10 Facts About Iran Sponsoring Terrorism

6. Hezbollah

During the 1980s and 1990s, a wave of kidnappings, bombings, and assassinations of Western targets, particularly American and Israeli, occurred in Lebanon and other countries. The attacks, attributed to Hezbollah, have included the 1982-1983 Tyre headquarters bombings and the blowing up of a van filled with explosives in front of the U.S. embassy in Beirut killing 58 Americans and Lebanese in 1983. The 1983 Beirut barracks bombing of the U.S. Marine and French ‘Drakkar’ barracks also killed 241 American and 58 French peacekeepers. On May 30, 2003, a U.S. federal judge ruled that Hezbollah carried out the attack at the direction of the Iranian government. The 1983 Kuwait bombings were done in collaboration with the Iraqi Dawa Party. The 1984 United States embassy annex bombing, which killed 24, the hijacking of TWA flight 847 holding the 39 Americans on board hostage for weeks in 1985 and murder of one U.S. Navy sailor, and the Lebanon hostage crisis from 1982 to 1992, were also done by the Iran sponsored Hezbollah.
According to Middle East analyst James Phillips, an August 1989 bombing in London was a failed Hezbollah assassination attempt on Indian-born British author Salman Rushdie, after the Iranian government put a $2.5 million bounty on his head over the novel The Satanic Verses. Iranian officials have repeatedly called for Rushdie’s death as recently as 2005.
Hezbollah operatives boasted of involvement in the bombing of the Israeli Embassy, which killed 29 people in 1992, as well as the bombing of a Jewish community center in Argentina, which killed 95 in 1994. Hezbollah also claimed responsibility for the 1994 AC Flight 901 attack, which killed 21, in Panama.
The 1996 Khobar Towers bombing killed 19 US servicemen. The overwhelming evidence pointed that Iran was responsible for the attack. The Khobar Towers bombing was planned, funded, and sponsored by senior leadership in the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran.