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(341) 10-20-2018-to-10-26-2018___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****
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(342) 10-27-2018-to-11-02-2018___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****
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(343) 11-03-2018-to-11-09-2018___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****
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https://ctc.usma.edu/qassem-soleimani-irans-unique-regional-strategy/
Qassem Soleimani and Iran’s Unique Regional Strategy
November 2018, Volume 11, Issue 10
Authors:
Ali Soufan
Categories:
Iran/Biographic & Autobiographical Texts/Strategy, History, & Goals/Hezbollah & Other Shia Groups/Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps/Quds Force
Abstract: In recent years, Iran has projected its power across the Middle East, from Lebanon and Syria to Iraq and Yemen. One of the keys to its success has been a unique strategy of blending militant and state power, built in part on the model of Hezbollah in Lebanon. The acknowledged principal architect of this policy is Major General Qassem Soleimani, the long-serving head of Iran’s Quds (“Jerusalem”) Force. Without question, Soleimani is the most powerful general in the Middle East today; he is also one of Iran’s most popular living people, and has been repeatedly touted as a possible presidential candidate.
Despite its ongoing economic woes, today’s Iran has fashioned itself into one of the premier military and diplomatic powers in the Middle East—and Saudi Arabia’s principal rival for hegemony over the entire region. It has achieved this with a mix of policies—among them, deft diplomatic maneuvering; a tactical alliance with Vladimir Putin’s Russia; and the provision of arms, advice, and cash to Shi`a militias across a variety of countries. In the latter case, Iran has pioneered a seemingly unique strategy that combines insurgent and state power in a potent admixture—a strategy that is evident today in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.
One man is recognized as the principal architect of each of these policies: Major General Qassem Soleimani, long-time chief of the Quds Force, a crack special forces battalion of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Although revered in his home country and feared on battlefields across the Middle East, Soleimani remains virtually unknown in the West. Yet to say that today’s Iran cannot be fully understood without first understanding Qassem Soleimani would be a considerable understatement. More than anyone else, Soleimani has been responsible for the creation of an arc of influence—which Iran terms its “Axis of Resistance”—extending from the Gulf of Oman through Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Today, with Assad’s impending victory in his country’s calamitous civil war, this Iranian alliance has become stable enough that Qassem Soleimani, should he be so minded, could drive his car from Tehran to Lebanon’s border with Israel without being stopped. And, as the Mossad chief Yossi Cohen has pointed out, the same route would be open to truckloads of rockets bound for Iran’s main regional proxy, Hezbollah.1
This article reviews Soleimani’s career and assesses his contribution to Iran’s regional ascendancy.
“Come, we are waiting for you:” Hamdan, Iran, 2018
On a normal day, the most powerful soldier in the Middle East shies away from bluster; indeed, he typically tends toward self-effacement. In meetings with everyone from local warlords to Ayatollahs to the Russian foreign minister, Major General Soleimani prefers to sit quietly in a corner and take it all in.2 When he speaks, he does so politely and simply in a pillow-soft tenor, rarely raising his voice.3 He deprecates all attempts at hero worship, refusing, for example, to allow admirers to kiss his hand.4 One American journalist who has profiled Soleimani calls him “almost theatrically modest.”5
Physically, he is unprepossessing. His face gently frosted with a close-cropped white beard, his dreamy eyes seeming to shine with the recollection of a fond memory, he bears more than a passing resemblance to mid-career Sean Connery, circa Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. He is short in stature—a fact he has been known to highlight, dubbing himself “the smallest soldier.”6
One day in the summer of 2018, Soleimani’s modest façade dropped—to be replaced, albeit briefly, by righteous anger. The source of his ire was one to which many Americans might relate: a furious tweet from President Trump. On this particular occasion, the object of Trump’s wrath was Soleimani’s nominal boss.
“To Iranian President [Hassan] Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!”7
During a speech in Hamdan, a city 200 miles southwest of Tehran, Soleimani tore into Trump with unusual bombast. He scowled. He wagged his finger. And he yelled, despite the half-dozen news microphones clipped to the lectern in front of him—a relatively modest crop, given Soleimani’s celebrity status in his home country.
“The U.S. president … made some idiotic comments on Twitter. It is beneath the dignity of the president of the great Islamic country of Iran to respond, so I will respond, as a soldier of our great nation. You threaten us with a measure that the world has not seen before. First of all, it has been over a year since Trump became U.S. president, but that man’s rhetoric is still that of a casino, of a bar. He talks to the world in the style of a bartender or a casino manager.”8
Soleimani’s audience responded in kind. Where typically they would hear his words in reverent silence, occasionally interjecting pro-forma Islamic revolutionary slogans, on this occasion they laughed and clapped and whistled and hollered and even heckled as if watching a standup comic.
Then came the threat.
“Mr. Trump, the gambler! […] You are well aware of our power and capabilities in the region. You know how powerful we are in asymmetrical warfare.9 Come, we are waiting for you. We are the real men on the scene, as far as you are concerned. You know that a war would mean the loss of all your capabilities. You may start the war, but we will be the ones to determine its end.”10
If anyone is in a position to make such brazen threats, it is Qassem Soleimani. One American commentator compares him to John LeCarré’s ubiquitous yet invisible Soviet spymaster Karla.11 Another calls him “Iran’s real foreign minister.”12 Both have a point. Although practically unknown to the U.S. public, Soleimani in fact manages vast swathes of Iranian foreign policy almost single-handedly. For the best part of 20 years, he has enjoyed the unmediated ear of his country’s supreme leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who calls Soleimani, uniquely among all the Islamic Republic’s heroes, “a living martyr of the Revolution.”13 Abroad, he has made himself the confidant of political leaders in Damascus, Beirut, Baghdad, and even Moscow.
The international community has taken note. The United Nations Security Council sanctions Soleimani for supporting terrorism and selling Iranian weapons overseas.14 The U.S. government brands him a nuclear proliferator, a supporter of terrorism, a human rights abuser, and a leading suspect in the 2011 plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States by bombing a Washington, D.C., restaurant.15 While most Americans and Europeans may never have heard the name Qassem Soleimani, their intelligence services might wish it came up less often.
Soleimani has become the leading exponent of a uniquely Iranian style of insurgency. Typically, militias define themselves against governments, fight them, and seek to sweep away all vestiges of their power. Those under Soleimani’s control, by contrast, have tended more often to work with the grain of government power, and thus to co-opt governments from within, fusing militant and state power into a formidable whole. Lebanon’s Hezbollah is the most prominent example; but, as this article will note, it is far from the only one.
