Hezbollah (67 page)

Iranian sponsorship of terrorism picked up pace as the Iran-Iraq War came to a close and US-Iran tensions increased. “No longer drained by fighting Iraq,” former White House counterterrorism director Richard Clarke wrote, “[Iranian] aid to Hezbollah increased.”
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Iranian support to its proxies in the Gulf increased as well. Following the accidental downing of Iran Air flight 655 by the USS
Vincennes
on July 3, 1988, US diplomatic posts worldwide went on high alert in anticipation of a revenge attack by Iranian agents or their proxies. The CIA noted at the time that several posts reported individuals of Middle Eastern appearance conducting surveillance of US embassies. The risk of an attack on US interests in the Gulf was deemed especially high. In addition, the CIA noted, “Tehran could draw on its extensive assets in Dubai to rally protest demonstrations—which could easily turn to violence—or mount a terrorist operation.”
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Years later, an Iranian diplomat who defected to Europe in 2002 after serving as Iran’s consul-general in Dubai would reveal that Iran used its consulate there as a regional intelligence hub through which it also funneled suitcases stuffed with millions of dollars to Hezbollah.
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Such claims were given further credence two years later, when dozens of long-term Lebanese Shi’a residents were expelled from the United Arab Emirates on charges of being affiliated with Hezbollah.
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By 1992, articles in Hezbollah’s own publications documented the group’s support to extremist groups throughout the region, including “radical elements” in Tunisia, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, and Yemen. At the time, the CIA assessed that at least “some” of Hezbollah’s support to these other extremist groups was taking place “at the behest of Iran, which is trying to expand its ties to extremist Islamic groups without jeopardizing its efforts to improve its political ties in the region.”
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In the broader picture, the activities of Iran’s terrorist proxies over the past two decades, and the Qods Force’s role in nurturing them, reveal a number of trends. First, Iran has a long history of supporting Shi’a terrorist groups in the Gulf region that act as proxies for Tehran. On their own, and in cooperation with the Qods Force, local Hezbollah affiliates and groups like the Iraqi Dawa Party have engaged in terrorism and political violence in support of their own and Iranian interests.

Second, Iraqi Shi’a extremists feature prominently in Iran’s arsenal of regional proxies. Some of the most proactive Iraqi Shi’a extremists to work with Iran in the post-2003 period began as Iranian proxies some twenty years earlier. Consider, for example, Jamal Jafar Muhammad Ali, better known as Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, one of the Iraqi Dawa Party terrorists who partnered with Hezbollah to carry out the 1983 embassy bombings in Kuwait and the 1985 assassination attempt on the Kuwaiti emir. Convicted in absentia for his role in those attacks, Muhandis went on to lead the Badr Corps, the militant wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). The Badr Corps not only fought alongside Iranian forces in the Iran-Iraq War, it also engaged in acts of sabotage and terrorism targeting the Saddam regime. As head of the Badr Corps, Muhandis worked directly with the Qods Force and other militant Iraqi Shi’a targeting the Hussein regime.
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According to Iraqi documents captured by coalition forces, Muhandis’s chief of staff in the Badr Corps was Hadi al-Ameri, who would go on to head the Badr Organization (so renamed in an attempt to rebrand the longtime militia as a political party) and serve as an Iraqi parliamentarian after Saddam’s overthrow. At some point in the 1990s, Muhandis was succeeded by Mustafa al-Sheibani as commander of the Badr Corps.
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Muhandis, who now also had Iranian citizenship, became an adviser to the commander of the Qods Force, Gen. Qassem Soleimani.
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At one point Muhandis and Sheibani lived in the same IRGC compound. And all three, Muhandis, Sheibani, and Ameri, went on to become key Shi’a militant leaders in the post-2003 invasion period. “Today,” a 2008 report published by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point concluded, “some of Iraq’s most wanted Shi’a insurgents share Badr Corps lineage with Iraqi politicians operating openly in Baghdad.”
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Third, Iraqi Shi’a militant groups like the Dawa Party and Badr Corps have long histories of cooperation, training, and cross-fertilization with Lebanese Hezbollah. As noted before, Dawa operatives engaged in joint terrorist operations with Hezbollah. In fact, links between Hezbollah and the Dawa Party run deep. The Dawa Party in Lebanon, one of the precursor elements to what became Lebanese Hezbollah, was imported from Iraq in 1969 by followers of Iraqi cleric Mohammad Baqr al-Sadr. Hezbollah has long-standing ties to the Badr Corps as well. According to seized Iraqi intelligence documents, the Badr Corps employed a modus operandi—common among Iranian-sponsored groups—of establishing clandestine offices in businesses, hospitals, and nongovernmental organizations in Iraq. One undated Iraqi intelligence report explained that among the many functions of these fronts was to help “secure and support the Badr Corps, and the different groups belonging to the al-Qods Force, such as the movement of Hezbollah.”
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Over the years, Iran has cultivated ties, both organizational and interpersonal, among its various proxies. That would continue in post-Saddam Iraq, where some of Iran’s most prominent diplomats not only served in the IRGC but also had personal relationships with Hezbollah. Ambassador Hassan Kazemi Qomi, a former Iranian ambassador to Iraq, for example, previously served as an IRGC liaison to Hezbollah.
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By forcing the collapse of the regime of Saddam Hussein, Operation Iraqi Freedom removed Iran’s greatest enemy and longtime nemesis. The 2003 invasion therefore provided Iran with a historic opportunity to reshape its relationship with Iraq and, in the process, increase its influence in the region. To that end, Iran employed an “all elements of national power” approach in exploiting the outcome of this seminal event. This included both soft and hard power, from the use of political, economic, religious, and cultural leverage to the support of militant proxies.

