Iran's Deadly Ambition (8 page)

Over time, Iran’s assistance has helped reshape the contours of the Syrian conflict. Whereas, at the outset, conventional wisdom held that the Assad regime could only cling to power for a short period of time, the contemporary view in both the Middle East and the West is that the Syrian regime has successfully weathered the storm.

The Iranian regime credits itself with this state of affairs. “Thanks to the planning and wisdom of Iran’s leaders, Syria’s regime could enjoy some stability,” a senior commander of
the IRGC was cited by the Agence France Presse as saying in the spring of 2014.
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For Iran, this represents far more than simply a local victory. Rather, it is perceived to be a direct blow against the nation it calls the Great Satan, the United States. “Since Syria was and continues to be part of the Islamic resistance front and the Islamic Revolution, it provokes the anger of the Americans,” IRGC commander Mohammad Ali Jafari explained on Iranian television.
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Alaeddin Boroujerdi, the chairman of the Iranian parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee, put it more succinctly in May 2014. “We have won in Syria,” he told reporters. “The regime will stay. The Americans have lost it.”
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This effort has come at a high cost for Tehran, however. Perhaps more than any other issue, the Iranian regime’s support for Assad has put it on the wrong side of the prevailing politics of the Arab Spring. As a result, the Islamic Republic has experienced a massive loss of support in the region and a sharpening of tensions with the Sunni Arab states.

The conflict has exacted a more direct toll as well. A number of high-ranking IRGC officers have been killed in Syria, among them several top paramilitary commanders.
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But the impact on Hezbollah has been more pronounced still. Although the Lebanese militia was a belated entrant into the hostilities, joining the fight only in mid-2013, it has since become deeply involved in the unfolding civil war on the side of the Assad regime. In the process, it has sustained massive casualties in what has become a bloody, open-ended conflict, leading some analysts to liken the Syrian civil war to “Hezbollah’s Vietnam.”
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Nevertheless, the Islamic Republic persists with what it sees as an important strategic imperative—the perpetuation of Syria as a front line of defense against Western aggression. As Yahya Rahim-Safavi, a senior aide to Supreme Leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, puts it, Iran’s “border defense is [now] southern Lebanon with Israel and our deep defensive strategy has reached the Mediterranean above Israel’s head.”
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In other words, Iran sees its Syrian policy as a way of creating strategic depth in regard to, and expanding its range of options against, Israel and the United States. As a result, its leaders equate participation in the war in Syria with Iran’s “sacred defense” during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s
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and are prepared, in the words of Major General Qassem Soleimani, head of the IRGC’s feared Quds Force, to “support Syria to the end.”
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REPUBLIC OF FEAR

At home, Iran’s response to the ferment taking place elsewhere in the Middle East was to extend and expand domestic restrictions. Already among the world’s most repressive regimes, during the past four years the Iranian government has cracked down further on human rights, freedom of expression, and political choice within the Islamic Republic.

This is somewhat surprising. During Hassan Rouhani’s bid for the country’s presidency in the spring of 2013, he campaigned on a political platform of forty-six mostly domestic promises. This agenda encompassed pledges to reform and improve the Islamic Republic’s beleaguered economy, reduce tensions with the West, and, most significant from a local perspective, serve as a champion for the embattled human rights of ordinary Iranians.
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These promises set Rouhani apart from other presidential hopefuls and allowed him to coast to an easy political victory in Iran’s June 2013 election.

But reality has not matched the campaign rhetoric. In the past two years under Rouhani, Iran has experienced a deepening wave of state-directed domestic repression, including, among other things, a significant spike in the rate of public executions. According to the Iran Human Rights Documentation
Center, a watchdog organization based in New Haven, Connecticut, the Islamic Republic executed 522 people in 2012, ranking it among the world’s most active executioners.
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In 2013, this figure rose higher still; the Iranian regime is believed to have executed a staggering 665 people, with two-thirds of those killings taking place after Rouhani took office in August.
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Today, the situation is even worse. According to the International Human Rights Documentation Center, another Iranian watchdog group, 2014 saw a total of 721 official executions by the Iranian regime, with many more likely going unreported.
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Iranian officials have embraced their government’s role as executioner. The international community should “be grateful for this great service to humanity,” Mohammad Javad Larijani, head of the Iranian judiciary’s perversely named Human Rights Council, insisted.
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Political prisoners abound in Iran as well. In the fall of 2013, before Rouhani’s inaugural speech to the U.N. General Assembly in New York, the Iranian regime made a show of freeing a large number of prominent political dissidents. That, however, was simply a cosmetic gesture. The United Nations estimates the number of political prisoners in Iran at 850, while Human Rights Watch and other NGOs believe the number is higher—perhaps considerably so.
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Among the incarcerated is Iranian-American pastor Saeed Abedini, as well as Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, both of whom served as leaders of Iran’s abortive Green Revolution back in 2009. Iran’s fractious ethnic politics are reflected in the prison population as well; some 40 percent of political prisoners in Iran are thought to be Kurds.
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The ranks of Iranian political prisoners keep growing. Perhaps most prominently, in July 2014, Iranian authorities arrested
Washington Post
Iran reporter Jason Rezaian and his wife, Yeganeh Salehi, a journalist for the Dubai-based
The National
newspaper. In the fall of 2014, U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki-moon appealed directly to Iranian president Rouhani to secure their release.
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Salehi was released from regime custody, but Rezaian remains behind bars and will soon stand trial for “crimes” against the Islamic Republic.
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In another repressive move, Iran’s regime constricted the country’s available media space. Democracy watchdog Freedom House estimates that more than forty newspapers have been shut down by the Iranian government since 2009.
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Since Rouhani took office in August 2013, the Iranian government has shuttered several more, doing so under various pretexts, including that they were guilty of “spreading lies and insulting the holy precepts of Islam.”
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This state of affairs has successfully imposed an intellectual orthodoxy on journalism within the Islamic Republic. A spring 2014 survey of the Iranian press by independent journalist Hadi Anvari found that up to 60 percent of all content featured in the country’s “reformist” media is pulled from sources affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards.
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In other words, Iran’s hard-liners increasingly control both the conservative and the liberal narrative in the Iranian press.

