Enter the General.

President Bush’s war on terror and ongoing US antipathy paved the way for the arrival of a new figure in Iranian foreign policy.

Enter General Ghassem Soleimani, a key figure in Iran’s modern history and a central contributor to Iran’s regional activities.

Soleimani was born in 1957 and joined the Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC) around the time of the revolution. He rose through the ranks via command of the 41st Tharallah Division in Kermanshah where he engaged in counterterrorism operations against Sunni resistance groups such as the Taliban and Jundallah.16 In February 1998 supreme leader Khamenei appointed him head of the IRGC’s Quds Force responsible for operations beyond Iran’s borders.

The military had been severely depleted by war and the sanctions imposed after the revolution. Military expenditure had fallen sharply and it was clear that Iran was unable to confront threats or challenges directly. She would therefore need to act asymmetrically, focusing on points of weakness in her adversaries in order to increase their cost of conflict.17

Soleimani was a hardliner, loyal to Khamenei and keen for Iran to play a more active role in the Middle East. But he was also a student of the proxy warfare that had emerged in the Cold war, and his counter terror experience of Iraq sponsored resistance groups in Kermanshah had lent him a keen understanding of the power of asymmetrical warfare and the patron-client relationship in which states funded and equipped client groups with intent to maximise the interests of patrons, whilst minimising the risk of war. His was a rationale shared with many who had fought on the frontlines of the war and had witnessed first-hand the suffering of Iraqi attacks and Iranian vulnerability in war with the West’s proxies. It was a rationale of self-reliance, coup-proofed institutions, defence of territorial integrity, national unity and sovereignty through deterrence and ‘constant’ defence.18 The resultant strategy blended Khamenei’s pursuit of the original transnational revolutionary jihad with economic, social and military mechanisms intended to convert relationships – usually founded in shared religious beliefs – into directed militant proxies.19

General Soleimani’s new strategy

Soleimani’s military strategic thinking drew heavily on Brigadier S.K. Malik’s “The Quranic Concept of War” and the idea that the theory of war is derived from God’s principles and commandments for warfighting as described in the Quran.

The approach is founded in Islam’s Manichean dichotomy between right and wrong, contrasting the evil west with the purity of the Muslim faith and way of life. It rests on one of the Quran’s key concepts, that Jehad is the collective responsibility of the entire Muslim Ummah and is not restricted to soldiers. It is explicit with regard to justification of this defensive war, maintaining that the rejection of Dawa – the call to God – is treason under Islamic law and that it is necessary to remove such treason as a “cancerous malformation even if by surgical means…in order to save the rest of humanity.”20

The doctrine approaches terror as an objective principal of war, an instrument intended to push the enemy to his culminating point. “Terror struck into the hearts of the enemies is not only a means, it is the end in itself”. The religious dimension of this is emphasised: that “(terror)…can only be instilled if the opponent’s faith is destroyed…(and) to instil terror into the hearts of the enemy it is essential…to dislocate his faith”.21

And as Malik’s publisher Poole aptly comments, the attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon, as well as others such as the US Embassy and airport attacks in Beirut, and the lynching and humiliation of US soldiers in Somalia, were therefore not merely terror events but attacks on the west’s “faith” – materialism, military strength and democratic values. Attacks which in many cases led to a clear victory in the form of the withdrawal of military force.

This powerful message was to form the basis for the successful enrolling of Shi’a communities in the Levant and elsewhere.

It is worthy of note that the publishers of Malik’s text, Messrs Poole and Hanna, claim that US military officials discovered summaries of Malik’s text in multiple languages on the bodies of captured and killed jihadist insurgents in Afghanistan.

The approach also suited Khamenei. It fused the revolution’s original vehemently anti-western direction with elements of his personal interest in Islamic activism. Adair cites his efforts to undermine attempts at cooperation with the US during the presidencies of both Rafsanjani and Khatami, opposing both pragmatism and reform.

This preference for indirect opposition, founded in the Shi’a fundamentalism of the Revolution, led according again to Adair, to a highly rational “cost benefit” analysis based on a western perspective and resulted in the strategic pursuit of “bounded instability” in neighbouring geographies. Thus the Quds force would work to encourage low intensity insecurity across the Levant in order to generate operational space for Iranian clients, allowing them to create inhospitable environments which restricted adversaries’ freedom of manoeuvre, and created defensive depth, whilst limiting cost to a minimum. Over time, entrenched proxies would, like Hezbollah, expand instability and weaken their hosts providing further opportunities for the expansion of Iranian hegemony.

The connection with the wider Middle East

Soleimani’s starting point was the two relationships Iran had developed in the preceding decades.

Ayatollah Khomeini had developed relationships with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) from well before his own revolutionary success, maintaining that “Palestine was the cornerstone of Iranian revolutionaries’ struggles against the Shah, Imperialism and Zionism”.22 The Palestinians’ struggle was an open conflict with Israel, a cause easily adopted by Iran in its overt opposition to the West and its proxies but the Palestinians were overwhelmingly Sunni and Soleimani needed a more solid foundation. He found it in the form of the Shi’a of southern Lebanon.

