IRAN'S CAMPAIGN OF CONQUEST, SUBJUGATION AND MURDER

THIS SECTION WAS WRITTEN AND RESEARCHED BY UNITED AGAINST A NUCLEAR IRAN

AND CAN BE FOUND AT THEIR TERRIFIC WEBSITE

Since its inception in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has aggressively sought to “export” its Islamic Revolution and remake the Middle East under its dominion. Iran’s primary method to empower itself has been to anchor loyal proxies in the region, which it has done most successfully with Hezbollah in Lebanon, and more recently in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Gaza.

Where its proxies have not been able to take root, Iran has engaged in subversive activities to undermine its rivals and enhance its influence, as it has done in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Afghanistan.

Iran’s quest for regional dominance has caused tremendous instability throughout the Middle East, enflaming sectarian divisions and triggering devastating wars that have left hundreds of thousands dead.

IRAQ

Introduction

Since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003, Iran has waged proxy warfare in Iraq as it has sought to significantly increase its influence and oust America’s military presence from the country. Iran’s quest for primacy in Iraq is an important component of its hegemonic regional project to export the Islamic Revolution throughout the Middle East. Iraq is also an important link in Iran’s efforts to establish a “Shi’a crescent” that functionally serves as a land bridge linking Tehran to Lebanon and the Mediterranean, enabling Iran to more efficiently and lethally arm Hezbollah and its other regional proxies.

Sharing a 900 mile border with Iran, Iraq under the Sunni Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein was Iran’s primary geostrategic adversary. Iran viewed the U.S. invasion in 2003 as an opportunity to transform its foe into a client state and base from which to direct revolutionary activities around the Middle East. To that end, Iran has sought to cultivate loyalty among Iraq’s Shi’a majority population, seeking to leverage shared sectarian identity to justify its meddling and anchor its influence in Iraq.

In order to bolster its influence, Iran aims to keep Iraq weak and dependent on Tehran for its security. Iran has stood up and controls a vast network of Shi’a militant groups in Iraq, and uses these proxies to “stoke sectarian tensions and to foment political violence… thereby ensuring for itself a role as mediator in Iraq.” This “two-faced” strategy has enabled Iran to establish itself as the “key power broker” in Iraq.

Support for Shi’a Militias

Since the 2003 onset of the Iraq War, Iran supported, trained, and funded Shi’a militias and Shi’a insurgents in order to “work toward a humiliating defeat for the United States.” Until his death in a U.S. drone strike targeting his convoy as it left Baghdad’s international airport on January 3, 2020, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani served as Iran’s primary agent of influence in Iraq, overseeing the training and arming and coordinating the battlefield activities of various Iran-backed Shi’a militias operating in Iraq. Through a combination of military aid, cash, favors, bribes, and intimidation, Soleimani came to wield tremendous personal influence over the country’s Shi’a militias and political parties. Politicians were effectively held hostage to Soleimani’s demands, as he could call on the militias under his command to make trouble if they tried to cross him.

Iran supplied these groups with weapons such as IEDs, which were “top killer of U.S. troops” in Iraq. In order to move these weapons into Iraq, Iran controlled a number of arms smuggling rings. By 2006 the Quds Force, the extraterritorial military arm of the IRGC, had developed “a widespread network for transferring and distributing arms from Iran into Iraq through the Ilam region in western Iran.”

Iran’s imprimatur over the militias was most vividly borne out with the evolution from primitive Improvised Explosive Device (IED) attacks on U.S. service members to more lethal explosively formed projectile (EFP) attacks, whose sophistication U.S. military officials insist point to Iranian origins. In total, the U.S. Pentagon found that Iran-backed militias were responsible for 603 U.S. servicemember deaths between 2003-2011, accounting for roughly one in six U.S. casualties during that period. The sectarian violence Iran helped unleash also claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians in the years following the invasion.

According to the U.S. State Department Country Reports on Terrorism 2019, Iran-backed Shia militia groups are believed to be responsible for more than a dozen rocket or indirect fire attacks targeting U.S. or Coalition targets in Iraq in 2019, including the December 27 attack in which KH launched more than 30 rockets at an Iraqi base hosting U.S. forces in Kirkuk, killing one American contractor and wounding several American and Iraqi service members.

On March 5, 2019, the U.S. Department of State designated Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba (HHN), an Iranian proxy group established in 2013 with direct support from the IRGC. HHN is an Iran-backed Iraqi militia funded by but not under the control of the Iraqi government. HHN has openly pledged its loyalties to Iran and Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. The group’s founder, Akram al-Kaabi, was one of the cofounders of the IRGC-backed militia Asaib Ahl al-Haq (AAH) and many of the group’s fighters are former members of AAH and Kataib Hezbollah (KH). Kaabi openly admitted in 2015 that “technical and logistical support comes from the [Iranian] Islamic Republic.” The group has been active in Syria as well, and is alleged by Iraqi officials to be “helping Tehran create a supply route through Iraq to Damascus.”

On January 3, 2020, the U.S. Department of State designated Asa’ib Ahl al Haq (AAH) under Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, and designated its leaders Qais and Laith al-Khazali as Specially Designated Global Terrorists under Executive Order 13224. In a statement, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo alleged, “AAH and its leaders are violent proxies of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Acting on behalf of their masters in Tehran, they use violence and terror to further the Iranian regime’s efforts to undermine Iraqi sovereignty.”

Fight against ISIS

Iran’s hostile takeover of Iraq stoked sectarian backlash, catalyzing the rise and potency of the Islamic State (ISIS). In 2014, at the apex of ISIS’s power, the group took over Mosul with little resistance from Iraqi government forces and began advancing toward the outskirts of Baghdad. At the time, Iran’s primary focus had shifted to Syria, and Iran had diverted much of its Shi’a militia personnel to the effort to rescue the Assad regime. When the ISIS situation demanded action, Soleimani ordered the Iraqi militias to cross back over Syria's border to rescue Iraq.

Iran has used the war against ISIS as a pretext to embed IRGC officials in Iraq and increase support for Shi’a militant groups loyal to Ayatollah Khamenei. In conjunction with the Iraqi government, Soleimani helped stand up the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), an umbrella organization of predominantly Shi’a militia groups that coordinated with Iraq’s central government in the fight against ISIS. While not all the PMF forces are aligned with Iran, about 50 Shi'a militia groups are backed by Iran including some of the largest, best-funded, and most heavily armed groups. The creation of the PMF command structure and its integration with the Iraqi central government led to unprecedented coordination among the Iran-backed Shi’a militias and has helped entrench Iranian control over Iraqi affairs.

Reports on the number of IRGC soldiers killed fighting in Iraq further demonstrate Iran’s intense interventions in the area. Iran has supplied Iraq with $10 billion worth of weaponry, likely including T-72S tanks, Safir jeeps, and Sayyad sniper rifles.

As a result of these interventions against ISIS, Iranian influence in Iraq reached an “unprecedented level.” According to Ali Younusi, an adviser to Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei, “Iran is an empire once again at last, and its capital is Baghdad.” A member of the Iranian parliament made a similar claim, declaring that Baghdad has “fallen into Iran’s hands and belongs to the Iranian Islamic Revolution.” Soleimani also echoed these sentiments boasting, “We are witnessing the export of the Islamic Revolution throughout the region… From Bahrain and Iraq to Syria, Yemen and North Africa.”

The Iran-backed Shi’a militias engaged in systemic human rights abuses and brutality that rivaled ISIS as they cleared out ISIS territory. Iraqi Shi’a militias were alleged to have engaged in extrajudicial assassinations, summary executions, kidnappings, and torture of both combatants and civilians, including children.

Due to the armed strength and brutality of the Shia militias within the PMF, their power has come to eclipse that of the central government, leading Iraqi officials to either surrender to and appease the PMF, or face reprisals. Iraq’s former prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, praised Iran at Davos in 2015 for springing to Iraq’s defense and even singled out Qassem Soleimani as an ally in the fight against ISIS. There are reportedly around 80,000 to 100,000 Iran-aligned Shia fighters inside Iraq today, and the government has little recourse to bring the Iran-backed militias, which desire to retain their independence, under its command. It’s this Shi’a militia infrastructure that provides Iran a vehicle to threaten U.S. interests in the aftermath of the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal. At Tehran’s behest, these militias have been operationalized to push back against the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign, attacking U.S. personnel and energy interests in Iraq. Reuters reported in August 2018 that Iran had recently transferred short-range ballistic missiles to its allies in Iraq. These kinds of missiles include the Zelzal, Fateh-110, and Zolfaqar, which can all travel from 200-700 km. This range places U.S. allies—Israel and Saudi Arabia—within reach. Indeed, the U.S. government was forced to shutter its consulate in Basra in September 2018 after Iranian-supported militias fired rockets at the compound.

Iran’s transfer of ballistic missiles to its proxies, the establishment of weapons depots in Iraq, and transformation of the country into a transshipment route for arms to the Assad regime and Hezbollah have further undermined Iraqi sovereignty, imperiling the central government’s monopoly on the use of force These provocations have invited reprisals from Israel, highlighting Iran’s willingness to subvert Iraq’s security for its own nefarious ends.

Political and Economic Influence

The kinetic power of these militias buys influence in Iraqi politics. The Iranian embassy in Baghdad is a hub of the mullahs’ machinations in Iraq—specifically because Iran’s Ambassador to Iraq Iraj Masjedi is himself a former general in the Quds Force and has served as a top advisor to Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani. It’s from this platform that Tehran wields powerful influence over the direction of Iraqi politics.

