From Tbilisi to Tirana: How Iran’s Influence Machine Found Its Albanian Opening

by Givi Targamadze

Nineteen years ago, the Russian FSB — operating through a Russian oligarch of Georgian origin who had taken cover in the guise of political opposition — was waging a well-organized, intense assault on Georgian statehood and on our Euro-Atlantic choice, an assault whose culmination was a continuous rally. Its driving force was a charge of feeling manufactured by compiling isolated misdeeds of the security services, the prosecutor’s office and the courts, and by artificially swelling the people’s genuine grievances out of all proportion — a fury that was no longer satisfied by a real investigation of those misdeeds and a fitting punishment, but demanded total political change, which in reality aimed at replacing the existing course with a pro-Russian one.
At the time I — a Georgian politician, Chairman of the Defense and Security Committee of Parliament — knew enough about what was really going on. And so, in the heat of the moment, I addressed the Russians’ adepts, and only them, with a single phrase that ran, word for word, like this: Russian flags will not fly over Rustaveli (the main avenue of Georgia’s capital); we will defend Rustaveli, we will defend Tbilisi, we will defend the whole country; and for what you are doing now, we will choke the souls out of you.

Our country’s well-tuned propaganda machine, running at full power, instantly sheared off the closing words of that phrase, erased the context completely, looped “we will choke the souls out of you” three times in a row, and flooded every platform with the product. It drove into people’s minds the conviction that I had simply been threatening anyone of an opposition disposition, with no context of defending the country at all.

And now, nineteen years on — after a later oligarch of the same breed managed, despite that earlier defeat, to drag onto the Russian orbit a country once known as the region’s beacon of democracy, a loyal partner of the United States, a participant in every joint military mission, a candidate for European Union membership — I have run into a painful irony. For more than a year now, patriotic forces have kept up an unbroken protest to return the country to its civilized course, and they voice it in precisely the right place, on Rustaveli Avenue. They physically guard that ground, and the Tbilisi around it, and the whole country, against Russian flags. They are doing exactly what I put into words nineteen years ago. And yet, when they catch sight of me, what these defenders still remember is the propaganda-soaked “we will choke the souls out of you,” and not, from this vantage point, the prophetic warning about defending the country.

So we, standing on the very same shore, fail to understand one another, and fail to win a fight that ought to be won together. This is how propaganda works. This is how it poisons the most ardent hearts and the soundest minds. Over time it becomes ever harder not merely to remember the truth but to accept it. That is why the moment this poison begins to spread is the moment to find within yourself the strength, and the will, to let the emotions settle, to give your mind the chance for calm analysis, to see the truth and, above all, to accept it as it is, and not as it would more comfortably suit you in the moment. Refusing the truth leads down a crooked road, and in all likelihood it ends by pitching you over the edge.

I watch the events of the past few days in Albania, and from behind decades of experience I see a familiar picture — not in the protests themselves, which are real and justified, but in the machinery that has fastened onto them. Tehran’s propaganda apparatus is running at full load, and its goal is to bend the truth: to fold sincere, natural outrage into a conspiracy theory, and to enlist truth-seeking people into the defense of a foreign regime’s lie. The wish to protect the territory, the island, the rare species of its flora and fauna, is wholly sincere and natural. The violations are real, and so is the need for correction and punishment. But none of that — not one legitimate grievance — requires surrendering the civilizational choice, the European future, or the partnership with the United States. That is the costume the operation wants the cause to wear, and it is the one thing Albanians must refuse to put on.

You need not take this on faith; look at what is already in the feeds. Around the Zvërnec protest, short videos generated by artificial intelligence — brightly colored animations in a toy “Lego” style — have begun to circulate, recasting Albania as a front in a “resistance” against Israel. It is not a new look. It is the exact aesthetic that pro-Iranian accounts mass-produced during the recent war between Iran, Israel and the United States, when American and Israeli leaders were rendered as little plastic figures and set to slogans and music, engineered for viral spread. The accounts seeding the Albanian version have not been formally traced, but the format, the language and the message match a pro-Iranian template that is by now thoroughly documented. A protest that began over a coastline, a lagoon and a question of who profits is being quietly re-scored into a chapter of Tehran’s war with the West — and that re-scoring is the whole of the operation.

