Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Honourable members of the committee, I would like to thank the committee for this opportunity and for your hard work on this critical matter over the past two years.

For your purview, I've enclosed in my submission notes several of my written analytical pieces on Iran International in English that discuss the activities of the IRGC. My submission today is divided into historical background, recent developments and summation.

From the 1960s onwards, Shia fanatical Iranian urban guerrillas plotted and staged several successful terror attacks against the Iranian imperial state officials. These guerrillas received training in urban warfare and assassination from armed Palestinian organizations, with the financial backing of Nasser's Egypt, the Baathist regimes of Iraq and Syria, and Gaddafi of Libya. They also worked with security services of several Soviet bloc states, including communist East Germany and Maoist China.

Most importantly, this network trafficked arms and hard currency and collaborated with armed insurgents from Southeast Asia to the Irish Republican Army in that period. After the fall of the Pahlavi dynasty in 1979, the very members of these guerrillas founded the IRGC, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

In the interest of time, I will be skipping some paragraphs of my brief.

I studied law in Iran. I would be grateful to bring it to your attention that per article 150 of the Islamic Republic of Iran's constitution, the IRGC is officially enshrined. It is not accountable before anyone but the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic. It is unimpeachable by the ostensibly elected parliament of the Islamic Republic.

In the 1980s, the IRGC was integral in the brutal suppression of Iranian political dissidents. It actually staged several coup attempts against Persian Gulf monarchies in that region. The opportunity for it to create the first Iranian armed proxy, and perhaps the foremost one, was the Hezbollah of Lebanon in the aftermath of the Israeli occupation of Lebanon in the same period.

Per recent developments, since the 1990s, the IRGC has been a major force in Iran's postwar economy. It has evolved into a large construction racket, whose Khatam al-Anbiya headquarters and its consulting engineering companies were assigned multi-billion dollar dam, petrochemical and transportation projects. IRGC's special Quds Force has been instrumental in the military-calibre brutal suppression of the Iranian people's recurring uprisings over the past 15 years, chiefly the suppression of the autumn 2022 Women, Life, Freedom uprising.

Since 2015 the IRGC has built up a criminal network in collaboration with Mexican and South American drug cartels, and has been very active in the dark web, cryptocurrency transactions and other international money-laundering operations that use various front enterprises from the gulf region and Southeast Asia to Latin America, the U.S. and here, Canada.

Since 2022 IRGC's military industrial complex has supplied the Russian war machine with tens of thousands of technologically sophisticated, and some not-so-sophisticated, projectiles of various types.

I will again skip some paragraphs.

The IRGC has been instrumental in creating the present state of instability in the Middle East by creating the Houthis of Yemen à la Hezbollah framework. I cannot adequately underscore the involvement of the IRGC in international criminal activity and the threat it poses to all Canadians, especially Iranian Canadians.

I also cannot sufficiently emphasize the involvement of the IRGC, directly or indirectly, in recruiting the Hezbollah of Lebanon, Canadian Hells Angels and other transnational gangster networks to plot attacks against Jewish religious and cultural centres as well as Iranian dissidents across the world.

I must add here, as a note, that the IRGC is also implicated in crimes against humanity against half a million civilian Syrians, basically massacring them, and the displacement of about two million Syrians in conjunction and confederation with the Hezbollah during the civil war in defence of the Baathist regime of Bashar al-Assad.

It has been claimed that listing the IRGC as a terrorist entity is fraught with various legal and political problems. Even Josep Borrell, the outgoing EU foreign policy chief, has stated as much: that without judicially valid evidence, one cannot risk listing IRGC as a terrorist organization. I beg to differ. Historical evidence, contemporary occurrences as well as several occurrences of terrorist activities dating back over the past 30 years, as established by European courts, confirm that IRGC is a sponsor of terrorism in the west, and it's a threat toward peace and Canada's security as well as to our transatlantic alliance.

Thank you very much for this opportunity.