Revealed: The West End influencer with a line to Iran's exiled prince

A horde of flags are billowing in the evening wind on Albert Road: Israeli, American and a curious third. It’s recognisably Iran’s, but with a golden lion in the centre. This was the state flag until the 1979 Iranian Revolution; now it’s banned in the country. But in Glasgow, it’s flying high, waved by a group of around 30 men standing outside Crosshill’s Al-Mahdi Islamic Centre, making quite the ruckus. 

“Put your Palestine up your ass,” one of the flag bearers bellows through a megaphone. 

A man dashes out from under a Star of David, into the middle of the road, shouting in Farsi. He is exercised, hitting himself in the head. Spotting Khosrow Lanjani, 67, one of a similar-sized group ‘protecting’ Al-Mahdi from the beflagged protestors, he lunges at him. The camera recording the interaction doesn’t capture what happens next, but Lanjani tells me the man struck him on the shoulder before they were both separated by police. 

This late February incident was the third or fourth time the two groups clashed since early February; there’s been at least three more occasions since. Mostly, they’ve turned up on Thursday evenings, says Nadia Abdel-Hady, who attends a sister mosque nearby. They hurl obscenities at those entering Al-Mahdi. “Very crude language towards women,” says Abdel-Hady. “Things like ‘fuck your mother [and] ‘stick your flag up’ [...] I’ve never seen anything like this in Glasgow”. 

Why protesters are fixated on this community centre is unclear to outsiders. Their foul language and aggressive approach has been reported as “anti-Muslim” abuse. This is true in one sense — it is abusing Muslims. 

But there are Muslims on the other side too. So what’s going on?

The answer to that is a proxy war between partisans of the current Iranian regime and the supporters of one of its chief opponents, the country’s deposed crown prince. But Glasgow isn’t a distant outpost — The Bell’s reporting has uncovered players right in the thick of it, from a West End influencer with a direct line to the former prince, to Iran’s “unofficial consulate” in Scotland. 

The Persian DJ

Ashkan Barmak is tall and hirsute, with slicked-back hair. He drives a white Mercedes and quickly asks: “are you Muslim?” when I order a non-alcoholic beer in Curler’s Rest on Byres Road. He gets a pint of Madri and hesitates when I turn the question back on him. “No,” he admits after some humming and hawing, but he was raised Muslim. “So, you’re culturally Muslim?” “Yes”. 

Now 34, Barmak is a cafe owner and DJ based in Dumbarton. He’s put on Persian club nights since he arrived in Glasgow 10 years ago. 

He ran a cafe in his native Tehran too, which became a cool hangout for young people, but it was subject to regular surveillance by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC), the militarized organisation that holds immense power in the country. Undercover IRGC officers would come in to ensure Barmak wasn’t selling a local homemade spirit made from raisins, and shut the venue “many times” when they spotted women not wearing hijabs. He realised the life he wanted was not in Iran. In 2016, he came to Glasgow as a refugee.

He’s a central figure of the protests outside Al-Mahdi. These have been described as “pro-Shah,” aka aligned to an Iranian opposition movement that wants to see the restoration of Iran’s former imperial family, the Pahlavis. The current torch bearer is Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last shah, who was overthrown after years of corruption and brutality. 

Barmak sees his allegiance as more nuanced. “We are not pro-Shah,” he claims “but Pahlavi is our only alternative”. He hopes that Israel and America’s current war will overthrow the conservative and oppressive Iranian regime. Then Pahlavi will return to lead Iran through the transition and “hold a referendum” on a new constitution.

Barmak’s driving motivation is opposing Iran’s authoritarian governors. He shows me an Instagram video of black body bags, lined up on the ground in a town outside Tehran called Kahrizak. Traumatised people crowd around them. “They’re looking for their son”, he explains, pointing out a family opening each gruesome package and peering fearfully inside. The video, verified by Amnesty International, documents the aftermath of January’s anti-government protests in Iran; anywhere from 3,000 (according to official Iranian figures) to over 30,000 (according to human rights groups and medics) civilians were massacred. “It was genocide,” Barmak says, wide-eyed across the table. 

Iran’s ‘unofficial consulate’

Khosrow Lanjani and Barmak have several things in common: they’re cultural, but non-practicing Muslims; they’ve both moved to west Scotland as a result of the Iranian revolution, and they both say they want what’s best for the Iranian people. 

Their definitions of ‘best’ differ though. 

“I support Iran from A-Z, no matter who’s in power,” the bespectacled and jovial Lanjani tells me when I meet him for a coffee in Hamilton, where he’s been living since the 1980s. Even though he’s not too keen on the fervent religiosity of the Islamic Republic, he believes the January demonstrators instigated the violence that saw so many killed. “They were Daesh [Islamic State] and Mojahedin,” Lanjani claims, accusing them of being members of the jihadi militant group Islamic State, or an outlawed opposition organisation, Mojahedin-e-Khalq. 

He has similar views on the 2022 Woman Life Freedom uprising, when thousands took to the streets to protest the horrific police custody death of Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish woman. To Lanjani, it was “a set up”. 

But on another key point, one which explains the unrest at Albert Road, he’s in agreement with Barmak: the Al-Mahdi Islamic Centre is the “unofficial consulate” of Iran in Scotland. 

Hi, I'm Calum and I help run The Bell. So often with stories like this, we only hear one side of the debate, or never see the people behind it. So how can we understand where they might be coming from? In local journalism, this is doubly important because they're our neighbours.

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