The Goat Thief: Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, 1953-200216
Little in Soleimani’s personal background could have hinted at the power he would one day wield. He hails from a village in the mountains of Kerman Province, a region in Iran’s southeast, not far from the borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan.17 In Kerman, tribal politics traditionally have held far more sway than any edict of the central government 500 miles away in Tehran.
Owing to a botched land reform introduced by the Shah as part of the “White Revolution,” Soleimani’s father, a small-time farmer, wound up owing the government around 9,000 rials. This debt, which was only on the order of $100, seems to have brought the family to the brink of ruin. In order to help pay down the debt, Soleimani left school at 13 to labor on construction sites in the provincial capital, Kerman City. By the time the Islamic Revolution erupted in 1978, he had become a technician with the municipal water authority.18
Prior to that point, the young Soleimani had shown little, if any, interest in politics; but he joined the IRGC shortly after it was founded in April 1979. He found his calling. At any rate, he must have impressed someone, for immediately after completing basic training, he became an instructor of new recruits.19 That was the moment Qassem Soleimani began his remarkable upward trajectory.
In many ways, Soleimani’s rise from provincial obscurity to the heights of power parallels Iran’s regional ascendancy over the past 40 years. His frontline career began in the turmoil that followed the Islamic Revolution, when his unit was sent to the northwest to quell a Kurdish separatist uprising—a mission regarded to this day as a badge of honor within the IRGC. (It was in the course of that effort that Soleimani, just 22 years old, first encountered a 23-year-old political operative named Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then acting as an adviser to the regional government. Nearly 30 years later, Ahmadinejad would go on to serve as one of the Islamic Republic’s most hardline presidents—with vocal support from Soleimani.20)
In September 1980, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq opportunistically invaded its neighbor, hoping to capitalize on the post-revolutionary chaos. Initially, Soleimani was sent back to Kerman to raise and train troops, but he soon found himself redirected to the front, where he volunteered to spend extra time. Soleimani served throughout the war in almost every part of the front, from the retaking of Bostan in December 1981 to the invasion of Iraqi Kurdistan in 1987, during which Saddam’s forces attacked his unit with chemical weapons, to the climactic expedition to the al-Faw Peninsula in April 1988, whose failure helped precipitate the ceasefire that ended the war.21
Soleimani developed a reputation for treating the men under his command well. He made a habit of returning from behind-the-lines reconnaissance missions with live goats and other provender to feed his men, earning him the admiring sobriquet “the Goat Thief.”22 On many occasions, he publicly questioned the decisions of his commanding officers, culminating in a shouting match in which he told his commander-in-chief, Mohsen Rezai, “We don’t have any plan for the war!”23 But this insubordinate streak did not prevent him from rising to leadership of the IRGC’s crack 41st Division, nicknamed Tharallah—Vengeance of God—an alias of Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet and one of the key figures in Shi`a Islam.24 He was starting to attract attention from the very top; a photograph from the period shows Soleimani seated on the floor, enjoying a meal at the right hand of then-President Ali Khamenei.25
Following the close of hostilities with Iraq in 1988, Soleimani was sent back home to Kerman to wage war on the drug gangs threatening order in the region. Like the United States’ own “War on Drugs,” it was a bloody campaign; but within three years, forces under Soleimani’s command had pacified the province, earning him the lasting gratitude of its residents.26
Little is known about the next six or seven years of Soleimani’s life, but by March 1998 at the latest, he had risen to become commander of the Quds Force, the lethal special forces unit of the IRGC tasked with bolstering pro-Iranian regimes and militias abroad. (“Quds” comes from the Farsi name for Jerusalem.27) As the remainder of this article will show, Soleimani excelled at this task, establishing or strengthening contacts with Shi`a militias and political parties across the region, as well as the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Damascus.
At the same time, the then-newly installed administration of Mohammed Khatami put him in charge of managing Iran’s burgeoning confrontation with the upstart Taliban movement in neighboring Afghanistan.28 Not for the first or last time, Soleimani’s inborn familiarity with tribal culture and politics would stand him in good stead.
In August 1998, a few months into Soleimani’s tenure at the head of the Quds Force, Taliban forces swept into the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i Sharif, home to a substantial community of ethnic Hazaras—Farsi-speaking Shi`a Muslims. The Taliban initiated a brutal pogrom against members of the minority, trashing homes, raping women and girls, and massacring hundreds of Shi`a men and boys.29 Among the dead was a group of nine Iranians: eight diplomats and a journalist.30 At this naked provocation, factions on both sides turned white-hot for war; the IRGC’s overall commander at the time, Yahya Rahim Safavi, requested Supreme Leader Khamenei’s permission “for the punishment of the Taliban, to advance to Herat [a city in western Afghanistan], annihilate, punish, eliminate them.”31 Iran began massing an invasion force of almost a quarter-million soldiers along the Afghan border. Reportedly, it was Soleimani who stepped in and defused the situation without resorting to further violence. Instead of confronting the Taliban directly, Soleimani opted to throw increased Iranian support behind the opposition Northern Alliance, personally helping to direct the group’s operations from a base across Afghanistan’s northern border in Tajikistan.32 It was a model of proxy warfare to which he would return again and again.
In the months after 9/11, Soleimani saw an opportunity to defeat the Taliban once and for all by unconventional means—namely, cooperation with the United States. Early in the war, he directed Iranian diplomats to share intelligence on Taliban military positions with their U.S. counterparts. The Americans, in return, told the Iranians what they knew about an al-Qa`ida fixer hiding out in eastern Iran.33
For a brief moment, it seemed as if this contact might lead to a more general thawing of relations between Iran and the country its leaders refer to as the “Great Satan.” Indeed, back in Tehran, behind closed doors, Soleimani was pronouncing himself “pleased with [the] cooperation,” and musing at the highest political levels that “maybe it’s time to rethink our relationship with the Americans.”34
This cooperation came to an abrupt halt in January 2002, however, after President George W. Bush used his State of the Union address to throw the book at Iran, branding it a nuclear proliferator, an exporter of terrorism, a repressive state, and part of an “Axis of Evil.” Soleimani, predictably, was apoplectic, and canceled future meetings with the Americans—a huge setback.35
Worse was to come.
