“... The people who have been in prison so far cannot therefore be described as prisoners or detainees. "They are hostages of the regime," says Schindler, who now heads the Counter Extremism Project, a think tank that focuses on terrorism. Ultimately, the Iranians are not interested in giving the German detainees a fair trial, but rather in convicting them on flimsy evidence in order to use them as political bargaining chips. This was also the case with Helmut Hofer. "The Iranians' idea was to exchange him for the terrorist Darabi and his accomplices," says Schindler. Kazem Darabi was the mastermind behind the Mykonos attack in Berlin, in which four Kurdish politicians in exile were killed. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. Germany did not allow itself to be blackmailed by Iran.” 

“The relationship between the cartels and Hezbollah is long-standing, significant and multifaceted,” the senior director of the Counter Extremism Project, Hans-Jakob Schindler, told The New York Sun. Mr. Schindler said the “strategically most significant part” of the relationship between the cartels and Hezbollah is financial cooperation in the international illicit drug trade.

“This also includes money laundering activities that Hezbollah is now also able to offer other organized crime networks as a service,” he said, adding, “This role has only increased since the war with Israel following the attack of Hezbollah on Israel” the day after Hamas’s assault on October 7, 2023.

Where is Mojtaba Khamenei? Days after being named Iran's supreme leader following Ali Khamenei's death, Mojtaba Khamenei has not appeared on camera. Hans-Jakob Schindler of the Counter Extremism Project tell DW what's known about him.

[CEP Senior Director] Middle East and terrorism expert Hans-Jakob Schindler doubted whether the current strategy would achieve the former in particular. The current aim is to bring about regime change through air strikes so that sufficient numbers of people from the security apparatus defect to the opposition side. In return, the Iranian regime would have a plan to drive up the economic costs for the USA and the world so that they would end the war for economic reasons. In his opinion, it should not come to that, because: "If the regime survives, we will see chaos."

Expert Hans-Jakob Schindler assumes that Ahmadinejad is still alive. And there must be a reason for that. “For right on the very first day, the U.S. and Israel succeeded—100 percent—in killing those individuals who had been identified as priority targets,” says the Senior Director at the international Counter Extremism Project (CEP) in Berlin. Ahmadinejad, it seems, was likely not among them.

According to terrorism expert Hans-Jakob Schindler, bringing about regime change solely through airstrikes is an extremely risky undertaking. The airstrikes would have to continue until a sufficient number of security apparatus employees defected to the opposition.