Iran was found guilty of supporting the 9/11 attacks.In 2011, the Iranian regime attempted to murder the Saudi Ambassador to the US, Adel al-Jubeir. Recently, Iranian state agents have been trying to murder senior US officials who served in the Trump administration, various dissidents, and Donald Trump himself.Iran’s mullahs, as was evident during the election campaign, when Iran “emerged as the chief election security concern within the U.S. government,” according to the Wall Street Journal, are also hard at work to subvert the U.S.Originally, the purpose seems to have been preventing the election of Trump. Just because that influence and hacking campaign failed, however, does not mean that Iran’s influence operations in the US will stop.Iran has an interest in having Democrats re-elected as soon as possible. Even while Iran fired on US forces in the region more than 160 times just since October 7, 2023, the Biden administration never stopped being inordinately generous to Iran and compliant with its nuclear weapons program.Iran has also been busy setting up a drone factory in Venezuela, as well as expanding its presence in Cuba.The Iranian regime will most likely keep seeking windows of opportunity to dislodge the US from the Middle East and the Western Hemisphere, presumably as a Western home base for its proxy Hezbollah, whatever is left of it.Hezbollah, in its heyday, according to one 2020 Atlantic Council report, helped to “turn Venezuela into a hub for the convergence of transnational organized crime and international terrorism.”According to Professor Alejandro Cassaglia, an expert in terrorism and organized crime at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina:“It’s crucial to recognize that these groups are dedicated to hybrid warfare, cyber-intelligence, and terrorist attacks… The presence of Iran and the Quds Force [in Latin America] is not just a potential risk, but a palpable reality. These criminals have total freedom of movement in the region, they have Venezuelan passports and are usually of Lebanese or Persian origin.”These groups came into the US largely during Biden’s presidency. The most problematic transnational terrorist group, Tren de Aragua, which originated in the prisons of Venezuela, has grown exponentially, and under the Trump administration its members are now being deported.It has been described as the “largest and most powerful organization in Venezuela,” with “a history of flooding other countries with military-aged Venezuelan males to establish a base of operation to carry out violent crimes in those countries,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott said in September.It has reportedly maintained networks in Colombia, Peru, and Chile, and set up bases in 18 US states, including California, Florida, New Jersey, New York, Tennessee, Texas and Utah.The group has already been tied to hundreds of crimes, including the shooting of two New York Police Department officers in June, the murder of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, and the brutal rape and killing of 12-year-old Houston girl Jocelyn Nungaray.Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Middle East Policy Simone Ledeen warned in February 2024 that Hezbollah has had its own sleeper cells in the United States for years, and may just be waiting for the word from Iran.Overshadowing all of this is Iran’s obsession with getting nuclear weapons — which the regime may not hesitate to use, either directly or as a threat.Iran’s regime did not hesitate to fire at least 300 ballistic missiles, rockets and drones against Israel, a country the size of New Jersey. Iran’s Houthi proxies in Yemen launched missiles and attack drones into Israel many times since October 2023.The mullahs might well hope simply to wait until President Trump’s term is over to break out their nuclear weapons and resume “exporting the Revolution.”In the meantime, Iran most likely will continue trying to forge even closer ties with rogue states, such as Venezuela, Cuba, China, North Korea and Russia, to try to destroy the West.While the US might be reluctant to seek regime change in Iran, if the Trump administration allows the mullahs to stay in power, there will be no peace for the foreseeable future in the US, Europe, or the Middle East.In addition, almost 90 million Iranians will continue to have to suffer unimaginable abuses and human rights violations that the mullahs daily impose on them.In 2024 alone, Iran executed more than 900 people, reportedly the highest recorded number in nine years, including 31 women, the UN human rights office recently announced.Given the UN’s utter lack of trustworthiness and its complicity with Iran, that number is likely to be much larger.In 2021, Iran actually served on the UN’s women’s rights body, although it later was expelled. It has chaired the UN’s Conference on Disarmament. A report from Hengaw, a Kurdish human rights group, noted that more than half of people executed in Iran last year were from ethnic minorities, including 183 Kurds.Many possibly innocent political prisoners currently are held in Iran’s prisons, where they are tortured and abused. According to the US State Department:“Although there were no official statistics regarding the number of citizens imprisoned for their political beliefs, the NGO United for Iran identified at least 1,074 prisoners of conscience in the country at year’s [2023] end.”Ending Iran’s regime would finally put a stop to its becoming a nuclear power and its incessant attacks on US assets in the Middle East, and finally could bring peace to the region. That prospect appears worth serious consideration by the Trump administration.The post Time to bring down the curtain on Iran’s terror axis appeared first on World Israel News.