“When we say no, he makes trouble:” Iraq, 2003-2011
The Islamic Republic’s relationship with Syria’s Assad regime has deep roots, extending back as far as the Iran-Iraq War when Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez, closed a key oil pipeline in a bid to harm the Iraqi economy. In 2003, the U.S. invasion of Iraq pushed Syria and Iran still closer together, as both regimes realized that if the Americans succeeded in Iraq, they could be next. To damage the U.S. occupation, Soleimani helped Syrian intelligence create pipelines for funneling Sunni jihadis into Iraq. Once there, the jihadis attacked U.S. forces, often using roadside bombs supplied by Soleimani’s Quds Force from factories inside Iran.36
Soleimani soon intervened more directly in Iraq, too, sending in Shi`a militias as proxies. Under his leadership, the Quds Force stood up a number of militias for the express purpose of attacking U.S. and allied troops. Collectively, these organizations were responsible for hundreds of coalition deaths. One of them, Asaib Ahl al-Haq (League of the Righteous), claimed more than 6,000 such attacks between its creation in 2006 and the U.S. withdrawal in 2011—an average of more than three per day, every day, for five years.37
In 2006, at the height of the bloodshed in Iraq, Soleimani took a break from managing Asaib and its sister groups in order to supervise another Iranian proxy, Hezbollah, in its escalating war with Israel.38 During his absence, U.S. commanders in the Green Zone noted a sharp decline in casualties across the country. Upon his return from Lebanon, Soleimani wrote to U.S. commanders, “I hope you have been enjoying the peace and quiet in Baghdad. I’ve been busy in Beirut!”39
Following the reestablishment of government in Iraq in 2005, Soleimani’s influence extended into the country’s politics as well. Under prime ministers Ibrahim al-Jaafari and Nouri al-Maliki, one of Soleimani’s militant proxies, the Badr Organization, was allowed to become, in effect, an arm of the state when the interior and transport ministries came under the control of its political wing.40 Iraq’s president from 2005 to 2014, Jalal Talabani, had benefited from IRGC help (as well as that of the CIA) when he served as a leader of Kurdish resistance to Saddam in the 1990s, and Soleimani took full advantage of that history.41 Dexter Filkins of The New Yorker quoted an intelligence officer as saying that he had never seen the normally formidable Talabani “so deferential to anyone. He was terrified.” No wonder; the same profile quoted one of Talabani’s fellow Kurdish officials as saying, “When we say no [to Soleimani], he makes trouble for us. Bombings. Shootings.”42
In early 2008, Soleimani sent General David Petraeus, then the most senior U.S. commander in Iraq, an imperious message:
“Dear General Petraeus: You should be aware that I, Qassem Soleimani, control Iran’s policy for Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and Afghanistan. And indeed, the ambassador in Baghdad is a Quds Force member. The individual who’s going to replace him is a Quds Force member.”43
This was conveyed to General Petraeus via a text message to Talabani’s personal cellphone—effectively relegating Talabani to the role of Soleimani’s mailman. The symbolism was not lost on anyone. Legend has it that Petraeus’ piquant reply read, “Dear General Soleimani: Go pound sand down a rat hole.”44 Privately, however, the U.S. State Department appears to have concurred with Soleimani’s assessment of his own bailiwick, describing him as “the point man directing the formulation and implementation of [his country’s] Iraq policy, with authority second only to [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei.”45
Soleimani’s habit of taunting U.S. officials did not end with the American withdrawal in 2011. As recently as 2017, then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo wrote to Soleimani again, warning him to restrain militias under his command from attacking U.S. interests in Iraq. The response from ‘Karla?’ “I will not take your letter nor read it and I have nothing to say to these people.”46
“We must witness victory:” Syria and Iraq, 2011-present
When the Arab Spring began in late 2010, Soleimani was quick to recognize the potential benefits for Iran, declaring in a May 2011 speech in Qom that the uprisings “provide our revolution with the greatest opportunities … we must witness victory in Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. This is the fruit of the Islamic Revolution.”47 In the months that followed, Soleimani made himself even more indispensable to the regimes in both Damascus and Baghdad—by deploying militants under his command.
On battlefields in both countries, Qassem Soleimani made himself ubiquitous. One might see him standing on the hoods and flatbeds of trucks, surrounded by fighters jostling and shushing each other to hear and see better.48 His rapt audiences consist of Shi`a militiamen from various countries who fight in support of the Assad regime or against the Islamic State group, but there is never any doubt as to where their principal loyalty lies. Not only do these groups sing songs about Soleimani, they produce music videos featuring militants doing parkour stunts and saluting the general’s image.49
Following the outbreak of civil war in Syria in 2011, Soleimani ordered some of his Iraqi militias into Syria to defend the Assad regime.50 For the same purpose, he also set up additional Shi`a militant groups; these included a group of Afghans resident in Iran, the Fatemiyoun Division, and a Pakistani outfit, the Zeynabiyoun Brigade.51 The very names of these groups announce Iran’s sectarian intentions: Shi`a Muslims accord Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet, a status comparable to that of the Virgin Mary in Catholicism; while Zaynab, Fatima’s daughter, was the sister of Hussein, whose death at the Battle of Karbala formed a pivotal moment in the Sunni-Shi`a schism. Forces under his command were instrumental in many major offensives of the Syrian war, including the recapture of Qusayr from rebels.52 True to form, Soleimani has sought to blend state and insurgent power as seamlessly as possible; the staff at his secret headquarters in Damascus reportedly includes Lebanese and Iraqi militia chieftains working alongside generals from both Iran and Syria.53
In June 2014, Islamic State forces captured Mosul, a city of nearly two million in northern Iraq. In the face of the jihadi advance, tens of thousands of Iraqi troops and federal police doffed their uniforms and melted away.54 By October 2014, the Islamic State had reached the outskirts of Baghdad and was lobbing mortar rounds at the city’s main international airport.55 In the absence of a credible Iraqi army, someone had to save the capital, and Soleimani’s Shi`a proxies—alongside other militias drawn from other communities—were only too happy to oblige. Soleimani now ordered some of the Iraqi militias tasked with defending Assad to cross back over the border to rescue the Iraqi state.56 The militants participating in the defense organized themselves into the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), an umbrella organization for coordination with the government in Baghdad. Most of the PMF’s constituent groups are Shi`a, and most of those are aligned in some way with Iran, although not all fall under Soleimani’s direct control.57 But Soleimani’s forces are among the biggest, and have seen much of the most intense fighting—often benefiting from U.S. military support to Iraqi troops on the ground. For example, they were pivotal to the retaking of Tikrit in early 2015, during which Soleimani himself was frequently pictured on the frontlines.58