After the May 2018 parliamentary elections, which saw the Iran-backed Fatah alliance finish second in the vote tally, Iran and its allies were intimately involved in the negotiations over government formation. For example, Muqtada al-Sadr, whose nationalist Sairoon coalition came in first in the elections, traveled to Lebanon in September 2018 where he was hosted by Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah and Qassem Soleimani to forge a consensus on who would become the next prime minister of Iraq. The trio settled on Adel Abdul-Mahdi, a former oil minister and vice president of Iraq. According to leaked Iranian intelligence cables obtained by the Intercept, Abdul-Mahdi worked closely with Iran dating back to his time in exile as an opponent of Saddam Hussein’s regime and as oil minister, had a “special relationship with the IRI.” Abdul-Mahdi was hailed as a compromise candidate palatable to the U.S. and Iraq, but his selection highlighted that no Iraqi prime minister could assume power without Iran’s backing. While Mahdi has been described as an independent-minded technocrat, after taking office, he granted Iran preferential access to his inner circle. In October 2018, only 24 hours after announcing he would not meet with delegations from foreign embassies as his cabinet was in the process of being formed—out of fear of an appearance of impropriety in the decision-making process—he hosted the Iranian Ambassador Iraj Masjedi for a discussion.

Outside the political realm, Iran also maintains economic leverage over Iraq. According to Ambassador Masjedi, Iran’s second-largest export market is Iraq, with bilateral trade set to reach $8.5 billion in 2018, with Iran hoping to increase the trade volume to $22 billion annually. Indeed, the United States has had to continually grant Iraq a periodic waiver from U.S. sanctions that the U.S. government re-imposed on Iran following its withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal allowing it to import gas and electricity from Iran.

An additional node for Iranian influence is its development of Shi’a shrines in Iraq. According to a December 2020 Reuters report, Iran has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the construction and upgrading of religious sites in Iraq. Construction companies linked to charitable foundations owned by the IRGC are behind the construction bonanza. The primary organization overseeing the development of shrines is called the Holy Shrines Reconstruction Headquarters. It was set up by Supreme Leader Khamenei and is run by IRGC appointees. Such arrangements are part of Khamenei’s efforts to establish patronage links to the IRGC, enriching Guardsmen and ensuring their fealty to the Supreme Leader. In March 2020, the organization was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department which alleged it was controlled by the Quds Force and served as a front for funneling lethal aid to Iran-backed proxies, intelligence activities, and money laundering.

Millions of religious pilgrims pass through Iraq’s shrines each year, giving Iran the opportunity to proselytize its Khomeinist ideology. Iran is seeking in the long term to influence the selection of a successor to Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, Iraq’s most powerful Shi’a cleric and a rival source of emulation for Shi’a Muslims to Khamenei. A successor more favorable to its state ideology in Najaf would cement Iranian cultural and political influence in Iraq in the long term. Thus, even at a time when it faces massive economic pressures due to sanctions, Iran has seen fit to divert massive amounts of funds to shrine development in Iraq.

In moves showcasing Iranian influence in Iraq, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Iran’s Ambassador to Iraq Iraj Masjedi as a Specially-Designated Global Terrorist and later the Chairman of the Popular Mobilization Committee and Iraq’s former National Security Advisor Falih al-Fayyadh under the Global Magnitsky Act for human rights abuses. The designation of Masjedi was significant, especially for shining a light on Iran’s embedding of Quds Force generals in Iran’s diplomatic postings. The sanction on al-Fayyadh was also important given his history and the fact that al-Fayyadh had visited Washington in the past in order to discuss Iraqi stability. But al-Fayyadh has long been close with Iran, recently traveling to Tehran for the commemoration of the first anniversary of Soleimani’s death.

Backlash

Iran’s control over Shi’a militias has made it the dominant military, political, and diplomatic power broker in Iraq, but its quest for domination and subversion of Iraqi interests to its own has weakened Iraq’s central government and impeded its ability to provide for the welfare of its citizens. Meanwhile, Iran’s project to cultivate patronage links among Iraq’s Shi’a population through its militias, which provide social services in addition to security, has failed to take root, as widespread unemployment and economic privation remain the norm. Iran’s revolutionary bravado has proved insufficient to override its ineptitude at basic governance, and the result has been a backlash against Tehran that has metastasized into a mass protest movement ongoing since October 2019.

The protests gripping Iraq have witnessed tens of thousands of demonstrators taking to the streets to vent their dissatisfaction with the government of Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi, an out-of-touch class of political elites, and Iran-backed militias. Too often, these forces have placed Iran’s interests over the public good, for instance steering Iraq’s oil resources to benefit Tehran while Iraq’s own citizens lack healthcare, jobs, educational opportunity, consistent electricity, and clean drinking water. Notably, the Iraqi protestors are almost exclusively Shi’a, showing that Iran’s political and military maneuvering has failed to translate to winning over the hearts and minds of the core constituency it needs to continue projecting influence in Iraq. Calls for more inclusive governance were high among the protestors’ demands, highlighting the unpopularity of Iran’s explicitly sectarian approach.

Iran has responded to the Iraqi protest movement with repression, dispatching former Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani to Baghdad immediately after protests began to advise Iraqi politicians and security officials on his best practices for quelling unrest. According to Iraqi security officials present at the meeting, Soleimani, who chaired the meeting in place of Prime Minister Abdul-Mahdi, told those present, “We in Iran know how to deal with protests. This happened in Iran and we got it under control.”

Since Soleimani’s ominous proclamation, PMF and Iraqi security forces have responded with excessive and deadly force to quell demonstrations. By the end of December 2019, nearly 500 protestors had been killed, thousands more injured, and about 2,800 were arrested. The directive to respond to protests with live fire clearly emanated from Tehran, and numerous reports indicate that Iran-backed forces have been behind the deadliest clashes. For instance, Reuters reported that PMF elements close to Iran, reporting directly to their militia commanders rather than the commander in chief of the Iraqi armed forces, deployed snipers on Baghdad rooftops overlooking demonstrations just days after the unrest began, killing several dozen.

While directing the suppression of the Iraqi protests, Soleimani also ordered the Iran-backed militias under his control to undertake a concerted campaign of rocket attacks targeting U.S. military targets in the country. According to a U.S. military official, forensic analysis of the rockets and launchers used during the spate of at least ten attacks indicated the involvement of Shia militias, most notably Asaib Ahl al-Haq and Katai’b Hezbollah (KH). On December 27, 2019, more than 30 missiles were fired at an Iraqi military base near Kirkuk, killing a U.S. contractor and wounding four U.S. troops as well as two members of the Iraqi security forces. The U.S. accused KH of being responsible for the attack, and retaliated by launching strikes against 5 KH targets in Iraq and Syria including weapons depots and command and control centers. The U.S. strikes reportedly killed at least 25 KH militants.

On December 31, 2019, protesters, including members and supporters of KH, attempted to storm the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Demonstrators threw stones and torched a security post, prompting embassy guards to respond with stun grenades and tear gas. The militia supporters withdrew from the embassy after prominent commanders reportedly spoke to them. On January 1, 2020, following orders from Mohammed Mohyee, KH’s political spokesman, thousands of protestors dispersed from the American Embassy in Baghdad.

In the early morning hours of January 3, 2020, President Trump greenlit a drone strike targeting Soleimani’s convoy shortly after his arrival in Baghdad. The head of KH, Abu Mahdi al-Mohandes, who also served as deputy head of the PMF, was killed in the strike as well. Despite their deaths, the powerful network of Iran-backed Shi’a militias will continue to remain a fixture in Iraq, upholding Iran’s influence increasingly through repression.

Iran’s leadership has vowed devastating reprisals against the U.S. for the operation to kill Soleimani, and they followed up on this threat by firing a salvo of over a dozen ballistic missiles at two Iraqi air bases housing U.S. troops in the early morning hours of January 8, wounding 11 U.S. soldiers.

Following the attack, a period of calm prevailed, although Iran signaled that it is likely to strike U.S. interests again at a future time of its choosing. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, intoned that while the ballistic missile attack represented a “slap on the face” for the U.S., “military action like this (ballistic missile) attack is not sufficient,” vowing to refuse to enter negotiations and to continue to confront the U.S. until its influence is expelled from the region. In the intervening period, Iran’s leaders maintained a steady drumbeat of threatening rhetoric aimed at the U.S., with Soleimani’s successor, Esmail Qaani, for instance vowing to “hit his enemy in a manly fashion.”

On March 11, 2020, the calm was broken as what were presumed to be Iran-backed militia forces launched a Katyusha rocket salvo targeting U.S. and coalition troops stationed at Camp Taji, 17 miles north of Baghdad. Two U.S. soldiers and one British soldier were killed in the attack, and an additional twelve soldiers were injured. The attack crossed a U.S. red line as it killed U.S. servicemembers, once again raising U.S.-Iran tensions. The attack coincided with what would have been Qassem Soleimani’s 63rd birthday, but it is unclear whether the attack was ordered directly by Iran, as the assassination of Soleimani likely has affected command and control between Tehran and its proxies in Iraq. Following the attack, airstrikes were carried out around the Abukamal Syria-Iraq border crossing, where Iran-backed militias are known to have a strong presence. The U.S. has not claimed credit for the airstrikes at this time.

In the aftermath of Soleimani’s death, Iraq’s protest movement has continued to gain steam, with demonstrators venting their frustration that Iran’s disregard for Iraqi sovereignty has increasingly ensnarled their country as a staging ground for proxy warfare between Iran and the U.S. Soleimani’s successor as Quds Force commander, Brigadier General Esmail Qaani has struggled to wield control over Iraq in the same manner as Soleimani. Qaani, who previously focused primarily on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia lacks the relationships with Iraqi political and militia leaders of all stripes that Soleimani, who was universally feared if not respected, had cultivated.

As such, Hezbollah has had to fill the void created by Soleimani’s death, taking over coordination of militia operations in Iraq. In April 2020, the U.S. State Department announced a $10 million reward for information on Hezbollah operative Sheikh Mohammad al-Kawtharani, alleging he had “taken over some of the political coordination of Iran-aligned paramilitary groups” that had previously been Soleimani’s purview. Tehran’s command and control of the various militia groups it backs have been degraded as a result. Its ability to dictate outcomes in Iraq’s political affairs has been set back as well.

In late March 2020, Qaani made his first visit to Baghdad seeking to establish continuity with his predecessor and reassert the Quds Force’s influence. His visit was widely seen as a failure. He sought to unite Iraqi militia and political factions in supporting an anti-American, pro-Iranian prime minister, but Iraq ultimately selected former intelligence chief Mustafa al-Kadhimi, who is viewed as supportive of U.S. interests. Qaani was snubbed on his visit by Moqtada al-Sadr, who refused to meet with him. Such a snub would have been unheard of for Soleimani, and demonstrated that Tehran no longer commanded the fear and respect it previously engendered.

