With Iran increasingly isolated among its Gulf neighbors, recent reports say Tehran has been deepening its ties in the South Caucasus with the Republic of Georgia.
The former Soviet republic, which was until recently seen as an aspiring European Union and potential NATO member candidate, has slowly moved closer to Tehran.
"Iran has built a vast influence infrastructure in Georgia, which includes entities sanctioned by the U.S. government for links to extremism and viewed in Washington as fronts for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)," Giorgi Kandelaki, former member of the Georgian Parliament, told Fox News Digital.
Kandelaki, co-author of a recent report with the Hudson Institute titled Al-Mustafa University, which is considered one of Iran’s main arms for the dissemination of Islamic Republic founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's ideology abroad, according to United Against a Nuclear Iran.
The U.S. Treasury Department stated in 2020 that Iran’s IRGC-Quds Force uses Al-Mustafa University in Georgia as an international recruitment network for Iran and acts as a conduit for the Islamic Republic’s ideological and security interests.
"Al-Mustafa has facilitated unwitting tourists from Western countries to come to Iran, from whom IRGC-Qud's Force members sought to collect intelligence," the Treasury Department said. It also said that the university facilitated student exchanges with foreign universities to develop intelligence sources.
A report from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies estimated the university’s annual budget is $100 million and has trained tens of thousands of emissaries across the world who spread Iran’s revolutionary ideology.
Iran has utilized sympathetic Georgians to commit international crimes to advance its domestic agenda.
While no links have ever been made with the Tbilisi government, a Georgian national, Agil Aslanov, who had ties to organized crime, was reportedly recruited by the Quds Forces to assassinate a prominent Jewish leader in Azerbaijan in 2022. In another case in 2025, Georgian nationaloil and petroleum products from Iran, a key economic lifeline for the regime and its regional war efforts, according to import Iranian oil pay in cash and can bypass international banking sanctions.
"The scale is massive, as Tehran uses the revenue from these schemes to fund its regional operations," Chkhaidze claimed.
Telephone and email requests for comment sent to the government of Georgia were not returned. A spokesman for Iran's mission to the United Nations would not comment on the relations between the two countries.