Speaking later that year at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi thanked Iran for its “prompt” deliveries of arms and ammunition, “without even asking for immediate payments.” He reserved particular praise for Qassem Soleimani, calling him out by name as one of Iraq’s most important allies in the fight against the Islamic State.59
Today, the Islamic State no longer holds any meaningful territory in Iraq. But the PMF has not gone away. As of early 2018, its strength was being estimated at around 100,000 to 150,000 fighters, most of them aligned with Iran.60 Long after the Islamic State’s defeat became an inevitability, Prime Minister Abadi was referring to the PMF as “the hope of the country and the region.”61 Indeed, Abadi’s government further entrenched the PMF’s power, making it an independent security force reporting directly to the prime minister’s office—a position that, by longstanding convention, is always held by a Shi`a Muslim.62 While some PMF groups have indeed integrated their command structures under the prime minister’s office, others—including prominent militias with close ties to Tehran—have refused to do so, preferring to retain their independence.63 The Abadi government’s attempts to bring these groups into line met with resistance, denunciations, and in some cases violence, suggesting that future administrations will need to tread carefully when dealing with the PMF.64
Meanwhile, PMF groups have themselves become a force at the ballot box. In 2018, several of the larger militias loyal to Soleimani, including the Badr Organization and Asaib Ahl al-Haq (both of which battled Western troops during the U.S. occupation) formed a political coalition, the Fatah (Victory) Alliance, which won 48 seats in Iraq’s parliament in the May 2018 elections.65 In the political negotiations that followed those elections, Tehran initially identified Hadi al-Amiri, leader of the Badr Organization and the Fatah Alliance, as one of its preferred candidates for prime minister (the other being former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki).66 Al-Amiri has acknowledged his friendship with and admiration for Soleimani in effusive terms.67 As transport minister in the al-Maliki government from 2010 to 2014, he allegedly permitted supply flights from Iran to Hezbollah to overfly Iraqi airspace at Soleimani’s behest.68
Soleimani’s own role in Iraqi politics also persists. Prior to the retaking of Kirkuk from Kurdish peshmergas in the fall of 2017, Soleimani personally traveled to Kurdistan on at least three occasions to deliver veiled threats to the Kurdish leadership on behalf of then-Prime Minister Abadi.69 No doubt these warnings factored heavily into the Kurds’ eventual decision to yield the city almost without a fight. Wily as ever, Soleimani positioned his own militias so that they would wind up in control of key sites around the city.70
It remains to be seen how Iraq’s new prime minister, Adel Abdul Mahdi, will handle the PMF. Now a political independent, Abdul Mahdi came to prominence during the Saddam years as a leader in the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq—a political party-in-exile created by (and indeed, in) Tehran in the early 1980s.71 However, he also worked productively with U.S. officials following the 2003 invasion.72 The Fatah Alliance, together with other Iran-aligned political groups, initially opposed his candidacy, while other influential Shi`a figures, including the clerics Moqtada al-Sadr and Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, backed him.73 Given this eclectic background, Abdul Mahdi’s nomination has been seen as representing a compromise, both between the two major Shi`a political blocs and, on a wider level, between U.S. and Iranian interests in Iraq.74
In the near term, Abdul Mahdi’s government will have little room to curb the power of the PMF; as long as the Islamic State retains any presence in Iraq, the militias will remain essential to the country’s security.75 Even after the Islamic State is fully eradicated (if that day ever comes), the PMF’s influence, militarily and politically, has reached the point that no successful government will be able to ignore its wishes for the foreseeable future; indeed, amid a slate of cabinet nominees comprised largely of moderates and technocrats, Abdul Mahdi also nominated the Chair of the PMF, Falih al-Fayadh, to serve as his interior minister.76
https://ctc.usma.edu/app/uploads/2018/11/Sentinel-Sidebar-v2.jpg
Summoning the Bear: Moscow, 2015
By mid-2015, things were not going exactly to plan for Soleimani back in Syria. Assad’s forces were plagued by defections, leaving Iranian-backed militias from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, among other countries, almost single-handedly fighting Sunni rebels for control of Syria’s largest city, Aleppo.77 They needed the backing of a larger outside power, one with formidable air capabilities, and the natural broker for the deal was the top general on the scene—Qassem Soleimani. In July 2015, despite peremptory U.N. sanctions prohibiting him from travel outside Iran, Soleimani flew to Moscow (reportedly on a commercial flight) for talks with the Russian defense minister and, reportedly, President Putin himself.78 A few weeks later, Soleimani was back in Syria, spearheading a coordinated offensive against rebel and jihadi groups, under cover of a massively stepped-up Russian air campaign. Putin’s intervention turned the tide decisively in Assad’s favor. By December 2016, Soleimani was pictured touring the remains of Aleppo’s historic heart, a few days after his militias, fighting alongside Syrian regulars, retook the city.79
Iranian forces have made significant sacrifices in Syria. Soleimani’s IRGC has an active presence, and they have not held back from the thick of the fight. Accurate totals for Iranian personnel deployed to Syria are hard to come by—Assad himself, naturally enough, claims the number is zero—but the Washington Institute for Near East Policy estimates that the number generally deployed there at any one time has been around 700, except during the height of the Russian air campaign in the second half of 2015, when it ballooned to perhaps 3,000.80 According to one October 2017 analysis in The Washington Post, at least 349 Iranian soldiers died in Syria and Iraq between February 2012 and August 2017, suggesting a high casualty rate.81 The same analysis showed that the dead included at least 39 of Soleimani’s fellow IRGC generals.82
But Soleimani evidently calculates that the cost justifies the expense, and he has a point, given Tehran’s current strategic priorities: as long as it remains under the control of the Assad family, Syria lies at the western end of an arc of Iranian influence stretching from the western borders of Afghanistan to the shores of the Mediterranean—a crimp on Iran’s regional rivals, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
Tehran also sees economic reasons for cultivating this “Axis of Resistance,” not least the fact that it will need its cooperation if it is ever to build a long-planned overland pipeline to the Mediterranean from the giant South Pars–North Dome gas field on the Persian Gulf. The Iran-to-Lebanon crescent has already transformed the geopolitics of the Middle East; backed up by petrochemical power, it would truly be a force to reckon with.
