Tech Against Terrorism warns the UK is ignoring the online frontline
London, 15 July 2026
The UK Government's move to list Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Islamic Movement of Companions of the Right (IMCR, also known as HAYI), and the GRU Volunteer Corps as terrorist organisations confronts a threat Tech Against Terrorism has been warning about for years. It also carries a warning of its own: naming these actors changes little unless the state is equipped to confront how they actually reach into the UK — through the internet.
The campaign that prompted these listings shows why. IMCR publicly claimed a wave of antisemitic attacks across Europe — including the arson attack on four Hatzola ambulances in Golders Green on 23 March — and UK ministers say operatives of the IRGC Quds Force (IRGC-QF) almost certainly directed them. This was not a grassroots cell. It was a state-directed, online-enabled operation: a brand launched and amplified on Telegram through ‘proof-of-crime’ propaganda videos, which recruited and paid local criminals — reportedly including vulnerable young people — to conduct sabotage, tasking them over encrypted messaging. Tech Against Terrorism's own analysis found IMCR to be an ‘astroturfed’ brand rather than an organic movement.
This is what makes the threat real, not theoretical. The primary way these groups reach into Britain is online — recruiting, radicalising, tasking, and paying disposable proxies, while running information operations designed to spread fear and erode trust in public institutions. The attack on the street begins with a message on a screen.
One detail from the related United States prosecution should give the Government pause. The man accused of directing the campaign — an Iraqi militia commander with close IRGC ties — was charged in New York after prosecutors say he tried to pay an undercover FBI agent to carry out attacks on American targets, including a synagogue; he was arrested abroad and extradited. According to the unsealed complaint, the case against him rested on that human-intelligence sting and an informant's recordings, not on scrutiny of the group's prolific online activity. That is telling. It points to a very real risk that the online dimension is being treated as background noise, and that information operations are being sidelined, even as they do the heavy lifting of recruitment and radicalisation.
Proscription and listing matter. But they address the label, not the mechanism. The mechanism is online, and it is being used by nation-states to exploit extremism and vulnerable people — including minors — turning them into instruments of attacks that amount to terrorism offences on UK soil. A response that stops at adding names to a schedule will miss the threat as it is actually operating.
Tech Against Terrorism therefore calls on the Government to treat the information environment as frontline national-security terrain, and to resource it accordingly. That requires:
Call to Action:
Sustained investment in the police, security and intelligence agencies, and in the open-source and online-investigation capability needed to detect recruitment, tasking and propaganda as they happen, not months later.
A serious focus on the threat vector: disrupting online recruitment and radicalisation, and the information operations that accompany them, rather than treating them as secondary to physical policing.
Protection for those most exploited: the vulnerable people and young people groomed online into becoming disposable proxies for hostile states.
Listing is the floor, not the ceiling. Tech Against Terrorism stands ready to help build what sits above it — disrupting terrorist and hostile-state exploitation of the internet while safeguarding human rights and freedom of expression.
Adam Hadley CBE, Founder and Executive Director of Tech Against Terrorism, said:
“Listing these groups is the right first step, but a name on a list does not stop how they operate. The hard truth is that these attacks begin online — hostile states are using the internet to recruit, radicalise and pay vulnerable people, including children, to conduct attacks on our streets, and then to broadcast them for maximum fear. The man accused of orchestrating this campaign was caught through old-fashioned human intelligence, not because anyone was paying enough attention to the online machine that did the recruiting. That should worry us. If we keep treating the internet as an afterthought, we will keep meeting this threat only once it reaches the pavement. Government must match these listings with the will and the resources to fight on the online frontline. We stand ready to help.”