How many of Tehran's feared Revolutionary Guard will be sneaking

On the fringes of the French port of Calais is a small forest where Iranian migrants hide in a tented camp as they wait to cross on small boats to Britain.

‘It is easy to find a trafficker to help us,’ said Amir, a 28-year-old from an Iranian city near the Caspian Sea, when I visited the camp of 400 people early last autumn.

‘We go to the canal near the Calais town hall to talk to the right men, or they come here to find us.’

Soon after I met Amir, he arrived in Dover and was sent to a migrants’ hotel.

He was one of 4,400 Iranians to successfully make an illegal Channel crossing from France to Kent on a trafficking gang’s boat last year.

Yet the squalid camp Amir left is soon expected to swell in size.

The entire EU bloc and Britain are bracing for a dramatic influx of Iranian refugees as US President Donald Trump’s war to force regime change in their country enters its second week with no end-game in sight.

Yesterday, it was reported that more Iranian migrants had reached the French coast, intent on getting to Britain.

Some 4,400 Iranians successfully made an illegal Channel crossing from France to Kent on a trafficking gang’s boat last year. Yet the squalid camp they left is soon expected to swell in size. Pictured: Migrants walk on the beach before trying to board a smuggler’s boat across the Channel at Gravelines, northern France, in September last year

Dozens of people are said to have arrived in vans at a camp in Dunkirk after travelling via Turkey. It seems they are the front-runners of a new influx from Iran into Europe.

For decades, I have witnessed mass migration across our continent and seen, with foreboding, its consequences for host nations.

In 2015, I walked with the first Syrians into Germany after German Chancellor Angela Merkel threw open her country’s borders to those escaping the civil war that had erupted in that country.

The four young men (who hoped to become BMW engineers) told me despairingly, as we sat in a coffee bar, that only a third of their fellow travellers who had reached Europe were genuinely from Syria.

The migration mayhem that followed has changed the face of the continent for ever.

For, as the quartet of Syrians I met predicted accurately, myriad people from nations untouched by war answered Mrs Merkel’s reckless invitation, with 1.3million strangers entering Germany during the first year.

Within weeks of that Berlin meeting, I found Pakistanis (who had upped sticks from stable jobs loading luggage on forklift trucks at Karachi airport) settling in a provincial German town.

They demanded, and got, an asylum house for themselves and their families.

I discovered Roma people from the Balkans had seized the chance of a better life, too. They were begging on the streets of Paris, living in derelict cars in a suburb.

‘We have a right to be in Europe, like anyone else,’ the amiable matriarch of one family told me.

The migrant throngs arriving in 2015 were uncontrolled. It was a free-for-all. But the aftermath of the Iran war will be more consequential still.

Many are fleeing to the border with Turkey, beginning what the EU asylum agency this week warned could become a migration influx ‘of unprecedented magnitude’.

If just ten per cent (of 90million Iranian citizens) head towards Europe and Britain, the agency says it could overwhelm borders, making 2015 – and what is now widely viewed as Merkel’s folly – a mere blip in history.

Most people know Merkel’s welcome brought unsavoury chancers into Europe and Britain, aided by flimsy border controls, and resulted in some of the terror atrocities and culture clashes that have scarred the continent in the decade since.

A new migration wave of millions out of Iran may have worse consequences than anything we have seen before. Who knows who will arrive on our shores this time?

I know many Iranians in Britain who have escaped the brutal and implacable mullahs.

In 2015, Sue Reid walked with the first Syrians into Germany after German Chancellor Angela Merkel threw open her country’s borders to those escaping the civil war that had erupted in that country. Pictured: Mrs Merkel, taking a selfie with a Syrian refugee at a camp in Berlin in 2015

Myriad people from nations untouched by war answered Mrs Merkel’s reckless invitation, with 1.3million strangers entering Germany during the first year. Pictured: Bathers watch refugees from Syria arrive from Turkey by dinghy to the Greek island of Lesbos in 2015

One came on a Channel boat after being thrown in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison for wearing a US T-shirt in public.

Another is an English teacher who was locked up by the regime, merely for talking to a platonic female friend in his car.

A third, a photography student, fled to Britain because he is gay – a crime often punished with death in the brutal theocracy.

He crossed into Turkey undercover after being hunted by the notorious Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the central plank holding together the regime.

The Corps has operated with an iron grip over the Iranian population since the revolution toppled the Shah in 1979.

Although threatened by this week’s air strikes, it runs a ruthless paramilitary wing, a nation-wide propaganda unit, 150,000 ground troops, 20,000 naval personnel, plus an aerospace and nuclear enrichment division.

Recruited into its ranks are thousands of scientists, academics, economists and industrialists.

The IRGC’s secret police oversee a network of neighbourhood spies that make the old East German Stasi look almost incompetent.

These apparatchiks report back on women showing a lock of hair from their compulsory hijabs, the consumption of alcohol, student unrest and meetings of political opponents.

Crucially Iran’s founding constitution gave the IRGC ‘an ideological mission’, which it still obeys.

This is to extend ‘jihad in God’s ways throughout the world’. In other words, the Corps was told to spread its malign tentacles not only into neighbouring nations but into the West, including Britain.

Today, nearly half a century on, the IRGC is here on our streets – and I fear this new crisis may prompt a further influx.

When I ask my Iranian migrant friends to join me for a Persian meal in London, they politely refuse because so many of their national restaurants in West London are, they claim, run by Revolutionary Guard supporters.

From Liverpool, I have had calls at midnight from weeping Iranians who say they have narrowly escaped being mown down by cars as they crossed the road.

‘It is the Revolutionary Guard,’ they told me. ‘They are here among us.’

I believe them. Last month, the IRGC was designated a terrorist organisation across the European Union, as it already is in the US.

Today, Iran’s notorious Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) (pictured, on a military drill in 2006), the central plank holding together the regime, is here on our streets – and I fear this new crisis may prompt a further influx, writes Sue Reid

The Tony Blair Institute has for years said it must be outlawed in the UK. But while we have sanctioned some of its individual henchmen, the current Labour Government stubbornly insists a total ban is inappropriate for a ‘foreign state organisation’.

Only this week, Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper continued to refuse proscription as Ed Davey’s Liberal Democrats demanded action.

His party, which is planning an emergency Bill in Parliament to ban the IRGC, said the group ‘has long been the architect of brutal domestic repression, as well as a threat to UK security and the safety of Iranian and Jewish communities across Britain’.

Meanwhile, our internal intelligence service MI5 has revealed the organisation and its proxies are to blame for 20 ‘potentially lethal’ terror plots, sectarian violence and intimidation of Iranian regime opponents, like my own friends, in Britain.

As the war started last weekend, an Iranian migrant friend living in the Midlands told me hopefully: ‘We want to go home to a new Persia which is not run by the ayatollahs.

‘We are excited, we are hopeful. Soon, Sue, I will take you to meet my family, to show you a free Iran, the most beautiful country in the world.’

Later, he sent me a WhatsApp message filled with doom as news broke of an expected migration upsurge to Europe.

‘I am praying the Revolutionary Guard will not be among those who slip in on the boats,’ he said, adding: ‘They must not have any more places here in Britain.’

But as a new refugee crisis swells in the Middle East, I fear his warning words may prove prophetic.