A senior commander of the Iran-backed Iraqi militia Kataib Hezbollah was charged in federal court on Friday with orchestrating a global terror campaign that included a plot to bomb a Manhattan shul and attack Jewish centers in Los Angeles and Scottsdale, Arizona.

Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood Al-Saadi, an Iraqi national and high-level figure in Kataib Hezbollah, appeared in Manhattan federal court Friday afternoon following his apprehension in Turkey and transfer to American custody. He did not speak during the hearing. His attorney, federal defender Andrew Dalack, called him a political prisoner and a prisoner of war, and said he was unaware of any extradition proceedings.

According to a criminal complaint unsealed Friday, Al-Saadi directed or claimed responsibility for at least 18 terrorist attacks in Europe and two additional attacks in Canada since late February, carried out in the name of Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiya, a component of Kataib Hezbollah. The attacks, prosecutors said, were intended to retaliate for the joint U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran and to pressure Washington and Jerusalem into halting the war.

The plot to bomb a New York shul unraveled when Al-Saadi was put in contact with an FBI undercover officer he believed was a willing assassin, the complaint says.

On April 1, prosecutors allege, Al-Saadi was recorded asking how much it would cost to hire someone “to carry out a bombing operation” in the United States. “I mean, we provide him with a Jewish temple, a Jewish center,” he said, according to court papers.

He allegedly sent the undercover agent a photograph and map of a prominent Manhattan shul, along with similar materials identifying Jewish centers in Los Angeles and Scottsdale. The two agreed on a price of $10,000 in cryptocurrency, prosecutors said, and Al-Saadi sent a $3,000 down payment with instructions that the attack be carried out by April 6. He was arrested before the deadline.

“Working with our law enforcement partners, we disrupted a plan to attack a Manhattan synagogue, and in partnership with the synagogue’s leadership, ensured its security when the threat was elevated,” New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said in a statement. “This case puts into stark relief the global threats posed by the Iranian regime and its proxies like Kataib Hezbollah — Foreign Terrorist Organizations that have repeatedly targeted Jewish communities across Europe and the United States since the war began.”

The shul was not named in court filings.

The overseas attacks attributed to Al-Saadi span several Western capitals. He allegedly firebombed a Bank of New York Mellon building in Amsterdam, attempted to detonate improvised explosives at a Bank of America building in Paris, and stabbed two people in London, including a Jewish-American citizen. Prosecutors also linked him to a March shooting at the U.S. consulate in Toronto.

Al-Saadi faces charges including conspiracy to provide material support to designated terrorist organizations, conspiracy to bomb a place of public use, and related offenses. He is being held at the federal jail in Brooklyn, with his next court appearance scheduled for June 29. At least one of his associates is expected to be brought to the United States and charged, the complaint says.

Court papers include photographs of Al-Saadi with Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the longtime head of the Quds Force, the overseas arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Suleimani was killed in an American drone strike near the Baghdad airport in January 2020. Al-Saadi also worked closely with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the Iraqi militant who led Kataib Hezbollah and was killed alongside Suleimani in that strike, prosecutors said. During Friday’s proceeding, Al-Saadi spoke quietly but animatedly with his lawyer, appearing intent on ensuring the attorney understood his ties to Suleimani.

Kataib Hezbollah was formed after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and grew into one of the most powerful factions in the Popular Mobilization Forces, the umbrella of Shiite militias later folded into Iraq’s official security apparatus during the war against the Islamic State. The group remains nominally tied to the Iraqi government but answers, U.S. officials say, to the Revolutionary Guards in Tehran. It has been designated by the United States as a foreign terrorist organization and has been blamed for repeated attacks on American military and diplomatic posts in Iraq and Syria.

Despite that long record in the region, Kataib Hezbollah has no well-documented history of operations far beyond the Middle East, making the breadth of the European and North American plots described in Friday’s complaint a notable escalation. Unlike Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, the group has emerged from the past two years of war in the Middle East largely intact.

In March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Kataib Hezbollah was responsible for the kidnapping and subsequent release of Shelly Kittleson, an American journalist seized in Baghdad.

The circumstances of Al-Saadi’s capture in Turkey and his transfer to the United States have not been disclosed.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)