In pursuing its goals in Iraq, Iran backed multiple, often opposing parties and movements in an effort to secure its interests no matter the outcome of the country’s political developments. By hedging its bets, Iran was able to rely on different groups for different types of activities. For example, SCIRI and the Badr Organization quickly entered the political fray in Iraq, while other hard-line groups played a more strictly militant function. Understanding Iran’s layered relationships with its Iraqi proxies is critical to understanding the role Hezbollah would come to play in Iraq. After all, even senior US and UK government intelligence analysts and policymakers themselves initially could not understand why Iran would need Hezbollah to act on its behalf in Iraq, let alone why Hezbollah would agree to do so.
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Working through its longtime proxies, Iran set out to achieve several goals in Iraq, the most important and overarching of which was the creation, in the words of then–Defense Intelligence Agency director Lowell Jacoby, of a “weakened, decentralized and Shi’a-dominated Iraq that is incapable of posing a threat to Iran.”
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In addition, the long-held Iranian desire to push the United States out of the Gulf region now extended to the large US and international military presence in Afghanistan to Iran’s east and Iraq to its west. Iran sought to foster unity among Iraq’s various Shi’a parties and movements so that they could consolidate Shi’a political control (Shi’a constitute about 60 percent of the country’s population) over the new Iraqi government.
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Even as it pursued its political goal of seeking a weak federal state, dominated by Shi’a allies and vulnerable to Iranian influence, Tehran also sought to bloody coalition forces in Iraq. Careful not to provoke a direct confrontation with US and coalition forces, Iran armed, trained, and funded a variety of Shi’a militias and insurgent groups in an effort to bog down coalition forces in an asymmetric war of attrition. If the United States were humiliated in Iraq and forced out of the region in disgrace, the thinking went, the Americans would be deterred from pursuing similar military interventions in the region in the future.

