The United States is offering up to $15 million for information leading to the disruption of key financial mechanisms of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Working particularly through its Qods Force, the IRGC, as it is called, is the chief Iranian institution directing and carrying out the regime’s global terrorist campaign.
The mechanisms include, among others, financial institutions facilitating IRGC transactions, front companies tied to the IRGC, and IRGC donors or financial facilitators.
One such facilitator is financier and senior IRGC leader Abdul Reza Shahla’i, a commander in the IRGC-Qods Force, based in Sanaa, Yemen. Born in Iran circa 1957, he is also known as Hajji Yusef.
At a press conference, Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook noted that Shahla’i “has a long history of attacks against Americans and our allies globally:”
“He planned multiple assassinations of coalition forces in Iraq, provided weapons and explosives to violent Shia extremist groups, and planned the January 20th, 2007 attack in Karbala that killed five American soldiers and wounded three others.”
In 2011 Shahla’i directed a plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir at a restaurant in Washington:
Had this scheme succeeded, as many as 200 innocent civilians in the United States could have been killed.”
Special Representative Hook said that given Shahla’i’s track record of terrorism and destabilization in Iraq, the United States remains “gravely concerned by his presence in Yemen and potential role in providing advanced weaponry of the kind we have interdicted to the Houthis.”
Since its inception in 1984, the Rewards for Justice Program has paid in excess of $150 million to more than 100 people who provided actionable information that helped bring terrorists to justice or prevented acts of international terrorism worldwide.
If you have information about Abdul Reza Shahla’i, please contact the nearest U.S. Embassy or Consulate; or email: info@rewardsforjustice.net.
All information will be kept strictly confidential.
