The shadowy group claiming attacks around Europe

Late at night, the three men strode towards the community ambulances carrying a can -- then ran away once the vehicles, owned by the Jewish medical service Hatzola, had begun to burn. The March attack in north London, shown on surveillance camera footage, was one of a series of night-time assaults on civilian targets around Europe that have been linked with a shadowy group that apparently sprang into existence less than a month ago. Ashab al-Yamin -- also known by the longer name Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia, or Hayi -- had no presence anywhere online before March 9, according to researchers. Since then it has been connected with arson and explosive attacks in Belgium, the Netherlands and France as well as the one in London, all taking place against the backdrop of the US-Israeli war on Iran. The assaults have raised fears that Iran could be behind an emerging campaign of Russian-style "hybrid warfare" attacks around Europe. "A group emerging out of nowhere like this is unusual," said Julian Lanchès at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism think-tank, whose analysis showed that the group had "no known references, neither online nor offline" before March 9. Telegram channels used to post Iranian government propaganda have claimed responsibility for the London ambulance attack on behalf of Ashab al-Yamin. Police in Paris on March 28 thwarted an attempt by two minors to set off an explosive device outside the offices of Bank of America, and prosecutors said that incident too appeared linked to the group. The attacks have appeared to target Jewish communities and US banks. Those arrested -- 10 in the Netherlands, four in France and three in the UK -- have been aged between 14 and 23, according to police. The three men arrested in the UK -- two British nationals aged 19 and 20 and a 17-year-old joint British-Pakistani national -- were charged with arson offences on Friday and are due in court on Saturday. Neither prosecutors nor police mentioned Ashab al-Yamin when announcing the charges. Investigators in several countries are probing whether the claims of responsibility are genuine -- and what kind of group Ashab al-Yamin might be. On March 9 it declared -- in a Telegram channel seemingly affiliated with an Iraqi pro-Iranian militia group -- that it was beginning "its military operations against US and Israeli interests around the world". Two days later, the group took credit for firebombing a synagogue in Liège. The group's sudden appearance meant that "there are considerable doubts that they are a genuine, serious terror group with offline or internal structures," said Lanchès. "I think this is a project of Iranian intelligence." Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House, said little was known about Hayi, but she added that in the past Iran had paid criminal gangs to harass and harm dissidents. "This could be a bigger scale of the same model," Vakil said. Iran's embassy to London said: "The Islamic Republic of Iran, as a responsible state, has always respected the principles of international law, including non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries." On the UK attack, it said it "rejects any allegations related to the unlawful actions of certain individuals in the United Kingdom". The wave of arson has caused anxiety both for financial professionals and in Jewish communities that were already facing a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents during the conflicts that have followed Hamas's October 7 2023 attack on Israel and Israel's retaliatory war in Gaza. In the UK, the Community Security Trust, which provides protection to Jewish community facilities, has linked the Golders Green arson to other alleged or proven incidents of antisemitism. In the Netherlands, attacks hit a synagogue in Rotterdam on March 13 and a Jewish school in Amsterdam on March 14. An attempted attack on a synagogue in Heemstede was foiled on March 20. Dutch justice minister David van Weel told parliament in March of the Rotterdam synagogue assault: "The possibility that Iran is involved in this attack is . . . being explicitly investigated." In finance, meanwhile, staff at the Paris offices of US financial institutions Citi and Goldman Sachs were given the option of working from home after the thwarted attack on Bank of America. A previous attack claimed by Ashab al-Yamin, on March 16, hit the Amsterdam branch of Bank of New York Mellon. While Ashab al-Yamin appears new, there is a long history of Iran-linked covert activity in European countries. The ambulance attack came four days after an Iranian man and a joint UK-Iranian national appeared in a London court charged with spying on targets in London's Jewish community on behalf of Iran's intelligence services. In some of the latest attacks, there are suggestions that the alleged perpetrators had been recruited on a one-off basis. France's Le Monde newspaper said one of the three teenagers arrested over the Paris attack told police that he was recruited on Snapchat by a fourth man, in his twenties, who told him that the bomb was intended as revenge on an unfaithful girlfriend. Prosecutors said the fourth man told the teens to set off the incendiary device and film the scene in exchange for a payment of between €500 and €1,000. Lanchès said the attacks drew on techniques developed for "hybrid warfare" by Russia. That included the hiring of "single-use agents" for attacks, he said. "The alleged attackers are recruited for relatively modest sums of money online via platforms like Snapchat, Telegram and TikTok," he said. Potkin Azarmehr, a London-based Iranian-born opposition activist and journalist, said the hiring of such agents meant it was hard to pin the attacks definitively on Iran. "If it goes wrong, it can claim plausible deniability," he said. However, Azarmehr said Iran had also ensured that there were clear signs of its links to the incidents -- at a time when the Islamic regime is engaged in a struggle for its survival. Ashab al-Yamin was "made to sound and look like an Iranian proxy", Azarmehr said. "Iran is going out of its way to say, 'This is something I can do'." Lanchès, meanwhile, expressed relief that the attacks so far had seemed aimed at damaging property rather than people. But he said the anxiety they had generated could well be their purpose. "The core aim for hybrid warfare in Europe is to create confusion and destabilise societies," he said. Additional reporting by Andrew England in London and Andy Bounds in Brussels