In the final months of the Trump administration, Iran has sought to restrain the Iraqi militias it backs from attacking the U.S., seeking to wait out the clock and avoid any escalations. In November 2020, Qaani reportedly visited Beirut to meet with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah to secure his assistance in reining in Iran-backed Iraqi militias. Qaani then went to Baghdad to meet the Prime Minister and several militia leaders to urge restraint. While some militias have followed Tehran’s orders, most notably Kataib Hezbollah, others have openly defied Tehran. Asaib Ahl al-Haq leader Qais al-Khazali gave a TV interview after Qaani’s visit in which he vowed to continue confronting the U.S., declaring, “The Americans occupy our country, not yours. We will not listen to you anymore because our motives are 100 percent nationalist. The truce with the Americans has ended due to its conditions not being met.”

Since Qaani’s visit, Iraqi militias have continued to carry out attacks on U.S. interests. On November 17, 2020, militants targeted the U.S. embassy with a volley of rockets. On December 10, two convoys carrying logistical equipment to the U.S.-led coalition were attacked by roadside bombs. On December 20, the embassy was targeted with another salvo of 21 rockets, in the largest attack on the Green Zone in a decade. The repeat violations of the tenuous cease-fire have been condemned by Kataib Hezbollah and other factions close to Iran, but show that the Iran-backed militias remain divided in their approach to confronting the U.S. and that under Qaani, the Quds Force can no longer enforce discipline among their ranks. Qaani made another visit to Iraq in December, with Al-Alam news network claiming it was unrelated to the December 20 attack.

Iranian-backed militias have continued to launch attacks against the U.S. military presence in Iraq since Joseph Biden assumed the U.S. presidency, presumably as part of Tehran’s strategy to increase its leverage and compel the U.S. to make up-front concessions ahead of the resumption of nuclear negotiations.

On February 15, 2021, suspected Iran-backed militants launched a salvo of 14 rockets targeting a heavily fortified U.S. military compound in Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan, with three rockets hitting the base. A civilian contractor to the U.S. military with Filipino nationality was killed, and an Iraqi civilian died a week later due to injuries sustained in the attack. At least eight others were injured in the attacks, including a U.S. soldier and five military contractors. On March 3, Kurdish counterterror authorities released a confession from one of the perpetrators of the attack who said he carried out the attack along with other individuals who belonged to the Iran-backed militia Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada (KSS), which is part of the PMF. The suspected attacker further claimed to have used Iranian-made rockets in the attack. KSS is believed to be an offshoot with operational links to the Badr Organization. The group’s propaganda frequently features images of Supreme Leader Khamenei, indicating the group’s fealty to the Iranian regime.

Several days after the Erbil attack, militants fired rockets at the Balad air base, where a U.S. defense firm services Iraq’s fighter jets, and at Baghdad’s Green Zone compound, where the U.S. Embassy is located. The U.S. responded to the uptick in violent attacks by launching airstrikes targeting Iran-backed militia forces on the Syrian side of the Iraq-Syria Abukamal border crossing on February 25, 2021, a choice calibrated to respond to and deter further Iranian aggression while not creating political headaches for the Iraqi central government. According to Pentagon spokesman John Kirby, the facilities targeted were used by Kataib Hezbollah and Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada. On March 3, 2021, U.S. forces were targeted again by a rocket barrage that U.S. defense officials believe was launched by Kataib Hezbollah or an affiliated Iran-backed militia. A U.S. contractor suffered a fatal cardiac episode during the attack.

Iraq’s continuing political instability and protests, as well as the sporadic hostilities between Iran-backed proxy forces and the U.S., pose formidable challenges to those wishing to restore sovereignty and democracy to Iraq, a situation which Iran will continue to exploit. While Soleimani’s death posed a setback to Iran’s ability to project influence in Iraq, it still wields considerable power over the key militias in the PMF and can marshal groups to confront the U.S. at the time of its choosing.

LEBANON

Lebanon’s Political Dynamics

Lebanon gained independence from France in 1943. Responding, in part, to Maronite nationalist aspirations, France—then the mandatory power in control of the lands that would become Syria and Lebanon—created what would be known as the State of Greater Lebanon, combining the Mount Lebanon Mutassarifate, the locus of Maronite settlement, with adjacent predominantly Muslim areas. While this made the Maronite enclave viable, it also included in the would-be state population groups with identities and affiliations strongly at odds with that of the Maronites. This would become the source of Lebanon’s regionally unique diverse social fabric, but also the cause of its chronic domestic instability.

Maronite preeminence was built into Lebanon’s early system. The 1943 National Pact—an informal agreement divvying up sectarian political power in the country—afforded the Maronites primacy of place based on the 1932 census, when the Eastern Christian sect formed a majority, and gave Christians the country’s most powerful political offices and a 6:5 majority in parliament. This census was the last Lebanon would ever conduct, in order to maintain the fiction of sectarian balance and avoid religious conflict.

Lebanon’s Christian-Muslim divide had broader political implications. Maronites and many smaller Christian sects were oriented towards Europe and the West. Generally, they rejected Pan-Arabism and denied that Lebanon was an Arab country. For many Lebanese Muslims, however, their country was still an integral part of a greater Syria and the wider Arab and Muslim world—and if the countries comprising greater Syria could not reunite as one state, they should at least be closely tied together culturally and politically.

Sectarian tensions over Lebanon’s identity intensified because of the influx of Palestinian refugees after the 1948 Arab–Israeli War and after the expulsion of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from Jordan in the early 1970s. Maronites vehemently opposed the refugees’ naturalization, which would have tipped Lebanon’s delicate sectarian scales against them. The 1969 Cairo Agreement, which removed Palestinian refugee camps from under Lebanese state authority, was meant to alleviate Lebanese-Palestinian tensions. Instead, the pact ended up heightening sectarian conflicts by allowing the PLO to establish a state-within-a-state in Lebanon, soon leading to violent clashes with Maronite militias. In 1975, these skirmishes sparked the bloody Lebanese Civil War, which lasted until 1990.

Lebanese Sunnis and Druze, resentful of continued Maronite dominance, sided with the Palestinians against their Christian compatriots. Lebanon’s army fractured along sectarian lines, and an alphabet soup of sectarian militias soon emerged, each inviting the assistance of one foreign backer or another—most critically, Syria and Israel

Syria never properly recognized Lebanon’s independence and saw the civil war as an opportunity to reassert control over that country and reverse the effects of the French mandate. Israel, allied with the Maronite Phalangist party, invaded to expel the PLO from the country and create the conditions for Lebanon to sign a peace agreement with Israel.

Israel would succeed in expelling the PLO, but its political aspirations ended in failure. Syria, by contrast, emerged as Lebanon’s new hegemon due to the 1989 Taif Agreement, which ended the civil war.

Now, only vestiges remain of Maronite preeminence in Lebanon. The Taif Agreement gave Sunni and Shiite Muslims parliamentary parity with Christians and increased the powers of their allocated key offices—prime minister and parliamentary speaker—at the expense of the Maronite-controlled presidency.

Iran supplies the rockets to Hezbollah which threaten Israel.

Lebanese Sectarianism

Sectarianism is built into Lebanon’s national DNA. While it accounts for Lebanon’s much-touted multi-religious tapestry, it is also an outgrowth of the country’s lack of a supra-religious, unified national identity and prevents the creation of such an identity. Per Lebanon’s National Pact, the country’s highest political offices are apportioned not based on merit, but sect: the president must always be the most powerful Maronite Christian figure, the prime minister the most powerful Sunni, and the speaker of parliament the most powerful Shiite. Similarly, political parties primarily coalesce around and represent religious sects, or familial/geographic divisions within each sect, rather than agreement over issues or political philosophies.

The 1989 Taif Agreement, which ended Lebanon’s civil war, ameliorated the effects of sectarianism by dividing parliament equally between Muslims and Christians and gave some of the Christian president’s powers to the Sunni prime minister and Shiite speaker of parliament. However, it did not eliminate old sectarian hatreds and suspicions, nor resolve the struggle over Lebanon’s identity that led to the country’s civil war. To the contrary, this cosmetic change, by ameliorating the worst effects of Lebanon’s sectarianism, arguably further entrenched this system.

Lebanon is thus a country that lacks a unified national identity, and foreign powers, like Iran, divide and conquer in this vacuum by stoking or exploiting sectarian grievances or hatreds.

Hezbollah: Iran’s Long Arm in Lebanon

For over three decades, Iran has exploited this sectarianism—particularly the Lebanese Shiite community’s grievances and disenfranchisement—to establish a solid foothold in Lebanon. The chaos of Lebanon’s civil war and the violence wrought upon Shiites during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon enabled Tehran to catalyze the rise of the first foreign extension of its Islamic Revolution: Hezbollah.

Hezbollah has grown into a powerful force in Lebanese politics and society. With Iranian assistance, but also through its own increasingly independent efforts, the group has spawned a vast social apparatus in Lebanon catering to its community’s needs; a growing military arm that has withstood three decades of conflict with the Israeli military; and achieved a global reach and ever-growing political power in Lebanon’s government.

Lebanon and Hezbollah may not yet be synonymous – though the group is gradually aspiring to achieve that goal – but Hezbollah has asserted its control over critical parts of Lebanese decision-making. At Iran’s orders, or to serve its interests, the group de facto decides when Lebanon will go to war or enjoy peace, as with its several rounds of conflict with Israel or unilateral decision to enter the Syrian Civil War. Notably, that decision was made not to defend Lebanon from Sunni jihadists, as is claimed, but rather to rescue the regime of Iranian ally Bashar al-Assad.

