Victims of Iran-sponsored terrorism are calling on Trump to demand repatriation as part of any peace deal

Washington – Victims of Iran-sponsored terrorism and their families are in Washington this week to urge President Trump to demand Iran pay as part of any peace deal.

The team of more than 100 people includes those who successfully sued the Islamic Republic in the US federal court for tens of billions of dollars for its role in planning, financing or providing other material support for major terrorist attacks around the world, including the Beirut Marine bombing in 1983 that killed 241 US soldiers and killed US soldiers and killed American citizens.

“American victims were completely absent from the public and reporting framework,” the group American Victims of State-Sponsored Terrorism United wrote in a letter to Mr. Trump was first reported by CBS News. “Our request is clear and based on long-standing US policy: no agreement, short-term or long-term, should release, transfer, freeze, or return Iranian assets, or lift or lift sanctions, before the terrorism judgments owed to American victims are settled.”

Angela Mistrulli, who led the two-day rally in Washington, told CBS News that the letter speaks in solidarity with the more than 20,000 American victims directly affected by Iran-backed terrorism. He plans to deliver the letter to the president at a meeting at the White House scheduled for Tuesday.

Mistrulli’s father, Joseph, was killed while working at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

“If we destroy the terrorists, little American blood will be spilled,” Mistrulli asserted. “There must be no money returned to the terrorist regime.”

In recent days, the war with Iran has started all over again and the initial push for a peace agreement has stalled. But the group’s effort came about halfway through the first 60-day Memorandum of Understanding signed by Mr. Trump and Iranian leaders on June 17.

The MOU, negotiated in large part by Vice President JD Vance, offered Iran the prospect of hundreds of billions of dollars in frozen assets and sanctions relief if it complied with conditions including opening the Strait of Hormuz to sea traffic and ending any nuclear threat.

“If it can be done in 60 days, that’s fine. We’re going back to bombing,” said Mr. Trump after signing the agreement. “I don’t want to do that, because it’s very good, but it might be necessary, because we will never allow them to have a nuclear weapon.”

Vance called the MOU “a very good deal for the American people” and said it gave Iran an opportunity to be “re-invited into the world economy.”

But there was little progress on a long-term agreement, and the US resumed the war attacks Iran more than last week.

The Iranian terror from October 1983 to Oct. 7, 2023

According to Mistrulli, Iran and other states such as Syria and North Korea have been ordered to pay up to $156 billion in lawsuits dating back to the 1990s after Congress passed legislation allowing victims of terrorism to sue US-designated state sponsors of terrorism. Iran has been ordered to pay the most money of any country since the law was passed.

The plaintiffs included victims and families harmed in attacks spanning decades and continents, including 9/11, for which a federal judge found Iran responsible in 2018, saying it provided aid to hackers.

In one recent case, the US District Court in Washington awarded $573 million to plaintiffs representing US service members who were killed or injured by Iranian-backed insurgents in Iraq from 2003 to 2015.

The current pending case focuses on Iran’s alleged role in the Hamas-led terror attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Hamas is one of the militant groups in the region supported by Iran.

“As a society, the decisions we make are not followed because of compensation,” Mistrulli added. “Compensation is the only justice we can get – and we don’t want another group to lose loved ones like us.”

Although victims have won billions of dollars in Iranian judgments, collecting those awards has been extremely difficult, as state sponsors of terrorism rarely pay judgments voluntarily. To provide some relief, Congress created the US Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism Fund to provide partial compensation to eligible victims using funds from qualified state penalties, forfeitures and other congressionally authorized sources.

According to the fund’s website, more than $10 billion has been paid out since its inception in 2015 – less than 10% of what has been awarded in terrorism cases.

“There has been some relief,” Aryeh Portnoy, a lawyer who has represented thousands of victims in terrorism cases and is currently suing the victims of October 7, told CBS News. “But even those in the fund who have been in it for a long time and have gotten a lot out of it have only gotten pennies on the dollar for their decision.”

Portnoy also pointed to limited enforcement, legal disputes and chronic underfunding as reasons for the shortfall.

“So there is a lot of work to be done, but it can be done,” he said. “There are opportunities for the government, the Congress, the administration to help these victims, to fulfill the promise made by the Congress when it allowed the victims to come and pursue these terrorist groups in court because of the horrible things they have done.”

And no country owes more than Iran, Portnoy said. In many of the state-sponsored terrorism cases it has prosecuted, Iran has repeatedly emerged as the foreign government accused of supporting terrorist groups responsible for the attacks.

“In those cases, the actors themselves could be a terrorist organization,” Portnoy explained to CBS News. “It could be Hezbollah, it could be ISIS, it could be Al Qaeda. But behind those actors is always a state sponsor – and Iran is a major state sponsor of terrorism and has been for the last forty years.”

A spokesman for the Iranian Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.