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For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://ctc.usma.edu/qassem-soleimani-irans-unique-regional-strategy/
Qassem Soleimani and Iran’s Unique Regional Strategy
November 2018, Volume 11, Issue 10
Authors:
Ali Soufan
Categories:
Iran/Biographic & Autobiographical Texts/Strategy, History, & Goals/Hezbollah & Other Shia Groups/Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps/Quds Force
Abstract: In recent years, Iran has projected its power across the Middle East, from Lebanon and Syria to Iraq and Yemen. One of the keys to its success has been a unique strategy of blending militant and state power, built in part on the model of Hezbollah in Lebanon. The acknowledged principal architect of this policy is Major General Qassem Soleimani, the long-serving head of Iran’s Quds (“Jerusalem”) Force. Without question, Soleimani is the most powerful general in the Middle East today; he is also one of Iran’s most popular living people, and has been repeatedly touted as a possible presidential candidate.
Despite its ongoing economic woes, today’s Iran has fashioned itself into one of the premier military and diplomatic powers in the Middle East—and Saudi Arabia’s principal rival for hegemony over the entire region. It has achieved this with a mix of policies—among them, deft diplomatic maneuvering; a tactical alliance with Vladimir Putin’s Russia; and the provision of arms, advice, and cash to Shi`a militias across a variety of countries. In the latter case, Iran has pioneered a seemingly unique strategy that combines insurgent and state power in a potent admixture—a strategy that is evident today in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.
One man is recognized as the principal architect of each of these policies: Major General Qassem Soleimani, long-time chief of the Quds Force, a crack special forces battalion of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Although revered in his home country and feared on battlefields across the Middle East, Soleimani remains virtually unknown in the West. Yet to say that today’s Iran cannot be fully understood without first understanding Qassem Soleimani would be a considerable understatement. More than anyone else, Soleimani has been responsible for the creation of an arc of influence—which Iran terms its “Axis of Resistance”—extending from the Gulf of Oman through Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Today, with Assad’s impending victory in his country’s calamitous civil war, this Iranian alliance has become stable enough that Qassem Soleimani, should he be so minded, could drive his car from Tehran to Lebanon’s border with Israel without being stopped. And, as the Mossad chief Yossi Cohen has pointed out, the same route would be open to truckloads of rockets bound for Iran’s main regional proxy, Hezbollah.1
This article reviews Soleimani’s career and assesses his contribution to Iran’s regional ascendancy.
“Come, we are waiting for you:” Hamdan, Iran, 2018
On a normal day, the most powerful soldier in the Middle East shies away from bluster; indeed, he typically tends toward self-effacement. In meetings with everyone from local warlords to Ayatollahs to the Russian foreign minister, Major General Soleimani prefers to sit quietly in a corner and take it all in.2 When he speaks, he does so politely and simply in a pillow-soft tenor, rarely raising his voice.3 He deprecates all attempts at hero worship, refusing, for example, to allow admirers to kiss his hand.4 One American journalist who has profiled Soleimani calls him “almost theatrically modest.”5
Physically, he is unprepossessing. His face gently frosted with a close-cropped white beard, his dreamy eyes seeming to shine with the recollection of a fond memory, he bears more than a passing resemblance to mid-career Sean Connery, circa Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. He is short in stature—a fact he has been known to highlight, dubbing himself “the smallest soldier.”6
One day in the summer of 2018, Soleimani’s modest façade dropped—to be replaced, albeit briefly, by righteous anger. The source of his ire was one to which many Americans might relate: a furious tweet from President Trump. On this particular occasion, the object of Trump’s wrath was Soleimani’s nominal boss.
“To Iranian President [Hassan] Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!”7
During a speech in Hamdan, a city 200 miles southwest of Tehran, Soleimani tore into Trump with unusual bombast. He scowled. He wagged his finger. And he yelled, despite the half-dozen news microphones clipped to the lectern in front of him—a relatively modest crop, given Soleimani’s celebrity status in his home country.
“The U.S. president … made some idiotic comments on Twitter. It is beneath the dignity of the president of the great Islamic country of Iran to respond, so I will respond, as a soldier of our great nation. You threaten us with a measure that the world has not seen before. First of all, it has been over a year since Trump became U.S. president, but that man’s rhetoric is still that of a casino, of a bar. He talks to the world in the style of a bartender or a casino manager.”8
Soleimani’s audience responded in kind. Where typically they would hear his words in reverent silence, occasionally interjecting pro-forma Islamic revolutionary slogans, on this occasion they laughed and clapped and whistled and hollered and even heckled as if watching a standup comic.
Then came the threat.
“Mr. Trump, the gambler! […] You are well aware of our power and capabilities in the region. You know how powerful we are in asymmetrical warfare.9 Come, we are waiting for you. We are the real men on the scene, as far as you are concerned. You know that a war would mean the loss of all your capabilities. You may start the war, but we will be the ones to determine its end.”10
If anyone is in a position to make such brazen threats, it is Qassem Soleimani. One American commentator compares him to John LeCarré’s ubiquitous yet invisible Soviet spymaster Karla.11 Another calls him “Iran’s real foreign minister.”12 Both have a point. Although practically unknown to the U.S. public, Soleimani in fact manages vast swathes of Iranian foreign policy almost single-handedly. For the best part of 20 years, he has enjoyed the unmediated ear of his country’s supreme leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who calls Soleimani, uniquely among all the Islamic Republic’s heroes, “a living martyr of the Revolution.”13 Abroad, he has made himself the confidant of political leaders in Damascus, Beirut, Baghdad, and even Moscow.
The international community has taken note. The United Nations Security Council sanctions Soleimani for supporting terrorism and selling Iranian weapons overseas.14 The U.S. government brands him a nuclear proliferator, a supporter of terrorism, a human rights abuser, and a leading suspect in the 2011 plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States by bombing a Washington, D.C., restaurant.15 While most Americans and Europeans may never have heard the name Qassem Soleimani, their intelligence services might wish it came up less often.
Soleimani has become the leading exponent of a uniquely Iranian style of insurgency. Typically, militias define themselves against governments, fight them, and seek to sweep away all vestiges of their power. Those under Soleimani’s control, by contrast, have tended more often to work with the grain of government power, and thus to co-opt governments from within, fusing militant and state power into a formidable whole. Lebanon’s Hezbollah is the most prominent example; but, as this article will note, it is far from the only one.