Hezbollah in Lebanese Politics

Hezbollah also asserts outsize influence over Lebanon’s political decision-making. The group has become adept at crippling Lebanon’s political system to serve its interests. When political maneuvering fails Hezbollah has resorted to force. Despite its promises to never turn its weapons on its fellow Lebanese, in May 2008 the group invaded and seized Beirut in response to a governmental decision to shut down its telecommunications network and remove the pro-Hezbollah security chief from Beirut’s Rafic Hariri International Airport. Evidence also implicates Hezbollah in a campaign of assassinations against its political opponents—most infamously the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafic al-Hariri. Hezbollah also can draw on its social support among Shiites to mobilize members of that sect to carry out street violence or simply shut down whole sections of the country—as with the December 2006 political protests, which led to the resignation of the U.S.-backed government.

It also prevented Lebanon from electing a president for two years until its opponents caved and appointed its ally Michel Aoun in 2016. In 2018, the group prolonged Lebanon’s efforts to form a new government by backing the demands of pro-Hezbollah Sunnis to be represented in Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s government, in an effort to weaken the premier and force him to concede the legitimacy of pro-Hezbollah voices within his sect.

Hezbollah has been a force since that time. For example, it has backed two consecutive health ministers—Jamil Jabaq and Hassan Hamad. Jabaq, in particular, was close with its Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, having served as his personal physician. The health ministry is not an insignificant position in the cabinet—it has had the fourth-largest budget. That’s not to mention the other ministries that either its allies or members have occupied in the last two governments, for example, the Industry and Sports and Youth Ministries. The most recent prime minister, Hassan Diab, whose government collapsed after less than a year in office amid the explosion of ammonium nitrate at the Beirut port in August 2020 and an economic crisis, was also backed by Hezbollah. In fact, his nomination was only supported by March 8 parliamentarians.

Yet those positions of responsibility contrast with how Hezbollah sees its role in Lebanon. It has disclaimed any responsibility for incidents like the one at the Beirut port, despite the Party of God’s reported dominance over Lebanese ports. In fact, Nasrallah himself indicated that his organization was more focused on the port of Haifa in Israel than the port of Beirut in Lebanon. It’s Iran’s transnational revolutionary movement that remains Hezbollah’s priority. The Lebanese system’s persistent failure erodes popular support for it and thereby furthers Hezbollah’s ultimate goal—replacing the Lebanese secular system with an Islamic republic based on the Iranian model.

Hezbollah Leader Pledging allegiance/deference to Iran's supreme leader.

PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES/GAZA

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh Embracing Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei

A key ideological pillar of the Islamic Republic of Iran is its struggle to “liberate” the Muslim lands of Palestine and the holy city of Jerusalem from what it disparagingly refers to as the illegitimate “Zionist Regime.” To help achieve these ends, Iran has armed, trained, and funded –often working indirectly through Hezbollah – Palestinian terrorist groups, despite the Sunni-Shi’a divide between them.

Iran’s primary goal in supporting various militant Palestinian factions is to foment continuous armed struggle against Israel, weakening a key regional foe and enhancing Iran’s image among Muslim and Arab publics. Arming the Palestinians enables Tehran to play one faction against another, allowing Iran to maintain leverage over the various Palestinian groups and thereby the Palestinian nationalist movement as a whole, bringing them into line with the regime’s foreign policy objectives.

Iran has been the leading sponsor of Gaza-based Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), which was founded in 1979, inspired by the success of the Islamic Revolution. Iranian funding of PIJ has been in place since 1987. During the early 1990s, much of PIJ organizational and operations-based support came from the Iranian sub-group Hezbollah. The PIJ is extremely open about Iran being its main supporter: “All of the weapons in Gaza are provided by Iran… the largest share of this financial and military support is coming from Iran.”

Iran has also exerted considerable influence over Hamas, the Sunni Islamist terror group in control of the Gaza Strip. In 1993 Iran, pledged $30 million in annual support for Hamas’ anti-Israel operations. Hamas had consistently enjoyed this financial support, in addition to military training, until disagreements over Iran’s role in Syria created a rift between the two parties. However, Iranian favor has once again returned to Hamas to the tune of “tens of millions of dollars.” Israeli media reported in August 2019 that Iran expressed a willingness to increase its funding of Hamas to $30 million per month in exchange for intelligence on Israel’s missile stockpiles.

Iran’s rapprochement with Hamas is part of an effort to restore Tehran’s image in the Arab and Sunni world, damaged due to its brutality in propping up the Assad regime, through taking back the mantle of anti-Zionist resistance. Restoring ties with Tehran has helped Hamas whether diplomatic isolation as well. In recent years, Hamas has faced a hostile Egyptian government on its Gaza border and fallen out of financial favor with Gulf monarchies, which have quietly aligned their regional policy with Israel and backed more moderate Palestinian forces in response to the Iranian threat.

Hamas had also suffered fractured relations with the Assad regime and Hezbollah, the other primary actors in the Iran-led “resistance axis,” over the Syrian civil war. At Iran’s behest, the Assad regime and Hezbollah have mended ties with Hamas in an effort to rebuild the axis. The effort to reintegrate Hamas into the Iranian sphere of influence furthers Iran’s hegemonic regional ambitions and gives Iran an ongoing outlet to focus on “resistance” activities against Israel.

In June 2018, Israel complained to the U.N. Security Council that it had intelligence showing that Hamas was working with Hezbollah to establish missile factories and training camps for thousands of Palestinian fighters in southern Lebanon. Hamas and Hezbollah’s growing cooperation lays the groundwork for a future struggle with Israel that may encompass fighting on multiple fronts with Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Iranian proxies all joining the fray. In August 2019, a Hamas official warned, “If the Israeli enemy launches aggression against the Gaza Strip, and we estimate that it is a confined battle that will not develop into a war to break us, we will face it alone. But if the enemy [Israel] tries to break the resistance, the rest of the axis will join the battle,” referring to Hezbollah and Iran’s foreign legion of proxy militias.

In September 2019, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh wrote a letter to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei thanking him for Tehran’s “extensive” support and for “Iran’s readiness to equip the resistance for whatever it needs to discharge its duty.”

In February 2020, Israel seized $4 million in funds that it alleged were transferred from Iran to Hamas to help the group build its weapons infrastructure and pay its operatives.

Billboards in Gaza in 2012 thanking Iran for their military support in fighting Israel, particularly their supply of longer-range rockets to target Israeli cities.

Iran’s influence extends far beyond financial support, particularly in Gaza. Iran has supplied and trained groups like Hamas and the PIJ in the use of longer-range rockets. In 2002 Israeli forces intercepted the Gaza-bound Karine A vessel in a raid in the Red Sea, which was loaded with 50 tons of advanced weaponry from Iran. Iran has supplied ever increasingly sophisticated and powerful munitions to Hamas with technology including UAVs being delivered to these groups via Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Iran has supplied Hamas with IEDs, anti-tank munitions, and provides training for up to 6 months in modern tactical warfare for Hamas operatives.

In May 2019, Hamas’s leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar thanked Iran for providing the group with increasingly sophisticated and long-range rocketry. Following a weekend in which Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fired 700 rockets into Israeli territory, Sinwar stated, “Iran provided us with rockets, and we surprised the world when our resistance targeted Beersheba. Had it not been for Iran, the resistance in Palestine would not have possessed its current capabilities.”

Iran is now also building a loyalist, “Hezbollah-style terror group” in the Gaza Strip. Known as Al-Sabirin, the organization is funded directly by Tehran. Through Al-Sabirin, Iran is also seeking to make inroads into the West Bank. On January 31, 2018 the State Department designated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and Harakat al-Sabireen, as Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGTs), noting that they are “sponsored and directed by Iran.”

Hezbollah itself has stepped up its activities in the West Bank in recent years. In January 2016, Israeli security forces dismantled a five-man terror cell in the West Bank city of Tulkarem recruited by Hezbollah’s Unit 133, which is tasked with recruitment and planning attacks in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. The cell – recruited and trained by Hassan Nasrallah’s son, Jawad – was instructed to gather intelligence on IDF training facilities for an attack, and to prepare a bomb for use in a suicide operation against Israeli civilians. In July 2019, Shin Bet announced that it had thwarted another cell—an Iranian espionage network—based in Syria, which was recruiting operatives in the West Bank and Gaza via social media.

The emergence of these cells within the Palestinian territories appears indicative of a longer-term Iranian strategy. In the short term, Iran is content to support and ally with extremist groups with shared anti-Israel aims, such as Hamas and PIJ, to fulfill broad geopolitical objectives. Al-Sabirin’s name, which translates to “the patient ones,” attests to a desire to anchor proxies loyal to Iran and who share its ideological predilections in the Palestinian territories further down the road if conditions on the ground are conducive. In fact, there have been signs of increased coordination within Iran’s broader Axis of Resistance in furtherance of this project. In 2019, Iran’s supreme leader reportedly proposed PIJ form a joint operations room in Gaza with Hezbollah and Iraqi militias.

Due to its implacable opposition to Israel’s existence, Iran has waged proxy warfare in the Palestinian Territories, backing the most recalcitrant elements of Palestinian society, including terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Iran’s bid to hijack the Palestinian national movement serves to undermine efforts for a peaceable, negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In January 2020, following the Trump Administration’s unveiling of the “Deal of the Century,” the IRGC called for resistance against the peace plan and praised the Palestinians for “standing alone” against it.

Iran has also stood against regional initiatives to accept Israel’s existence and normalize its position in the Middle East. After Israel and the UAE announced a deal establishing full diplomatic relations in August 2020, Iran condemned the normalization of ties and vowed that the UAE’s decision would strengthen the forces of the “resistance axis” in the region. Iran similarly condemned Bahrain in September 2020 after it decided to normalize ties with Israel, saying, "The rulers of Bahrain will from now on be partners to the crimes of the Zionist regime as a constant threat to the security of the region and the world of Islam.”

SYRIA

The Iranian-Syrian alliance stretches back over three decades, constituting one of the most enduring partnerships among authoritarian regimes in the region. Iran views the maintenance of Assad’s control in Syria as a check against Sunni power in Syria and the greater Middle East. Through the Assad regime, Iran is further able to project its influence throughout the Levant.

