A Muslim Pakistani-Canadian activist journalist who is critical of Islamic fundamentalism fears for her life after fielding two warnings recently that she’s in the digital crosshairs of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Raheel Raza, a 75-year-old Toronto grandmother, had just lost a friend and fellow journalist in Pakistan to sectarian violence. Then she learned from Iranian dissidents in California and an analyst in New York that her email had been infiltrated by IRGC hackers — known as APT35, or Charming Kitten — who produced a report detailing her work.
“You are on Iran’s radar,” wrote one of the dissidents who warned Raza about the leak.
That warning, she said, came with a description of the Iranian hacking group’s activities. “They hire hundreds of people who do nothing else but track people (like me) and they’re paid very well for it,” Raza said.
Knowing she was being monitored was chilling for Raza, as she’d just learned her friend, Pakistani journalist Imtiaz Mir, was attacked this past September by gunmen in the Malir area and later died from his injuries.
“In September 2022, Imtiaz was part of a delegation that visited Israel to know and learn with the goal of fostering interfaith dialogue and people-to-people understanding. Last year, he bagged the Ambassador of Peace Award for his work,” said a statement from the International Religious Freedom Roundtable. “Unfortunately, on September 17, this year Imtiaz was ambushed by armed assailants for voicing his opinions. He couldn’t survive the assault and tragically died on September 24, 2025. The terrorist group Lashkar e TharAllah (Al-Hosseini Resistance) claimed responsibility, explicitly citing his interfaith work and participation in the Israel peace mission. This act was not an act of random violence — it was a calculated attempt to silence a voice that wanted dialogue and bridge-building.”
Mir “was an excellent journalist,” Raza said in a recent interview.
“How it connects to me, is that the murderers of Imtiaz Mir were a terrorist outfit, closely linked with the Iranian regime. And the day after Imtiaz Mir’s assassination, my family and friends received phone calls asking for my whereabouts,” she said. “Is this a coincidence? I think not.”
Anyone who suspects Raza’s surveillance at the hands of the IRGC is an empty threat would do well to recall this past March, when two men were convicted in a plot to kill Masih Alinejad, an Iranian-American journalist and women’s rights activist living in New York. PBS reported at the time that Alinejad’s “attempted assassination was orchestrated by the Iranian government, part of more than a decade of violent plots targeting its critics abroad.”
The leaks that contained a profile of Raza were published on an anonymous account dubbed KittenBusters, according to Raaznet, a publication that promises to expose mass surveillance.
“The Charming Kitten leaks are more than a window into Iran’s cyber command, they are a rare glimpse into the bureaucratic soul of digital authoritarianism: structured, methodical, and quietly ruthless,” it reported on Oct. 17.
The IRGC profile of Raza doesn’t contain any threats “in terms of saying, ‘go out and kill her,’ or ‘we are going to kill her,’” she said.
“But what they do is they expose you,” Raza said.
“I’m a 75-year-old grandmother who’s just had a kidney transplant. Why would they want to have my photo out there?”
Raza answers her own question about IRGC exposure: “It’s the Salman Rushdie syndrome. They put it out there and then some young Islamist looks at it and thinks this woman is against Iran and against the regime. Ergo she is against Islam, so she’s a heretic, and I go to heaven if I kill her.”
Hadi Matar, a 27-year-old New Jersey man who stabbed and partially blinded Rushdie on a New York lecture stage in August 2022 was sentenced earlier this year to 25 years in prison.
The novelist had been in hiding for years since his novel, The Satanic Verses, prompted Iran’s religious leader to issue a fatwa calling for the author’s death for writing the book, which was inspired by the life of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad.
“That’s definitely my fear,” Raza said.
“In countries like Pakistan and Iran, where you have religious fanatics, they just go hysterical crazy; they don’t think. They basically think that they’re doing their faith a favour by getting rid of so-called heretics like me.”
The report IRGC hackers produced on Raza contains her photo and, in Farsi, it explains it was prepared with information gleaned by infiltrating her emails from 2017 until 2021.
It notes that amongst the 23,938 emails she sent over that time frame, she’s corresponded with Iranians.
“She is an advocate for banning the Islamic hijab and burqa in public places,” according to a translation from the original Farsi.
“In 2012, Raza called on the Canadian government to block immigration from ‘terrorist’ countries like Iran. She is a supporter of Islamic reform and is the author of the book Their Jihad, Not My Jihad.”
The IRGC report also notes Raza’s involvement in a group called the Muslims Facing Tomorrow Association. “The motto of this association is to create reforms in Islam, confront violence and bigotry, and defend human rights,” it says. “She has introduced herself as a liberal Muslim and believes in gender equality, especially for Muslim women.”
Since learning she’d been hacked, Raza has changed all her passwords and beefed up her internet security.
Raza also reached out to a senior member of the Toronto Police Service to ask what she should do about the hack. He told her to check in with her local division about the security breach.
“They sent two officers over (on Oct. 9), but they couldn’t quite figure out what this ideology’s about,” Raza said.
“One of them asked me: ‘Have you reported this to the Iranian embassy?’ I just looked at her and said, ‘There is no Iranian embassy.’”
Canada severed diplomatic ties with Iran in 2012, citing concerns over the safety of Canadian diplomats in Iran and the Islamic Republic’s support for terrorist organizations. Iran responded in kind by closing its Ottawa embassy and expelling Canadian diplomats.
Raza has also reached out to the RCMP through a lawyer about the IRGC hack, but she hasn’t heard back yet.
“This is absolutely consistent with a much broader pattern that we see systematically with Iran,” said Thomas Juneau, a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa, who is researching a book on Iran’s transnational repression activities.
“The idea of intimidation tactics to silence, tactics to smear, tactics to discredit journalists, activists, human rights militants and so on — this is something that Iran does on a very large scale.”
The attack on Rushdie “is an extreme case, in the sense that there was an actual fatwa from the ruler,” Juneau said. “It came from the very top.”
He’s not particularly worried Raza could experience the same fate.
But “the intensity of the tactics” Iran uses against journalists and activists “puts a massive toll on them, a physical toll, an emotional toll, a psychological toll,” Juneau said. “It slows down their work. It discredits them.”
Targeting Raza and others like her “sows fear,” he said.
“There’s no reason to try to find a specific logic in the sense that what matters is the message that is being sent, even if it’s not clear to you or me why is she targeted and not somebody else who is more prominent,” Juneau said. “That’s kind of the point.”
Raza was born in Pakistan and moved to Canada in 1988 with her family.
“I have been a human rights activist all my life,” she said.
“My main work has been to speak out against radicalization and extremism and Islamism. This has been the constant battle.”
Since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel that killed about 1,200 people and took another 251 hostage, Raza has “also been a very vocal advocate of Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself. I’ve been there 13 times and I work very closely with the Jewish community.”
Raza has no plans to stop that work.
“The more they try to intimidate me, the stronger my resolve to speak out,” she said of the IRGC.
“I will speak out against violence, against extremism, against hate.”
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