Iran’s attitude to its most notorious proxy in its earliest days can best be described as ambivalent. Even after the formation of Lebanese Hezbollah in 1985 and its role in opposing the Israeli invasion, the group owed more to the strenuous efforts of Lebanese clerics than it did to Iranian support.23 But the arrival of Soleimani was to change this. The Quds Force’s new chief saw Lebanese Hizballah as a central point of implementation of his wider strategy and he was impressed with the success of its operations such as the attacks on the US marine corps barracks in Beirut.

Soleimani quickly began to combine diplomatic efforts with security initiatives to grow networks and alliances. The intent was for Hizballah to act as lead coordinator – and an additional cut out - of a new proxy organisation called the Axis of Resistance,24 built around direct opposition to Israel. Diplomatic efforts would leverage Hizballah’s security contacts in pursuit of organisations with which the Quds Force wished to work. Early results were the recruitment of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, threatening Israel from both Gaza and the West Bank.

Repeated Shi’a uprisings in Iraq against Saddam Hussein in the late 90’s proved serendipitous. Iraqi Shi’a displaced by Saddam had for long sought refuge inside Iran. Camps had been established for them in Kermanshah province, under the control of the Iranian officered Badr Brigades which had been formed in the early 80’s as the military wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic revolution in Iraq. The intent was a return to Iraq in the event of US invasion.25 The Quds Force provided the necessary funding, training, equipment and structure via direct communications with the Brigades’ chief, Hadi al Ameri and Abu Mahdi al Muhandis.

It was an investment in men, weapons and equipment that was to prove remarkably far sighted.

Iran and the second Gulf War

By the time of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 the Badr Corps had become a powerful front line military client of the Quds Force. Iran feared a subsequent attack on itself and immediately sought to intensify influence in Iraq to bolster its leverage in potential future negotiations.26

A blend of political, social and cultural influences was brought into play by Soleimani. A coalition of Shi’a groups was unified under a single banner answering to Quds Force direction. Badr commanders were ordered to use the opportunity of post war chaos to move from Tehran to Baghdad and, using al Muhandis’ membership of the Dawa party, began to work in the political arena, ensuring that elections would promote candidates favourably disposed towards Iran. Hizballah, by now embedded in a fruitful relationship with the Quds force, was directed to form Unit 3800 to train Arab Shi’a militants to attack Coalition forces. Allowing, amongst other things, support to be offered to militants allied to Moqtadr al Sadr who had refused Iranian fealty.27

The icing on the cake came in the form of the second order effect of Iraqi instability was the birth of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). The collapse of the US trained and equipped Iraqi Army before the group’s lightning conquest of vast swathes of the Levant provided an unexpectedly powerful opportunity for Iran. Grand Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani’s call for Iraqi Shi’a men to stand and protect their holy sites led to the formation of the “Popular Militia Forces” and to a lead role in the defeat of ISIL. This saw them elevated to the status both of US ally and national heroes. But not before the new Iraqi Political elite, fronted by the redoubtable Abu Mahdi al Muhandis had commandeered them as Iran’s private army in Iraq. It was an extraordinary stroke of luck.

By 2005, this military force, in combination with the wide ranging power of the new Minister of the Interior - a former commander of the Badr Brigades, Baqr Jabr al Zubeidi (whose positon granted him control of the Federal Police, the department of border enforcement, the facilities protection service and the Federal Intelligence and investigations Agency), Soleimani’s Quds Force boasted near total control of Iraq.

Bibliography

Adair, Bianca L. "The Quranic Concept of War and Bounded Instability: Understanding Iran's Strategy and Tactics in the Middle East." Comparative Strategy, vol. 42, 18 Jan. 2023, pp. 1–16, https://doi.org/10.1080/01495933.2022.2158028. Accessed 27 Jan. 2023.

Malik, S K. The Quranic Concept of Power. 1991.

Myers, Joseph C. "Review Essays: The Quranic Concept of War." The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters, vol. 36, no. 4, 1 Nov. 2006, https://doi.org/10.55540/0031-1723.2334.

Ostovar, Afshon. "The Grand Strategy of Militant Clients: Iran's Way of War." Security Studies, vol. 28, no. 1, 17 Oct. 2018, pp. 159–188, https://doi.org/10.1080/09636412.2018.1508862.

Pahlavi, Pierre, and Eric Ouellet. "Iran: Asymmetric Strategy and Mass Diplomacy." Journal of Strategic Security, vol. 13, no. 2, July 2020, pp. 94–106, https://doi.org/10.5038/1944-0472.13.2.1796.

Sankari, Jamal. Fadlallah. 2005.

Tabatabai, Ariane. No Conquest, No Defeat: Iran's National Security Strategy. New York, NY, Oxford University Press, 2020.