The Goat Thief: Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, 1953-200216
Little in Soleimani’s personal background could have hinted at the power he would one day wield. He hails from a village in the mountains of Kerman Province, a region in Iran’s southeast, not far from the borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan.17 In Kerman, tribal politics traditionally have held far more sway than any edict of the central government 500 miles away in Tehran.
Owing to a botched land reform introduced by the Shah as part of the “White Revolution,” Soleimani’s father, a small-time farmer, wound up owing the government around 9,000 rials. This debt, which was only on the order of $100, seems to have brought the family to the brink of ruin. In order to help pay down the debt, Soleimani left school at 13 to labor on construction sites in the provincial capital, Kerman City. By the time the Islamic Revolution erupted in 1978, he had become a technician with the municipal water authority.18
Prior to that point, the young Soleimani had shown little, if any, interest in politics; but he joined the IRGC shortly after it was founded in April 1979. He found his calling. At any rate, he must have impressed someone, for immediately after completing basic training, he became an instructor of new recruits.19 That was the moment Qassem Soleimani began his remarkable upward trajectory.
In many ways, Soleimani’s rise from provincial obscurity to the heights of power parallels Iran’s regional ascendancy over the past 40 years. His frontline career began in the turmoil that followed the Islamic Revolution, when his unit was sent to the northwest to quell a Kurdish separatist uprising—a mission regarded to this day as a badge of honor within the IRGC. (It was in the course of that effort that Soleimani, just 22 years old, first encountered a 23-year-old political operative named Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then acting as an adviser to the regional government. Nearly 30 years later, Ahmadinejad would go on to serve as one of the Islamic Republic’s most hardline presidents—with vocal support from Soleimani.20)
In September 1980, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq opportunistically invaded its neighbor, hoping to capitalize on the post-revolutionary chaos. Initially, Soleimani was sent back to Kerman to raise and train troops, but he soon found himself redirected to the front, where he volunteered to spend extra time. Soleimani served throughout the war in almost every part of the front, from the retaking of Bostan in December 1981 to the invasion of Iraqi Kurdistan in 1987, during which Saddam’s forces attacked his unit with chemical weapons, to the climactic expedition to the al-Faw Peninsula in April 1988, whose failure helped precipitate the ceasefire that ended the war.21
Soleimani developed a reputation for treating the men under his command well. He made a habit of returning from behind-the-lines reconnaissance missions with live goats and other provender to feed his men, earning him the admiring sobriquet “the Goat Thief.”22 On many occasions, he publicly questioned the decisions of his commanding officers, culminating in a shouting match in which he told his commander-in-chief, Mohsen Rezai, “We don’t have any plan for the war!”23 But this insubordinate streak did not prevent him from rising to leadership of the IRGC’s crack 41st Division, nicknamed Tharallah—Vengeance of God—an alias of Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet and one of the key figures in Shi`a Islam.24 He was starting to attract attention from the very top; a photograph from the period shows Soleimani seated on the floor, enjoying a meal at the right hand of then-President Ali Khamenei.25
Following the close of hostilities with Iraq in 1988, Soleimani was sent back home to Kerman to wage war on the drug gangs threatening order in the region. Like the United States’ own “War on Drugs,” it was a bloody campaign; but within three years, forces under Soleimani’s command had pacified the province, earning him the lasting gratitude of its residents.26
Little is known about the next six or seven years of Soleimani’s life, but by March 1998 at the latest, he had risen to become commander of the Quds Force, the lethal special forces unit of the IRGC tasked with bolstering pro-Iranian regimes and militias abroad. (“Quds” comes from the Farsi name for Jerusalem.27) As the remainder of this article will show, Soleimani excelled at this task, establishing or strengthening contacts with Shi`a militias and political parties across the region, as well as the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Damascus.
At the same time, the then-newly installed administration of Mohammed Khatami put him in charge of managing Iran’s burgeoning confrontation with the upstart Taliban movement in neighboring Afghanistan.28 Not for the first or last time, Soleimani’s inborn familiarity with tribal culture and politics would stand him in good stead.
In August 1998, a few months into Soleimani’s tenure at the head of the Quds Force, Taliban forces swept into the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i Sharif, home to a substantial community of ethnic Hazaras—Farsi-speaking Shi`a Muslims. The Taliban initiated a brutal pogrom against members of the minority, trashing homes, raping women and girls, and massacring hundreds of Shi`a men and boys.29 Among the dead was a group of nine Iranians: eight diplomats and a journalist.30 At this naked provocation, factions on both sides turned white-hot for war; the IRGC’s overall commander at the time, Yahya Rahim Safavi, requested Supreme Leader Khamenei’s permission “for the punishment of the Taliban, to advance to Herat [a city in western Afghanistan], annihilate, punish, eliminate them.”31 Iran began massing an invasion force of almost a quarter-million soldiers along the Afghan border. Reportedly, it was Soleimani who stepped in and defused the situation without resorting to further violence. Instead of confronting the Taliban directly, Soleimani opted to throw increased Iranian support behind the opposition Northern Alliance, personally helping to direct the group’s operations from a base across Afghanistan’s northern border in Tajikistan.32 It was a model of proxy warfare to which he would return again and again.
In the months after 9/11, Soleimani saw an opportunity to defeat the Taliban once and for all by unconventional means—namely, cooperation with the United States. Early in the war, he directed Iranian diplomats to share intelligence on Taliban military positions with their U.S. counterparts. The Americans, in return, told the Iranians what they knew about an al-Qa`ida fixer hiding out in eastern Iran.33
For a brief moment, it seemed as if this contact might lead to a more general thawing of relations between Iran and the country its leaders refer to as the “Great Satan.” Indeed, back in Tehran, behind closed doors, Soleimani was pronouncing himself “pleased with [the] cooperation,” and musing at the highest political levels that “maybe it’s time to rethink our relationship with the Americans.”34
This cooperation came to an abrupt halt in January 2002, however, after President George W. Bush used his State of the Union address to throw the book at Iran, branding it a nuclear proliferator, an exporter of terrorism, a repressive state, and part of an “Axis of Evil.” Soleimani, predictably, was apoplectic, and canceled future meetings with the Americans—a huge setback.35
Worse was to come.