Iran’s plans to influence political developments in Iraq, as it happened, long predated the US invasion of 2003. This meant the Iranians were ready to fill the security vacuum immediately following the invasion, when, a US embassy cable would later note, “little attention was focused on Iran.”
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In April 2008, General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, the most senior US military commander and diplomat in Iraq, respectively, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee. In his testimony, Petraeus highlighted the flow of
sophisticated Iranian arms to Shi’a militants in Iraq. The military’s understanding of Iran’s support for such groups crystallized, Petraeus explained, with the capture of a number of prominent Shi’a militants and several members of the Qods Force operating in Iraq as well. Ambassador Crocker, himself a former US ambassador to Lebanon, was undiplomatically blunt in assessing the implications of Iran’s arming and training of extremist militia groups: “What this tells me is that Iran is pursuing, as it were, a Lebanonization strategy, using the same techniques they used in Lebanon, to co-opt elements of the local Shia community and use them as basically instruments of Iranian force.”
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In the 1980s, Iran helped form what would become Hezbollah by drawing upon more radical members of the comparatively moderate Amal militia. The fact that a similar phenomenon was now playing out in Iraq was not lost on the country’s Sunni population or its Sunni Arab neighbors. In the words of Vali Nasr, an Iranian-American scholar who later served as a senior adviser at the State Department, “SCIRI and its al-Badr Brigade—a force of some 10,000 that was trained by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to fight the Saddam regime—look too much like Lebanese Shia militias, Amal and Hezbollah, and prospects of their assumption of power evoke images of Lebanon’s grueling civil war.”
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Speaking to the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) in January 2012, Qods Force chief General Soleimani expressed satisfaction with Iran’s efforts to extend its influence over Iraq, much as it did over southern Lebanon. “In reality,” Soleimani stated, “in south Lebanon and Iraq, the people are under the effect of the Islamic Republic’s way of practice and thinking.”
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According to documents seized by coalition forces, alongside the Badr Corps operatives it sent to Iraq following the 2003 invasion, Iran “may have even funneled a few Lebanese Hizballah members into the country to provide expertise and training to its new would-be surrogates.”
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In time, evidence of Hezbollah’s presence in Iraq would be plentiful, as exemplified by the group’s creation of an outfit, Unit 3800, dedicated to aiding the Shi’a insurgency in Iraq. Iraq became a core issue for Hezbollah, however, not because the country’s affairs had anything to do with Lebanon but because gaining influence over Iraq and hegemony in the region was of primary concern to its Iranian sponsors. Before long, Unit 3800 trainers and operatives would be working alongside officers from the Qods Force’s Department 9000, also known as the Ramazan Corps, targeting coalition forces in Iraq.

In case General Petraeus was not clear that General Soleimani was calling the shots for Iran in Iraq, the head of the Qods Force reportedly sent the commander of coalition forces a message in early 2008 making this very point. Conveyed by a senior Iraqi leader, the message arrived just as Iraqi and coalition forces initiated Operation Charge of the Knights, an effort targeting Iraqi Shi’a militias in Baghdad and Basra. The message itself read, “General Petraeus, you should know that I, Qassem
Suleimani, control the policy for Iran with respect to Iraq, 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.”
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The message should have come as no great surprise, coming from a man aggressive in the belief that “offense is the best defense.”
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Indeed, the crux of the message was no surprise at all. Several months earlier, in October 2007, Petraeus confirmed to the press his “absolute assurance” that several Iranians detained by coalition forces were Revolutionary Guardsmen. “The Qods Force controls the policy for Iraq; there should be no confusion about that either,” he noted, adding, “The ambassador is a Qods Force member.”
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In fact, by the time Petraeus made these comments, coalition forces had already arrested senior Qods Force officials on at least three occasions.

In the wake of the Iran-Iraq War, Tehran remained concerned about threats closest to home. The Qods Force’s first four regional commands were therefore dedicated to Iraq (First Corps), Pakistan and Iran’s border provinces (Second Corps), Turkey and Kurdish groups (Third Corps), and Afghanistan and Central Asia (Fourth Corps). According to seized Iraqi intelligence, by the early 1990s the Badr Corps was a fully functional militia backed by the Qods Force regional command in Iraq, better known as Ramazan Headquarters. By the mid-1990s, such reports stated, the Ramazan Headquarters operated three camps along the Iraqi border to support such activities.
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By 2007, the multinational forces in Iraq assessed that the Ramazan Corps “is responsible for most of the Qods Force operations in Iraq.”
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Gen. Qassem Soleimani succeeded Ahmad Vahidi as Qods Force commander in 1998.
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In October 2011, Soleimani was designated as a terrorist by the US State Department, based on his role in the plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, DC. Qods Force activities in Iraq, mirroring those already enacted in Lebanon, would soon include providing IRGC and Hezbollah agents safe houses everywhere from Basra in the south to Irbil in the north.
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