By JNS Staff
The plot targeted an oil pipeline and Jewish sites, with drones and explosives smuggled in under IRGC direction, Israeli agencies said.
Israeli authorities on Monday revealed new information on the reported foiling of terrorist attacks by Iran in Azerbaijan, describing a network that planned to sabotage that country’s oil infrastructure as well as Jewish institutions.
“A few weeks ago, a terrorist infrastructure was thwarted in Azerbaijan that promoted attempts to harm a strategic target—the oil pipeline that runs through Georgia and Turkey (BTC), as well as against a number of Jewish targets and institutions in the country, including the Israeli embassy, the synagogue in Baku, and leaders of the Jewish community,” the Mossad and Shin Bet security agencies said in a joint statement with the Israel Defense Forces on Monday.
The statement added many details to the earlier statements by Azerbaijani authorities in March about the arrest of a group operating on behalf of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and plotting to assassinate a leader of the local Jewish community.
The terrorist network’s members had armed drones and explosives that they smuggled into Azerbaijan, according to the Israeli statement. They gathered intelligence on targets, including by taking pictures of them, acting on orders from handlers in Iran, the statement added.
Heading the terrorist operations was Rahman Makadam, who had served as the head of the Special Operations Department in the intelligence apparatus of the IRGC, known as Unit 4000. He was the target of an Israeli Air Force strike in the early days of "Operation Roaring Lion," according to the statement.
Makadam was under the command of Majid Khademi, a major general who served as head of the IRGC Intelligence Protection Organization until his targeted killing in the same Israeli Air Force strike.
Operating under Makadam was Mehsan Suri, according to the statement, who was also killed. A senior officer in Unit 4000, he met the terrorists in Azerbaijan and helped guide them.
The joint statement also mentioned Mahdi Yeka-Dehkan, who, according to Israel, “led the terrorism efforts in Azerbaijan.” He was in charge of a separate network in Turkey that was exposed in January 2026, the report said. He had smuggled attack drones from Iran to Turkey and from there to Cyprus, and his terrorists also performed reconnaissance on Incirlik Air Base in Adana, Turkey, according to the statement.
The U.S. and Turkish air forces are the primary users of the base.
Tehran has increased its efforts to carry out covert and terrorist operations abroad during "Operation Roaring Lion/Epic Fury," but Israel has demonstrated it has the ability to thwart them to a large degree, the statement’s authors wrote.
The exposure represents “a distinct failure by Iran’s regime to produce deniability” while carrying out terrorist actions abroad, and constitutes a collapse of its modus operandi of exercising terrorism while detaching Iran from those activities to avoid the diplomatic, legal and economic consequences,” the statement said.