“When we say no, he makes trouble:” Iraq, 2003-2011
The Islamic Republic’s relationship with Syria’s Assad regime has deep roots, extending back as far as the Iran-Iraq War when Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez, closed a key oil pipeline in a bid to harm the Iraqi economy. In 2003, the U.S. invasion of Iraq pushed Syria and Iran still closer together, as both regimes realized that if the Americans succeeded in Iraq, they could be next. To damage the U.S. occupation, Soleimani helped Syrian intelligence create pipelines for funneling Sunni jihadis into Iraq. Once there, the jihadis attacked U.S. forces, often using roadside bombs supplied by Soleimani’s Quds Force from factories inside Iran.36
Soleimani soon intervened more directly in Iraq, too, sending in Shi`a militias as proxies. Under his leadership, the Quds Force stood up a number of militias for the express purpose of attacking U.S. and allied troops. Collectively, these organizations were responsible for hundreds of coalition deaths. One of them, Asaib Ahl al-Haq (League of the Righteous), claimed more than 6,000 such attacks between its creation in 2006 and the U.S. withdrawal in 2011—an average of more than three per day, every day, for five years.37
In 2006, at the height of the bloodshed in Iraq, Soleimani took a break from managing Asaib and its sister groups in order to supervise another Iranian proxy, Hezbollah, in its escalating war with Israel.38 During his absence, U.S. commanders in the Green Zone noted a sharp decline in casualties across the country. Upon his return from Lebanon, Soleimani wrote to U.S. commanders, “I hope you have been enjoying the peace and quiet in Baghdad. I’ve been busy in Beirut!”39
Following the reestablishment of government in Iraq in 2005, Soleimani’s influence extended into the country’s politics as well. Under prime ministers Ibrahim al-Jaafari and Nouri al-Maliki, one of Soleimani’s militant proxies, the Badr Organization, was allowed to become, in effect, an arm of the state when the interior and transport ministries came under the control of its political wing.40 Iraq’s president from 2005 to 2014, Jalal Talabani, had benefited from IRGC help (as well as that of the CIA) when he served as a leader of Kurdish resistance to Saddam in the 1990s, and Soleimani took full advantage of that history.41 Dexter Filkins of The New Yorker quoted an intelligence officer as saying that he had never seen the normally formidable Talabani “so deferential to anyone. He was terrified.” No wonder; the same profile quoted one of Talabani’s fellow Kurdish officials as saying, “When we say no [to Soleimani], he makes trouble for us. Bombings. Shootings.”42
In early 2008, Soleimani sent General David Petraeus, then the most senior U.S. commander in Iraq, an imperious message:
“Dear General Petraeus: You should be aware that I, Qassem Soleimani, control Iran’s policy for Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and Afghanistan. And indeed, the ambassador in Baghdad is a Quds Force member. The individual who’s going to replace him is a Quds Force member.”43
This was conveyed to General Petraeus via a text message to Talabani’s personal cellphone—effectively relegating Talabani to the role of Soleimani’s mailman. The symbolism was not lost on anyone. Legend has it that Petraeus’ piquant reply read, “Dear General Soleimani: Go pound sand down a rat hole.”44 Privately, however, the U.S. State Department appears to have concurred with Soleimani’s assessment of his own bailiwick, describing him as “the point man directing the formulation and implementation of [his country’s] Iraq policy, with authority second only to [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei.”45
Soleimani’s habit of taunting U.S. officials did not end with the American withdrawal in 2011. As recently as 2017, then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo wrote to Soleimani again, warning him to restrain militias under his command from attacking U.S. interests in Iraq. The response from ‘Karla?’ “I will not take your letter nor read it and I have nothing to say to these people.”46
“We must witness victory:” Syria and Iraq, 2011-present
When the Arab Spring began in late 2010, Soleimani was quick to recognize the potential benefits for Iran, declaring in a May 2011 speech in Qom that the uprisings “provide our revolution with the greatest opportunities … we must witness victory in Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. This is the fruit of the Islamic Revolution.”47 In the months that followed, Soleimani made himself even more indispensable to the regimes in both Damascus and Baghdad—by deploying militants under his command.
On battlefields in both countries, Qassem Soleimani made himself ubiquitous. One might see him standing on the hoods and flatbeds of trucks, surrounded by fighters jostling and shushing each other to hear and see better.48 His rapt audiences consist of Shi`a militiamen from various countries who fight in support of the Assad regime or against the Islamic State group, but there is never any doubt as to where their principal loyalty lies. Not only do these groups sing songs about Soleimani, they produce music videos featuring militants doing parkour stunts and saluting the general’s image.49
Following the outbreak of civil war in Syria in 2011, Soleimani ordered some of his Iraqi militias into Syria to defend the Assad regime.50 For the same purpose, he also set up additional Shi`a militant groups; these included a group of Afghans resident in Iran, the Fatemiyoun Division, and a Pakistani outfit, the Zeynabiyoun Brigade.51 The very names of these groups announce Iran’s sectarian intentions: Shi`a Muslims accord Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet, a status comparable to that of the Virgin Mary in Catholicism; while Zaynab, Fatima’s daughter, was the sister of Hussein, whose death at the Battle of Karbala formed a pivotal moment in the Sunni-Shi`a schism. Forces under his command were instrumental in many major offensives of the Syrian war, including the recapture of Qusayr from rebels.52 True to form, Soleimani has sought to blend state and insurgent power as seamlessly as possible; the staff at his secret headquarters in Damascus reportedly includes Lebanese and Iraqi militia chieftains working alongside generals from both Iran and Syria.53
In June 2014, Islamic State forces captured Mosul, a city of nearly two million in northern Iraq. In the face of the jihadi advance, tens of thousands of Iraqi troops and federal police doffed their uniforms and melted away.54 By October 2014, the Islamic State had reached the outskirts of Baghdad and was lobbing mortar rounds at the city’s main international airport.55 In the absence of a credible Iraqi army, someone had to save the capital, and Soleimani’s Shi`a proxies—alongside other militias drawn from other communities—were only too happy to oblige. Soleimani now ordered some of the Iraqi militias tasked with defending Assad to cross back over the border to rescue the Iraqi state.56 The militants participating in the defense organized themselves into the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), an umbrella organization for coordination with the government in Baghdad. Most of the PMF’s constituent groups are Shi`a, and most of those are aligned in some way with Iran, although not all fall under Soleimani’s direct control.57 But Soleimani’s forces are among the biggest, and have seen much of the most intense fighting—often benefiting from U.S. military support to Iraqi troops on the ground. For example, they were pivotal to the retaking of Tikrit in early 2015, during which Soleimani himself was frequently pictured on the frontlines.58