In a testament to Assad’s utility, the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies have played a critical role in saving and sustaining Bashar al-Assad’s regime amidst the ongoing Syrian Civil War, which began as a popular uprising in March 2011 as the “Arab Spring” swept the region. Officials of the Iranian regime have gone so far as to refer to Syria as “the 35th province [of Iran] and a strategic province for us.”

Syria has been so strategically vital to Iran because it provides a logistical “land bridge” to Hezbollah and access to Mediterranean ports, which is central to its regional ambitions. The regime also wants to deny a victory to its regional Sunni rivals, and further consolidate its “Shia Crescent” stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean through Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon.

Not only does Iran remain the country's “closest ally,” declaring it will “support Syria to the end,” but Iran increasingly plays the commanding role in the Syrian Civil War against the rebel forces. In August 2012, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) General Salary About declared, “Today [Iran is] involved in fighting every aspect of a war, a military one in Syria and a cultural one as well.”

This steadfast support has continued throughout the administration of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, a purported moderate. Speaking with Syrian Prime Minister Wael al-Halqi in August 2013, Rouhani vowed, “the Islamic Republic of Iran aims to strengthen its relations with Syria and will stand by it in facing all challenges. The deep, strategic and historic relations between the people of Syria and Iran… will not be shaken by any force in the world.” In December 2020, Rouhani reaffirmed Iran’s support for the Assad regime, declaring, “The Islamic Republic of Iran will continue its support to the Syrian government and people as our strategic ally and we will stand by Syria until its final victory.” He added Iran will continue fighting in Syria until the Golan Heights are liberated from Zionist occupiers.

Iranian Economic Support to the Assad Regime

In support of the Syrian regime's campaign of mass murder to suppress the popular unrest, Iran has conducted an extensive, expensive, and integrated effort to keep Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in power. In the early stages of the conflict, Iran offered limited assistance to the Assad regime in the form of technical and financial support, facilitated primarily through the IRGC Quds Force. Beginning in 2012, Iran's economic support increased markedly to forestall the collapse of the Assad regime.

It is unknown exactly how much Iran has spent to prop up the Assad regime, but estimates range from $30 billion to $105 billion in total military and economic aid since the onset of the conflict. In 2017, Iran, through its state-run Export Development Bank, extended Syria an additional $1 billion credit line, adding to the $5.6 billion total credit lifeline Iran provided the Assad regime in 2013 and 2015 to keep the Syrian economy afloat and facilitate Syrian purchases of petroleum. Iran’s provision of credit to the Assad regime underscores its increased reliance on Iran for its survival.

Tehran has also greatly expanded its economic ties with Damascus during the Civil War, boosting bilateral trade from a peak of $545 million per year before the war to over $1 billion annually by 2017. Trade volume appears to have dipped since then according to Iranian state media reports, but in 2019, an Iranian official stated Iran’s intention to boost trade volume by an additional $500 million to $1 billion annually within two years. To that end, Iran and Syria held a series of bilateral visits and economic delegations in 2019 aimed at cementing stronger economic ties. Most notably, in January 2019, Iran’s vice president traveled to Damascus and inked agreements solidifying banking cooperation, for Iran to boost Syria’s power generation, and for Iran to restore railways and other infrastructure, all with an eye toward boosting trade.

Iran has used its own oil tankers to transport Syria's embargoed crude oil, disguise its origins, and get it to market. Iran stepped up its provision of diesel fuel to the Syrian regime during the Civil War, fueling the Syrian Army’s heavy ground vehicles – including tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and heavy transport. Tehran has done so through direct shipments as well as by providing Assad with credit lines to purchase the fuel. Additionally, Iran has provided Syria diesel in exchange for gasoline, a boon of hundreds of millions of dollars to the cash-strapped Syrian government.

Reports by Syrian government media indicate that in October 2018, Iran, hit hard by the re-imposition of U.S. sanctions, suspended its credit line to the Assad regime, triggering a fuel crisis. For at least a period of six months, Iran was unable to export fuel to Syria, but in May 2019, an Iranian oil tanker successfully delivered a shipment of oil, easing the crisis.

Iran’s efforts to provide oil to fuel Syria’s war machine have been ongoing, as evidenced by the July 2019 interdiction by British Royal Marines of an Iranian oil tanker off the coast of Gibraltar carrying 2 million barrels of oil suspected of being destined for Syria. The British operation highlighted Iran’s efforts to maintain its lifeline to the Assad regime in violation of EU and other international sanctions.

Iranian Military Support to the Assad Regime

Iran has effectively been in charge of planning and leading the conduct of the conflict.

The Iranian regime's support for Syria is broad and comprehensive, and includes deploying Iranian troops inside Syria, technical assistance, and training for Syrian forces. As early as December 2013, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Maj.-Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari boasted, "[Iran has] special forces transferring experience and training who are doing advisory work."

Initially, Iranian support was limited to advising and training Assad regime forces. Iranian support to the Syrian regime increased markedly in 2012 as Assad risked losing power due to rebel advances and force attrition. Iran began sending hundreds of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Basij fighters to Damascus, stanching and eventually reversing Assad’s losses. Tehran has subsequently greatly expanded its support to include deploying thousands of IRGC, Artesh and Basij fighters to take a direct part in the Syrian Civil War’s battles.

Iran has engaged in the facilitation of arms transfers to the Assad regime and proxy militia forces in Syria, including Hezbollah, in violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231. These arms transfers have helped Assad regain lost territory and have given Iran and its proxies the ability to project power in the Levant militarily, threatening Israel, Jordan, and other U.S. allies and interests in the region.

Iran has sent Syria vast quantities of military equipment throughout the civil war, including rifles, machine guns, ammunition, mortar shells, and other arms, as well as military communications equipment. These arms transfers began prior to the introduction of Resolution 2231 and continue today. Most of Iran's arms shipments to Syria are supplied via air transport. From January 2016 to August 2017, over 1000 flights departed from points in Iran and landed in Syria, indicating an ongoing complex logistical operation to resupply the Assad regime. Israel has referred Iran to the U.N. Security Council on two separate occasions for alleged violations of Resolution 2231 in Syria, once for the launching of an “Iranian unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV),” described as having been launched into Israeli airspace to attack Israeli territory, and once for Iran’s delivery of a Khordad air defense system (which Israel destroyed before it could be set up) to an Iranian air base.

As the tide of the war has shifted in Assad’s favor, Iran has moved to establish a permanent military presence in Syria, effectively transforming the country into a forward operating base from which to threaten and occasionally attack Israel. Iran has set about constructing military bases and weapons production and storage facilities to that end. Israel has targeted Iranian weapons depots on numerous occasions, vowing to strike against Iranian military entrenchment in Syria when it feels threatened. One prominent node for Iranian entrenchment is the T4 airbase, where Iran has sought to establish “a large air force compound under its exclusive control,” according to Haaretz military correspondent Amos Harel. Iran shares the large base with Russian and Syrian forces, but operates independently of them, controlling T4’s western and northern sides.

Highlighting the Iranian danger, in February 2018, Iran launched an armed drone from Syrian territory into Israel, an attack that Israel ultimately repelled. In August 2019, Israel struck Quds Force and Iran-backed Shi’a militia targets in Damascus who were preparing to launch explosives-laden “killer drones” into Israel’s north. Iran’s use of Syria as a staging ground for UCAV attacks against Israel illustrates the extent to which Iran has a free hand to operate in Syria, as Assad has allowed Iran to undertake such operations even though they put his own forces at risk.

In September 2019, Western intelligence sources alleged, and satellite imagery confirmed, that Iran’s Quds Force is constructing a military complex, the Imam Ali compound, near the border with Iraq where it will house thousands of troops. Some of the buildings at the compound appear to be heavily fortified, heightening suspicions that they may be used to store sophisticated weaponry including precision-guided missiles. The compound was partially destroyed by airstrikes after its existence was exposed, but as of November 2019, Fox News has confirmed that construction of the base is ongoing.

In December 2019, Fox News reported that Iran is building an underground tunnel at the Imam Ali complex to store missiles and other advanced weaponry.

While most of Iran’s military hardware and personnel are concentrated in Syria’s north, Israel is increasingly concerned about the transfer of sophisticated weaponry and precision-guided missiles to Hezbollah forces in the country and over Iranian efforts to establish a presence in the Golan Heights, overlooking Israel’s northern border. In November 2019, an Israeli military official alleged, "there are Iranian Quds forces in the Golan Heights and that's not fear-mongering, they're there." In January 2021, the Afghan Fatemiyoun Division reportedly transferred 56 short and medium-range surface-to-surface missiles over the Iraqi border to Iraqi Hezbollah forces positioned in Syria’s eastern Deir Ezzor province, disguising the weaponry by using vehicles meant for transporting produce. Iran’s military entrenchment has eroded Syria’s sovereignty and invited increased Israeli strikes on Syrian territory, indicating that as Syria’s civil war calms down, the country may become embroiled as a battleground between Israel and Iran and its proxies.

In July 2020, Iran and Syria signed a comprehensive agreement to enhance their cooperation in the military and defense spheres. Both sides indicated that the agreement was meant to resist U.S. attempts to pressure and isolate Iran and Syria. Iran noted that as part of the agreement, it will “strengthen Syria’s air defense systems within the framework of strengthening military cooperation between the two countries.” Israeli media reported in August 2020 that Israel has carried out over 1,000 airstrikes in Syria since 2017 largely in service of its effort to prevent Iranian military entrenchment in Syria and weapons transfers to Hezbollah. During that period, Israel has reportedly taken out over one-third of Syria’s air defenses in order to ensure its continued aerial freedom of operation.

Iran’s pledges to bolster Syria’s air defenses and increase military cooperation with Damascus show that it remains committed to entrenching itself militarily in Syria.

As Iran has entrenched, it has used Syria as a weapons transshipment hub, establishing supply lines to provide drones, precision-bombs, and other advanced weaponry to Hezbollah and Iran-backed Shia militias. Israel has shown repeatedly that it is willing to strike Iranian targets in Syria to stanch the Iranian proliferation threat and rein in the arms supply network Iran is building in the region. As such, Syria is likely to remain a battleground for direct Israeli-Iranian confrontation for the foreseeable future.