Give your own mind one evening, a few minutes at least; free it from the emotion, and you will see at once that the image of an evil Israel, of “the Jews,” the picture of a country that must urgently be saved from their tentacles, is entirely false — a manufactured thing. Then give your memory a little more room and you will find the root of it — the resentment and rage Tehran nurses toward Albania, the country that gave refuge to thousands of victims of a regime that tortures its own citizens. Albania’s natural friends are the real Iran, its people, not the men who have entrenched themselves in power in their name; and it is with that regime that Albania broke off diplomatic relations. Ever since, they have lain in wait for a moment like this one, for a natural anger they can turn to their own ends and use to drag your country, by your own hands, beyond civilization and onto their own darkened orbit.

This is not hyperbole, and it is not one man’s foreboding. The story of how Georgia changed is the story of how Iran builds influence when it is given time and quiet, and the most detailed account of it is a March 2026 report from the Hudson Institute by Luke Coffey and the Georgian analyst Giorgi Kandelaki, which describes Tehran’s penetration of Georgia as something that has crossed the threshold from episodic to systemic.

The penetration did not begin with a viral image; it began with institutions, and it advanced so gradually that for years it scarcely looked like a campaign at all. Iranian religious and educational fronts — branches of the Ahl al-Bayt World Assembly and the U.S.-sanctioned Al-Mustafa International University — established themselves openly, cultivating loyal clerical networks and drawing young men from Georgia’s ethnic Azerbaijani Shia community in the Kvemo Kartli region into a pipeline that ran from a madrasa in the sleepy town of Marneuli to the seminaries of Qom and back again. Media platforms laundered anti-Western narratives into exactly those audiences. The influence was reinforced, not resisted, from above: Georgia’s prime minister traveled to Iran twice in a single year, once to bury President Raisi in the company of the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah; the central television tower in Tbilisi was lit in the colors of the Iranian flag to mark the anniversary of the 1979 revolution; a deputy prime minister signed a condolence book honoring those killed in American and Israeli strikes. In Marneuli, processions moved through the streets chanting against the Great Satan and the Little Satan — the United States and Israel — in a Christian country that had known no meaningful tradition of such hatred. Underneath the politics ran a quieter current of money: a surge of Iranian-linked company registrations and imports that turned Georgian territory into a corridor for evading sanctions, and gave Tehran a material stake that Tbilisi grew reluctant to disturb.

What makes the Georgian case more than a cautionary tale about propaganda is what sits at the bottom of the structure. The same apparatus that produces narratives also produces operatives. A Georgian national, Polad Omarov, was convicted in a United States court for his role in a Revolutionary Guard plot to murder an Iranian-American journalist in New York — one instance of a pattern of Iranian attempts to kill its critics on Western soil. Another Georgian was arrested in neighboring Azerbaijan over an Iran-linked scheme to assassinate a local Jewish leader. The Hudson authors describe Georgia as having become fertile ground for intelligence recruitment and paramilitary mobilization, and the phrase deserves to be read literally. The soft layer of images and sermons and the hard layer of recruited killers are not two separate programs that happen to share a sponsor. They are the upper and lower halves of a single machine, and the function of the first is to prepare the ground for the second — to turn neighbors into enemies long before anyone is asked to act.
There is a final detail in the Georgian story that captures, better than any figure, how far the rot can travel. When the Hudson report was published, the Georgian state did not respond by examining its findings. It opened an investigation into the report’s authors. That inversion — a government treating the people who name a foreign operation as the security threat, rather than the operation itself — is the late-stage symptom of the disease. It is the moment at which a society has absorbed its adversary’s framing so completely that it begins to police on the adversary’s behalf. Georgia did not arrive there overnight. It arrived there because the campaign was allowed to accumulate, year upon quiet year, until it had become not an external pressure on the country’s politics but a structural feature of them.

Albania is meeting the same method while it is still a discrete, visible, externally branded campaign only weeks old, and that is the one advantage Georgia did not have. A society that can correctly name an operation while it is fresh keeps options that a society otherwise discovers it has lost only when it looks back. The most durable defense against an influence operation has never been a content-moderation rule or a fact-checking unit; it is a population’s refusal to let a foreign regime tell it who its enemies are. That choice is in front of Albania now, while it is still cheap to make — and the Georgian record stands as the most expensive case study available of what is forfeited by those who make it too late.

Givi Targamadze is a Georgian politician and a leader of the 2003 Rose Revolution. A member of the United National Movement and a close ally of former president Mikheil Saakashvili, he served as Chairman of the Defense and Security Committee of the Georgian Parliament from 2004 to 2010. In June 2025 he was sentenced to seven months in prison after refusing to recognize a Georgian Dream parliamentary commission, part of a broader crackdown on the country’s opposition.