Speaking later that year at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi thanked Iran for its “prompt” deliveries of arms and ammunition, “without even asking for immediate payments.” He reserved particular praise for Qassem Soleimani, calling him out by name as one of Iraq’s most important allies in the fight against the Islamic State.59
Today, the Islamic State no longer holds any meaningful territory in Iraq. But the PMF has not gone away. As of early 2018, its strength was being estimated at around 100,000 to 150,000 fighters, most of them aligned with Iran.60 Long after the Islamic State’s defeat became an inevitability, Prime Minister Abadi was referring to the PMF as “the hope of the country and the region.”61 Indeed, Abadi’s government further entrenched the PMF’s power, making it an independent security force reporting directly to the prime minister’s office—a position that, by longstanding convention, is always held by a Shi`a Muslim.62 While some PMF groups have indeed integrated their command structures under the prime minister’s office, others—including prominent militias with close ties to Tehran—have refused to do so, preferring to retain their independence.63 The Abadi government’s attempts to bring these groups into line met with resistance, denunciations, and in some cases violence, suggesting that future administrations will need to tread carefully when dealing with the PMF.64
Meanwhile, PMF groups have themselves become a force at the ballot box. In 2018, several of the larger militias loyal to Soleimani, including the Badr Organization and Asaib Ahl al-Haq (both of which battled Western troops during the U.S. occupation) formed a political coalition, the Fatah (Victory) Alliance, which won 48 seats in Iraq’s parliament in the May 2018 elections.65 In the political negotiations that followed those elections, Tehran initially identified Hadi al-Amiri, leader of the Badr Organization and the Fatah Alliance, as one of its preferred candidates for prime minister (the other being former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki).66 Al-Amiri has acknowledged his friendship with and admiration for Soleimani in effusive terms.67 As transport minister in the al-Maliki government from 2010 to 2014, he allegedly permitted supply flights from Iran to Hezbollah to overfly Iraqi airspace at Soleimani’s behest.68
Soleimani’s own role in Iraqi politics also persists. Prior to the retaking of Kirkuk from Kurdish peshmergas in the fall of 2017, Soleimani personally traveled to Kurdistan on at least three occasions to deliver veiled threats to the Kurdish leadership on behalf of then-Prime Minister Abadi.69 No doubt these warnings factored heavily into the Kurds’ eventual decision to yield the city almost without a fight. Wily as ever, Soleimani positioned his own militias so that they would wind up in control of key sites around the city.70
It remains to be seen how Iraq’s new prime minister, Adel Abdul Mahdi, will handle the PMF. Now a political independent, Abdul Mahdi came to prominence during the Saddam years as a leader in the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq—a political party-in-exile created by (and indeed, in) Tehran in the early 1980s.71 However, he also worked productively with U.S. officials following the 2003 invasion.72 The Fatah Alliance, together with other Iran-aligned political groups, initially opposed his candidacy, while other influential Shi`a figures, including the clerics Moqtada al-Sadr and Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, backed him.73 Given this eclectic background, Abdul Mahdi’s nomination has been seen as representing a compromise, both between the two major Shi`a political blocs and, on a wider level, between U.S. and Iranian interests in Iraq.74
In the near term, Abdul Mahdi’s government will have little room to curb the power of the PMF; as long as the Islamic State retains any presence in Iraq, the militias will remain essential to the country’s security.75 Even after the Islamic State is fully eradicated (if that day ever comes), the PMF’s influence, militarily and politically, has reached the point that no successful government will be able to ignore its wishes for the foreseeable future; indeed, amid a slate of cabinet nominees comprised largely of moderates and technocrats, Abdul Mahdi also nominated the Chair of the PMF, Falih al-Fayadh, to serve as his interior minister.76
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Summoning the Bear: Moscow, 2015
By mid-2015, things were not going exactly to plan for Soleimani back in Syria. Assad’s forces were plagued by defections, leaving Iranian-backed militias from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, among other countries, almost single-handedly fighting Sunni rebels for control of Syria’s largest city, Aleppo.77 They needed the backing of a larger outside power, one with formidable air capabilities, and the natural broker for the deal was the top general on the scene—Qassem Soleimani. In July 2015, despite peremptory U.N. sanctions prohibiting him from travel outside Iran, Soleimani flew to Moscow (reportedly on a commercial flight) for talks with the Russian defense minister and, reportedly, President Putin himself.78 A few weeks later, Soleimani was back in Syria, spearheading a coordinated offensive against rebel and jihadi groups, under cover of a massively stepped-up Russian air campaign. Putin’s intervention turned the tide decisively in Assad’s favor. By December 2016, Soleimani was pictured touring the remains of Aleppo’s historic heart, a few days after his militias, fighting alongside Syrian regulars, retook the city.79
Iranian forces have made significant sacrifices in Syria. Soleimani’s IRGC has an active presence, and they have not held back from the thick of the fight. Accurate totals for Iranian personnel deployed to Syria are hard to come by—Assad himself, naturally enough, claims the number is zero—but the Washington Institute for Near East Policy estimates that the number generally deployed there at any one time has been around 700, except during the height of the Russian air campaign in the second half of 2015, when it ballooned to perhaps 3,000.80 According to one October 2017 analysis in The Washington Post, at least 349 Iranian soldiers died in Syria and Iraq between February 2012 and August 2017, suggesting a high casualty rate.81 The same analysis showed that the dead included at least 39 of Soleimani’s fellow IRGC generals.82
But Soleimani evidently calculates that the cost justifies the expense, and he has a point, given Tehran’s current strategic priorities: as long as it remains under the control of the Assad family, Syria lies at the western end of an arc of Iranian influence stretching from the western borders of Afghanistan to the shores of the Mediterranean—a crimp on Iran’s regional rivals, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
Tehran also sees economic reasons for cultivating this “Axis of Resistance,” not least the fact that it will need its cooperation if it is ever to build a long-planned overland pipeline to the Mediterranean from the giant South Pars–North Dome gas field on the Persian Gulf. The Iran-to-Lebanon crescent has already transformed the geopolitics of the Middle East; backed up by petrochemical power, it would truly be a force to reckon with.
Continued...
