The US State Department will move to designate four Antifa-related groups in Europe as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) and Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGTs), placing them alongside terrorist organizations such as ISIS, Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, according to Fox News.
The four active Antifa groups in Europe, in Germany, Italy and Greece, are accused of bombings, shootings and other politically motivated acts.
The decision is considered particularly rare, as European governments usually treat these extremist groups as internal security issues rather than international terrorist networks.
It is the first time in history that the US has designated Antifa-related groups as international terrorists, extending the Tram Directive on domestic terrorism to an international scale.
With this designation, US financial authorities are required to freeze any assets of the groups, while their members are banned from entering the US. At the same time, it paves the way for criminal prosecutions of those who provide material support.
In Greece, the organizations Armed Proletarian Justice and Revolutionary Class Self Defense have carried out attacks on government buildings, with the most recent incident being the bombing of the Hellenic Train headquarters in April. Revolutionary Class Self Defense dedicated the attack “to the Palestinian people and their heroic resistance”.
In Germany, the group Antifa Ost has been linked to attacks carried out in the period 2018–2023, with prosecutors having prosecuted seven individuals. In 2025, the Hungarian government also designated it a terrorist organization, following an attack by nine of its members on civilians in Budapest in 2023.
In Italy, the International Revolutionary Front, also known as the Informal Anarchist Federation, is an alliance of groups that advocate armed revolutionary struggle against the state. It has been blamed for dozens of violent incidents over the past two decades, from explosive devices and letter bombs to shootings, including the attack on a nuclear engineer in 2012.
Deputy State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said that “the anarchists, Marxists, and violent extremists of Antifa have been waging a campaign of terror in the United States and throughout the Western world for decades, instigating bombings, beatings, shootings, and riots.”
As he said, “the State Department is committed to identifying and dismantling these terrorist networks that conspire to ruthlessly suppress the will of the people and violently undermine the very foundations of the United States and Western Civilization.”