Provision of Proxies

Iran has deployed an estimated 20-30,000 of its regional proxies from around the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Pakistan into the country. As the Assad regime has weakened, it has become increasingly reliant on the local and foreign Shia militias beholden to Iran to seize and hold territory. Former IRGC Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani was at the head of these forces until his death in a U.S. drone strike on January 3, 2020, coordinating activities among the various Shia mercenary forces and ensuring that their activities fulfilled Iranian foreign policy objectives.

These duties have now shifted to Soleimani’s successor, Esmail Ghaani. Tehran’s command and control over its proxy forces in Syria has likely suffered since the transition, as Ghaani does not have the stature of Soleimani or benefit of close relationships with the heads of various militias that made Soleimani so effective. In June 2020, Ghaani reportedly visited the Syrian side of the Abu Kamal border crossing with Iraq, where he vowed that Iran would continue to fight the “Zionist regime” and U.S. Ghaani’s visit was meant to show that like Soleimani, Ghaani is capable of clandestinely visiting Iranian proxies around the region, and as an opportunity for Ghaani to assert his control over and consolidate unity among the various factions Soleimani previously commanded.

Hezbollah

Under Iranian direction, Hezbollah entered the Syrian Civil War on Assad’s side in 2011 and has been critical to his regime’s survival. Hezbollah spent the first two years of the civil war denying its involvement, but in April 2013, Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah openly declared Hezbollah’s foray into the conflict, urging his followers to not “let Syria fall in the hands of America, Israel, or Takfiri (radical Sunni) groups.” Since then, Hezbollah has deployed approximately 5,000-8,000 fighters into the Syrian arena, and between 1 and 2,000 of them have been killed. The group has been involved in almost every major battle of the war, including the repeated offensives in Qalamoun and Zabadani, but most critically the battle of Aleppo. The battle of Aleppo ended with a regime victory in December 2016, irreversibly turning the tide of the Syrian war.

After averting the direct rebel threat to Damascus, Hezbollah has acted to re-extend the regime’s control over all of Syria. In May of 2017, Hezbollah’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah announced the withdrawal of his forces from positions on the Lebanese-Syrian border. Rather than demobilizing, however, they were sent deeper into eastern Syria as part of a large-scale operation to retake the country’s borders with Jordan and Iraq and to join with Popular Mobilization Forces charging from the Iraqi side of the border.

Hezbollah has made clear it intends to remain in Syria and is laying permanent groundwork for the day after an eventual Assad victory. Hezbollah has reportedly established missile bases in Qusayr and Qalamoun to better protect its longer-ranger projectiles from Israeli aerial attacks. It has also engaged in large-scale sectarian cleansing of Sunnis from the area to secure its Beqaa Valley and Baalbek strongholds across the border and guarantee its land corridor to Damascus. Critically, an Iranian-Qatari brokered population swap deal in April 2017 transferred almost all remaining Sunni combatants from the area, in exchange for the Shiite residents of besieged Foua and Kefraya.

The group is also aiming to establish a presence on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights, a matter of concern for the Israelis. This would not threaten Israel’s military superiority in the area, since the Israelis occupy the high-ground and the flat terrain between the Golan and Damascus can easily be seized by IDF ground troops. However, it could serve as a base for Hezbollah to carry out limited strikes against soldiers or civilians in Israeli-held territory in a future conflict.

Israeli security officials say Hezbollah is also exploiting the chaos of Syria’s civil war to clandestinely import advanced, balance-altering weapons – allegedly including chemical weapons, SCUDs, and Yakhont anti-ship missiles – from its Iranian patron and the Assad regime. These weapons would be a major upgrade from the short-range and unguided katyusha rockets that have been the group’s traditional mainstay, and which make up the bulk of its oft-mentioned arsenal of 150,000 rockets. Israel considers this a red line and has repeatedly intercepted and destroyed these weapons with air strikes.

Additional Shiite Militia Proxies

In addition to Hezbollah, Iran has mobilized, funded, and armed thousands of Shiite fighters to defend Assad’s regime, inflaming Sunni-Shiite sectarian tensions in the process. These fighters, were under the unified command of Qassem Soleimani, have been recruited from across the Arab and Islamic world, including Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

An estimated 3,000 Afghans, primarily immigrants and refugees residing in Iran and Syria, form the Liwa Fatemiyoun (Fatemiyoun Division). Approximately 1,000 Pakistanis, who receive training from the IRGC Quds Force in Mashad, comprise the Zainabyoun Brigade, which the Iranian press describes as an elite assault force. The core forces of the Zainabyoun Brigade reportedly initially came from Al-Mustafa International University, an Iranian network of colleges and seminaries tasked with disseminating Iran’s religious ideology around the world.

Iran’s efforts to recruit Shia militants to the Syrian war effort from around the Middle East and beyond center upon the salaries it offers its disaffected conscripts. Recruits are offered monthly salaries on a sliding scale dependent on country of origin, basic and advanced military training, and Iran offers to pay the families of “martyrs” for their children’s education and to send family members on annual pilgrimages to holy sites in Iran, Iraq, and Syria.

Beyond cash and benefits, Iran relies heavily on religious and ideological appeals to find recruits willing to be martyred for the cause. The New York Times detailed how recruiters affiliated with the IRGC appeal to the Shia faith and identity of potential fighters, reporting that once recruited, fighters train near Tehran where “Iranian officers delivered speeches invoking the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, the revered seventh-century Shiite figure whose death at the hands of a powerful Sunni army became the event around which Shiite spirituality would revolve. The same enemies of the Shiites who killed the imam are now in Syria and Iraq, the officers told the men.”

Iran has also sought to frame the fighting in Syria as an urgent necessity to defend Shia shrines. The golden-domed Sayyeda Zainab shrine, strategically located in south Damascus, is especially central to this narrative of Iran and its proxy fighters. Attendees at funerals for Lebanese Hezbollah and other Shia militia fighters killed in Syria frequently chant “labaykya Zainab (At your service, O Zainab), and these same groups have also produced propagandistic songs featuring the slogan and prominently placed the shrine’s iconic dome in the background of martyrdom posters of fallen fighters.

One of the most important and notorious of those groups is Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, which played a critical role in the battle for Aleppo and is alleged to have summarily executed 82 civilians – including 11 women and 13 children. Harakat al-Nujaba, an offshoot of Kataib Hezbollah and Asaib Ahl al-Haq, recently formed a “Golan Liberation Brigade” to fight the Israelis.

In March 2021, Syrian opposition media outlets reported that the Iran-backed militia Kataib al-Imam Ali had opened a recruiting station in the regime-controlled city of Aleppo. Kataib al-Imam Ali was created in Iraq in June 2014 as the armed wing of an Iraqi political party, Harakat al-Iraq al-Islamiyah (The Movement of the Islamic Iraq). The group has been uniformed and well-armed since its inception. It was founded by Shibl al-Zaydi, a U.S. designated terrorist who has leveraged his position as head of a powerful militia to become one of the richest men in Iraq with a large business empire and controlling interest in the Iraqi Ministry of Communications.

Assad regime defense officials reportedly approved of the group’s recruitment operations and have made allowances not to pursue army defectors and dodgers of compulsory military service if they instead join the militia. The militia appeals to economically disenfranchised Syrian youth, offering $200 per month for married recruits and $150 per month for single individuals. The group’s nascent presence in Syria is a testament to many of the Iran-backed Shi’a militias' transnational nature.

Local Actors

One of the most pernicious ways in which Iran has sought to bolster its influence along sectarian lines in Syria has been by providing ideological guidance for the transformation of elements of Bashar Al-Assad’s Popular Committees – small, localized defense units – and other irregular pro-Assad armed groups into increasingly “regularized” militias, known as the National Defense Forces (NDF), modeled after Hezbollah. Iran’s Qassem Soleimani and Hezbollah personally oversaw the creation of the NDF, whose local Syrian recruits receive training in urban and guerilla warfare from both the IRGC and Hezbollah at facilities in Syria, Lebanon and Iran.

The NDF operates as a part-time volunteer reserve force of the Syrian Army which has opted to fight on behalf of the Assad regime against rebel groups, filling the void created by the depletion of Assad’s Syrian armed forces since their creation in mid-2012. Iran has taken the lead in the “rebranding, restructuring, and merging” of the Popular Committees into the NDF, with Hezbollah playing a critical role in providing military and ideological training. In a similar vein to Hezbollah, the Iran-backed NDF operate in a localized context and are ostensibly Syrian actors, but their true raison d’etre is the propagation of Iran’s supranational revolutionary project.

In addition to replicating the Hezbollah model in Syria, Iran’s role in creating the NDF also mirrors the establishment of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) in Iraq. Both the Syrian NDF and Iraqi PMF are governmentally sanctioned and financed paramilitary outfits whose fighters are more numerous and powerful than their respective states’ official defense forces. The NDF is now by far the largest militia network in Syria, estimated at approximately 50,000 primarily Alawite members as of late 2015. The NDF has participated in critical battles, including the 2016 Aleppo offensive and the campaign to dislodge ISIS, contributing to Assad’s surging territorial reconquests.

Iran’s Gains in Syria

The successes of Hezbollah, the NDF, and affiliated Iranian proxy forces in the Syrian theater have expanded Iran’s objectives within Syria. What began as an Iranian-sponsored attempt to create a “Useful Syria” from the regime’s major cities and economic centers has now become a more ambitious campaign to retake the entire country. With the Assad regime and allied forces – including Hezbollah and other Iranian proxy militias – retaking the key Iraqi-Syrian border crossings of al-Tanf and Abu Kamal, and Iranian-sponsored members of the Popular Mobilization Forces reaching the Syrian border from the Iraqi side, Iran has completed a critical link in its project to create a land corridor to the Mediterranean.