Perhaps the most far-reaching media change, however, has been the result of the Iranian regime’s efforts to complicate access to the World Wide Web. In the aftermath of the 2009 Green Revolution, Iran’s leaders have expended extensive time, resources, and effort to isolate the Islamic Republic from the outside world via cyberspace and deny Iran’s citizens access to the Internet as a social, political, and cultural meeting place.

In these ways, Iran’s leaders have tried to dampen prospects for a “Persian Spring” within their own borders, even as they have tried to harness and exploit the currents of the Arab Spring to their advantage elsewhere in the region.

CHAPTER

III

Iran’s Own “War on Terror”

I
n the spring of 2014, the world woke up to a new and virulent global threat. Over the course of that season, the terrorist group now known as the Islamic State cut a bloody swathe across northern Iraq, routing the Iraqi armed forces in city after city in its merciless drive toward the country’s capital, Baghdad.

For the Obama administration, the development was politically unwelcome. In previous years, and particularly since the death of Osama Bin Laden at the hands of U.S. special operators in May 2011, the White House had actively promoted the notion that the struggle known as the
war on terror
had decisively turned a corner. The rise of the Islamic State put the lie to the assertion by administration officials—chief among them President Obama himself—that al-Qaeda and its ilk were “decimated” and on a “path of defeat.”
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Nevertheless, it should not have come as a surprise. Warning signs of the group’s resurgence—then known as al-Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI—were visible as far back as 2012, when it launched a highly successful campaign of bombing attacks and prison breaks.
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Even so, the speed at which it expanded in Syria and Iraq has been nothing short of meteoric, and
its success in capturing both treasure and territory has been startling.

Beginning in early 2012, AQI—also known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Shams (ISIS)—intervened in the Syrian civil war, mobilizing against the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Damascus. It did so initially in close conjunction with al-Qaeda’s local Syrian affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra. However, infighting over leadership prompted al-Qaeda head Ayman al-Zawahiri to intervene and demand a tactical divorce between the two organizations.
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Thereafter, an ideological schism formed between them, with al-Zawahiri formally disavowing ISIS in February 2014.
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In response, the Islamic State is trying to seize the mantle of global jihadism from al-Qaeda and supplant the Bin Laden network as the ideological center of gravity for Islamic extremists worldwide. To that end, in June 2014, the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, formally declared the creation of a new “Islamic caliphate” in Iraq and parts of Syria during a high-profile speech in Mosul, Iraq. In the same address, al-Baghdadi anointed himself as the new “caliph” and the “leader for Muslims everywhere.”
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As a result, there is now pitched ideological competition between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State for primacy in the jihadist intellectual narrative, with the two groups trading barbs and proffering competing worldviews in their battle for Islamic “hearts and minds.”
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The Islamic State is “beyond anything that we’ve seen,” in terms of both its ambitions and its capabilities, the then defense secretary Chuck Hagel warned in August 2014.
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The statistics bear out his assessment. The U.S. intelligence community estimated that, as of fall 2014, the group could field as many as 31,000 men under arms, making it among the largest terrorist groups on record.
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(By way of comparison, the State Department’s counterterrorism bureau gauged that
al-Qaeda’s core and its two most potent affiliates, AQAP and AQIM [al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb], number in the low thousands—although, when indirect affiliates such as Indonesia’s Jemaah Islamiyah are factored in, that figure is considerably higher.
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) The Islamic State is also believed to be one of the world’s richest groups, with assets valued at around $2 billion.
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Its rapid advance in both Iraq and Syria, moreover, left the group in control of vast territory. In mid-2014, experts estimated that it held and administered segments of northern Iraq and eastern Syria equivalent to the size of the United Kingdom.
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The Islamic State is not just a threat to the West. For Shiite Iran, the rise of the Sunni group poses a grave danger as well—as both a national security threat and a challenge to its ideological legitimacy. This is why the Islamic Republic began a major mobilization against the group. Iran provided both arms and advisors to the Kurdish
peshmerga
guerrillas battling the Islamic State in northern Iraq.
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It also sent detachments of its Revolutionary Guards to fight against the Islamic State on Iraqi soil.
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And in a marked departure from normal policy, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, reportedly even gave Major General Qassem Soleimani, commander of the elite Quds Force, the green light to coordinate military operations with the United States against the Islamic State.
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All this has nudged the United States and Iran into tactical alignment and has fostered the idea that cooperation in countering the Islamic State is, in fact, possible. Secretary of State John Kerry, for example, said publicly that he envisions a role for Iran in the broad coalition that Washington is erecting against the group.
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Others in the Obama administration have gone even further. In mid-October 2014, President Obama reportedly sent a secret letter to Iran’s supreme leader proffering joint coordination in the fight against the Islamic
State, provided Iran could come to terms with the West over its nuclear program.
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