Foreign Affairs committee  Well, according to statements made by Iranian officials and many of those proxy group leaders, like Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, when they visit Iran, they usually carry suitcases full of cash. Qassem Soleimani, before he was killed by a U.S. military operation in Iraq, visited those countries.

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes.

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you very much, sir. I think it's the responsibility of all of the free world and lesser nations to tackle this problem, because the IRGC is a growing problem. It is an adaptive, complex system. It adapts to existing situations, and we have to design and plan for measures against them accordingly.

Foreign Affairs committee  I was born in Iran. I've lived in Iran and studied and worked in Iran. I did my military service in Iran until 2005, when I moved to Britain to study. I did a master's degree in war studies. I did a Ph.D. degree in Middle Eastern studies at the University of Manchester and King's College London, and then I moved to Canada for a year.

Foreign Affairs committee  I do not have access to classified intelligence, but I am a senior fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where we constantly talk with people from the intelligence community, from foreign administration and other Iranians who have primary knowledge of the IRGC's operations.

Foreign Affairs committee  Well, on the “axis of resistance”, even if at some level there is a loose connection, with more coordination and given the existing technologies to communicate, at the same time Iran has been investing for years to arm these groups and to train them, to encourage them, and together to plan for situations exactly like the Houthis have been involved in since last November.

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you. For over four decades, the Islamic regime in Iran has founded and aggressively supported terrorism and terrorist organizations in the Middle East and defied international norms by conducting these terrorist activities, with global repercussions. The roots of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, go back to the 1979 anti-status quo revolution in Iran, when a number of paramilitary terrorist groups merged to assume the role of enforcer of the new regime.