Iran’s provision of economic, military, and proxy support was critical in stabilizing Assad’s rule until Russia’s entry into the Syrian Civil War in 2015. Following the regime’s 2016 victory in Aleppo, the war’s momentum swung decisively in Assad’s favor. In 2018, the Assad regime further consolidated its control in brutal fashion, pressing an offensive in Eastern Ghouta, the last rebel-held bastion in the Damascus suburbs. The Eastern Ghouta campaign forced the remnants of rebel forces and thousands of civilians to flee to Idlib province, which is now Syria’s last-remaining rebel-held enclave on the western Syrian corridor that runs from Damascus-Homs-Hama-Idlib-Aleppo.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has euphemistically declared that Idlib, whose population has doubled to 3 million people since the war broke out due to internally displaced refugees, must be “cleaned out” of opposition forces. The U.N. has warned that a regime offensive backed by Iran and Russia would result in the “worst humanitarian catastrophe” of the century as there are no longer any opposition-held areas left in Syria where those fleeing can evacuate. In September 2018, Russia and Turkey negotiated a tenuous truce to forestall a bloodbath in Idlib, but the Assad regime has referred to the deal as a “temporary one.”

In October 2019, President Trump hastily announced the withdrawal of U.S. forces from northeast Syria and signaled his intention to eventually fully end U.S. involvement in Syria. The announcement effectively strengthened Iran’s hand in Syria and will facilitate further Iranian military and commercial entrenchment, presenting a self-inflicted setback to the administration’s concerted effort to pressure Tehran.

The U.S. military presence in northeast Syria provided a deterrent that allowed the Kurdish-led SDF to control a full third of Syria’s territory, home to the country’s richest oil and agricultural resources, keeping it out of the hands of the Russia-Assad-Iran alliance for seven years.

The U.S. withdrawal has also increased the chances of a Russian-Syrian-Iranian onslaught in Idlib. Turkey, concerned that an offensive would further increase refugee strains, had stood as a major impediment to an Idlib offensive. In the aftermath of the U.S. withdrawal, however, Turkey has had to draw closer to Russia, neutralizing its protestations over a “fait accompli” in Idlib.

At a December 2019 summit in Kazakhstan as part of the Russia-Iran-Turkey negotiation track, Turkey joined Russia and Iran in expressing concern over the increased presence of “terrorist groups” in Idlib, and pledged to work cooperatively to pacify the situation. The pledge came in the wake of increased activity by Syrian armed forces, in conjunction with Russian air power, on the outskirts of Idlib in the weeks prior. In November 2019, Syrian and Russian forces killed at least 22 civilians in attacks on an internally displaced person (IDP) camp and a maternity hospital in villages around Idlib, according to opposition monitoring groups. These events indicated that a full-scale offensive in Idlib was imminent.

The Kazakhstan summit ended without a definitive ceasefire agreement, and in the days that followed, Syrian government forces, Russia, Hezbollah, Iran and other pro-Assad militias launched an offensive to retake Idlib. Nearly one million Syrians, roughly half of them children, were displaced by the fighting, straining U.N. relief efforts. In March 2020, Russia and Turkey agreed to a ceasefire, but the situation remains volatile.

Iran’s Long-Term Influence in Syria

The Assad regime’s re-consolidation of power, a project in which Iran played an indispensable role, has given Iran and its proxies a foothold to project economic, military, and cultural influence into Syria for years to come. Iran’s Syrian intervention has paid off, guaranteeing both Assad’s survival and dependence on Tehran given his weakened position both domestically and within the international community. For its efforts to shore up Assad, Iran and the IRGC – which has a hand in virtually every sector of the Iranian economy – have the opportunity to further carve out a long-term role for themselves in Syria, utilizing the cover of military and economic projects to export the Islamic Revolution by creating Shi’a militias and quasi-state institutions loyal to Iran and its Supreme Leader within Syria.

In September 2017, Iran’s Research Institute of Petroleum, a governmental research institute affiliated with the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), announced that Iran is planning to build an oil refinery in Syria’s western city of Homs once the civil war ends as part of a consortium involving Iranian, Syrian, and Venezuelan companies. The consortium has already begun pursuing international investments for the project, which will take an estimated $1 billion to construct and will have a projected refining capacity of 140,000 barrels per day.

The Homs oil refinery is one of a series of business deals Iran has announced that indicates that the Islamic Republic is poised to take a leading role in the rebuilding of Syria, after playing a pivotal role in the nation’s destruction. Also in September 2017, Iran signed a series of lucrative agreements to restore Syria’s power grid and in January 2017, the Iranian government and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)-affiliated entities inked major mining and telecommunications agreements with Damascus. The telecommunications agreements are particularly alarming, as they may provide Iran with communications-monitoring and intelligence-gathering tools.

In January 2018, Iran announced plans to establish Islamic Azad University branches in Syrian cities, a development that indicates that Iran is investing in spreading its Islamic Revolutionary ideology in Syria.

In November 2019, Iran and Syria announced a memorandum of understanding to establish three joint state-owned companies that will focus on reconstructing infrastructure and residential properties.

Both the NDF and Lebanese Hezbollah appear to be permanent fixtures in Syria as well, remaking a country that historically “was home to many competing ideological forms of Shiism” in Iran’s image. Hezbollah and the NDF’s secure Iranian alignment and loyalty to its revolutionary ethos ensures that Iran will be the dominant military and cultural power in Syria for the foreseeable future. As Iran has further entrenched its control and influence over Syria, it and its proxies have taken on increasingly confrontational postures against the U.S. and Israel. Iran has engaged in armed drone skirmishes with Israeli forces, and conducted a missile strike against ISIS fighters that landed within three miles of U.S forces. These incidents indicate that Iran plans on using Syria as a base from which to provoke the U.S. and its allies and is not concerned about dragging Syria into its proxy battles.

YEMEN

The Houthi flag and slogan, which reads “God is great/ Death to America/ Death to Israel /God curse the Jews/ Victory to Islam,” draws inspiration from the Iranian regime slogans “Death to America” and “Death to Israel”.

Iran continues to destabilize Yemen by supporting the Shiite Houthi insurgency(directly, and indirectly through Hezbollah) from the beginning of its war against the Sunni-dominated, internationally recognized central government in 2004. Iran uses the Houthis and Yemen as a proxy and base, respectively, to attack its leading Sunni rival, Saudi Arabia. Iran’s support for the Houthis has helped the latter expand their control of Yemeni territory; capture Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, and dethrone Yemen’s central government; and survive a massive air bombardment from a Saudi-led coalition seeking to restore the former Yemeni regime.

Tehran’s aid to the group has included funding, Iranian fighter pilots, arms shipments, and military training. In 2009, Iran’s support for the Houthis was exposed when the Yemeni navy apprehended an Iranian ship off the Yemeni coast in the Red Sea carrying weapons experts and anti-tank weapons sent to replace wounded “Iranians fighting alongside Houthi rebels” against Yemeni government forces. The Houthis’ motto, “God is great! / Death to America! / Death to Israel! / God curse the Jews! / Victory to Islam!” which emulates the Iranian regime’s own “Death to America” slogan and extremist ideology, underscores the group’s links to Tehran. Iranian meddling in Yemen includes arms shipments and support for assassinations and coups; the use of missiles, drones, and roadside bombs; and the deployment of foreign regional proxies, namely Lebanese Hezbollah, on the ground.

According to the U.S. State Department Country Reports on Terrorism 2019, throughout 2019, Hizballah, the IRGC-QF, and other Iran backed terrorist groups continued to exploit the political and security vacuum created by the ongoing conflict between the Yemeni government under the leadership of President Abd Rabu Mansour Hadi, recognized by the UN Security Council as the legitimate government of Yemen, and the Iran-backed Houthi militants. Additionally, IRGC-QF has exploited the conflict to expand its influence in Yemen.

On December 5, 2019, as part of its reward offer for information leading to the disruption of the financial mechanisms of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the U.S. Department of State’s Rewards for Justice program requested information on the activities, networks, and associates of Abdul Reza Shahla’i, a Sana’a, Yemen-based high ranking commander of the IRGC’s Qods Force (IRGC-QF).

On January 18, 2020, ballistic missiles struck a mosque at the al-Estiqbal military camp in Marib, killing at least 116 people in what was reportedly one of the deadliest attacks in the civil war. There were no immediate claims of responsibility but Yemen’s internationally recognized government blamed Houthi rebels. The United States blamed Iran, which denied involvement. On January 20, 2020 government forces fought Houthi rebels east of Marib, killing senior Houthi commander Jaber Al Muwaed.

On December 30, 2020, the Houthis launched an attack against the civilian airport in Aden, where the new Saudi-backed Yemeni government was deplaning. The attack resulted in the deaths of 27 people, including three staff members of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Afterwards, the Trump administration designated the Houthis as a Foreign Terrorist Organization and a Specially Designated Global Terrorist.

Arms Shipments and the Houthi Coup

According to a senior American intelligence official in 2012, intercepted phone conversations between smugglers and the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) revealed that Iran has been “using small boats to ship AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades and other arms to replace older weapons used by the rebels.” In early 2012, the Yemeni government intercepted another shipment of Iranian manufactured material which was destined for a Yemeni Houthi businessman to create explosively formed penetrators (EFPs), which are advanced improvised explosive devices able to penetrate armored vehicles and which killed hundreds of American servicemen during the Iraq War. A year later, in January 2013, a joint U.S.-Yemeni military operation intercepted an Iranian shipment of surface-to-air missiles, C4 explosives, and rocket-propelled grenades in the Arabian Sea. American officials have likened Iran’s shipments of “relatively small, but steady stream of automatic rifles, grenade launchers, bomb-making material and several million dollars in cash” to the kinds of materiel Iran provides to its allies in Syria and Iraq.

In September 2014, the Houthis seized Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, and pushed out Yemen’s central government four months later. Iranian support for Houthi operations then increased considerably, with Tehran shipping the group 160 to 180 tons of arms and military equipment in March 2015.On September 27, 2014, while speaking about the Houthi coup, Ali Riza Zakani, a member of Iran’s parliament and a close confidante of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, stated that Iran is in a phase of “Grand Jihad” and “Three Arab capitals (Beirut, Damascus, and Baghdad) have already fallen into Iran’s hands and belong to the Iranian Revolution,” and called Sanaa the fourth. A Saudi-led coalition has undertaken military operations to defeat the Houthis and restore the Yemeni government to power.

Missile and Drone Attacks on Saudi Arabia

Since 2015, the Houthis have used Yemeni territory under their control as launching pads to fire more than 100 missiles and drones at Iranian rival Saudi Arabia. Such strikes have landed on multiple cities, including Riyadh, the Saudi capital. Targeted locations include the king’s official residence, military bases and encampments, oil refineries, the Riyadh international airport, and shopping malls. Further, as the Congressional Research Service notes, “Since 2016, the Houthis have periodically targeted commercial and military vessels transiting and patrolling the Red Sea using naval mines, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, anti-ship missiles, and waterborne improvised explosive devices (WBIEDs). Some of the weapons used reportedly have been supplied by Iran, including sea-skimming coastal defense cruise missiles.”

Evidence indicates that Iran is arming and, in some cases, directing the Houthis in their missile campaign, contrary to Tehran’s denials and in violation of an arms embargo imposed by the United Nations Security Council in April 2015. An independent U.N. monitoring panel stated in November 2017 that remnants from four ballistic missiles fired by the Houthis into Saudi Arabia likely came from the Iranian-made and designed Qiam-1 missile. In December 2017, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley and Pentagon officials displayed debris from missiles fired into Saudi Arabia, claiming that the markings on and designs of the missiles demonstrated that they were made by Iran. The U.N.’s finding of Iranian origins in the Houthis’ missiles continued well into 2018, with panel after panel affirming the Iranian connection. One U.N. report from January 2018 found that recently inspected missiles and drones “show characteristics similar to weapons systems known to be produced in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” and, therefore, the panel “continues to believe” that Tehran is giving missiles and other arms to the Houthis. Indeed, Iran has recently bragged openly about their support for the Houthis, with an IRGC general telling IRGC-controlled media that the Guards had instructed the Houthis to attack two Saudi oil tankers in July 2018.

Iran reportedly also continues to provide other forms of arms to the Houthis. For example, an independent watchdog organization claimed in March 2018 that roadside bombs found in Yemen resemble ones used by Iranian proxies in Lebanon, Iraq, and Bahrain.

Hezbollah’s Assistance to the Houthis

The Iranian proxy group Hezbollah, a terrorist organization operating in Lebanon and elsewhere, also has longstanding ties to the Houthis, who are fellow Shiites. Working with Iran, Hezbollah reportedly operates on the ground in Yemen, arming, training, and even fighting for the Houthis. Analysts have speculated that the Houthis seek to replicate in Yemen Hezbollah’s Lebanese model of a “state within a state.”

Hezbollah operatives themselves have reportedly admitted that the group has a ground presence in Yemen and fights directly against the Saudi-led coalition. A Hezbollah commander told the Financial Times that the group began training with the Houthis in 2005. “They trained with us in Iran, then we trained them here and in Yemen,” he said. A Hezbollah commander reportedly told researchers in 2016, “After we are done with Syria, we will start with Yemen, Hezbollah is already there. Who do you think fires Tochka missiles into Saudi Arabia? It’s not the Houthis in their sandals, it’s us.”A Houthi militia leader confessed after surrendering to coalition forces in 2017 that Iran and Hezbollah operatives were operating covert training facilities in Yemen.

Coalition and United Nations officials have also claimed that Hezbollah is aiding the Houthis. Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi claimed in 2016 that Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah wrote to him that “Our fighters arrived in Yemen to teach the Yemeni people the essence of governing.”In June 2018, the anti-Houthi coalition stated that coalition forces had killed eight Hezbollah members in Yemen. That August, Khalid bin Salman, the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., said that not enough attention was paid to “not only the direct assistance the Al Houthi militia receives from the Iranian regime, but also the existence of Hezbollah commanders on the ground.” He added that a coalition raid on a Houthi site had “revealed a Hezbollah operative training, advising [the Houthis] on asymmetric warfare, and showed background portrait [sic] of Iran’s ‘Supreme Leader’ on militia’s computer [sic].”Ambassador bin Salman also tweeted evidence of ties between the two groups, including footage of a “Hizballah operative in Yemen advising the Houthis to use deception tactics such as using water tanks to store weapons, and smuggling fighters through civilian vehicles; endangering the lives of Yemeni civilians.” Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir has repeatedly accused Iran and Hezbollah of being responsible for missile attacks targeting Saudi territory. In July 2018, a coalition spokesman said “Hezbollah is the Houthis’ greatest arms supplier” and said the coalition had evidence that Hezbollah experts were on the ground in Yemen, training the Houthis and giving them a military communications system. And in October 2018, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned Hezbollah’s involvement in Yemen.

In 2018, Nasrallah stepped up his group’s public support for the Houthis. On June 29, Nasrallah paid tribute to the Houthis in a public speech, even saying, “I wish I could be one of your fighters and fight under the guidance of your brave and dear leaders.” In mid-August, Hezbollah used its annual commemoration of its 2006 war against Israel to display pro-Houthis propaganda—namely, as the National reported, “a reconstruction of a bus hit by a Coalition airstrike which had killed a number of civilians and children in Saada province several days earlier that the Arab-led force later said had been a mistake. Organizers used the bus for journalists to photograph, complete with actors impersonating the victims, special effects smoke, red lighting and fake blood in an evocative image of the war.” And on August 19, Hezbollah disclosed that Nasrallah had met recently with a Houthi delegation in Beirut.

Houthi leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi has reciprocated, praising Iran and thanking Nasrallah for his “solidarity.” He also promised that Houthis would fight alongside Hezbollah or Palestinian militants in a future war against Israel.

Saleh Assassination

In December 2017, the Houthis assassinated former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh, their erstwhile enemy and then ally, after he turned against them again and proposed reconciliation with the Saudi-led anti-Houthi coalition. Iranian leaders and regime-affiliated media outlets celebrated Saleh’s killing and said the Houthis are inspired by Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution and similar to Iranian-supported militant groups in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon.

A shipment of Iranian weapons destined for the Houthis seized by American naval forces in the Arabian Sea in 2015.

Afghanistan

Active proxy groups & Military forces

IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps)

Support for Afghan Proxies

Iranian influence in Afghanistan has deep-seated roots reaching back to the 15th century when the Afghan city of Herat was the capital of the Persian Empire. Iran also shares ties with various groups of Afghanistan, particularly the Persian-speaking Tajiks and the Shia Hazara. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Iran supported Shia resistance efforts and opened its borders to Afghan refugees. After the first Gulf War, Iraq, which had posed the major proximate threat to Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, was effectively neutralized. Neighboring civil war-torn Afghanistan supplanted Iraq as the main threat facing Iran, and in 1996, the extremist Sunni jihadist movement, the Taliban, rose to power, backed by Iranian geopolitical rivals Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

During the Afghan Civil War, Iran defensively sought to cultivate military and political influence in Afghanistan by backing elements hostile to the Taliban with ethnic, sectarian, and linguistic affinities toward Iran, namely the Hazaras in the West of the country and Tajiks in the North who formed the core of the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, more commonly referred to as the “Northern Alliance.” By 1998, Iran had amassed 70,000 IRGC troops along its border with Afghanistan to defend against spillover from the conflict next door.

In August of 1998, tensions between Iran and the Taliban reached a boil after the Taliban captured the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, a cosmopolitan and diverse city with a large Shia Hazara population. The Taliban brutalized the town’s Hazaras, raping and massacring hundreds. Amidst the chaos, Taliban soldiers besieged an Iranian consulate and executed nine Iranian diplomats and an Iranian journalist. As demands for retaliation grew, Iran stationed an additional 200,000 conventional forces along the border.

Ultimately, however, Iran, which has since the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War sought to avoid direct confrontation and heavy casualties, refrained from direct intervention and opted instead to escalate its strategy of proxy warfare. Iran ramped up its support for the Northern Alliance, with former IRGC-Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani reportedly taking an active role in directing the Northern Alliance’s operations from Tajikistan, where the group had established bases from which to launch attacks into Afghanistan and coordinate resupply of its fighters.

The Taliban offered Al Qaeda safe haven for its terrorist operations, leading the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to authorize covert assistance to the Northern Alliance in 1999 to facilitate operations against the growing Al Qaeda threat. This marked a rare instance of the U.S. and Iran independently backing a guerilla movement, albeit for different ends. Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda, America initiated hostilities against the Taliban government, a welcome development for Iran at the time.

While wary of the expansion of the U.S. military footprint in its environs, Tehran was willing to leverage American military might to neutralize its most pressing adversary. The U.S. and Iran held several rounds of secret shuttle diplomacy, leading to covert cooperation that went as far as Iran sharing intelligence detailing Taliban positions for the U.S. to strike. While many in Iran were skeptical about the efficacy of partnering with the U.S., Soleimani saw the situation as a win-win for Iran. He posited that even if the U.S. ended up betraying Iran after toppling the Taliban, their enemy would be defeated, and America would end up entangled in Afghanistan, similar to the Soviet Union. “Americans do not know the region, Americans do not know Afghanistan, Americans do not know Iran,” warned Soleimani.

Relations between the U.S. and Iran would ultimately sour following President George W. Bush’s 2002 State of the Union, in which Iran, Iraq, and North Korea were labeled the “axis of evil,” and the subsequent March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Iran’s threat perception changed as the U.S. was no longer the distant “Great Satan,” but a proximate threat with an expanding military footprint in the region that had toppled two neighboring governments and was ultimately bent on Iranian regime change.

As such, Iran’s primary objectives in Afghanistan shifted toward ensuring that the country remained sufficiently weak as to preclude a further military threat toward it, and imposing costs on the U.S. to compel its withdrawal. Iran’s long-term interest is in a stable, friendly, and weak Afghanistan in order to prevent drug trafficking, terrorism, and refugee flows from spilling over into Iran. To that end, Iran pursued foreign direct investment in Afghanistan’s reconstruction and assistance in the fields of infrastructure, agriculture, energy, and communications.

At the same time, however, Iran played what former Defense Secretary Robert Gates termed a “double game” in Afghanistan, seeking good relations with the central government while also modestly funneling arms to insurgents of various ethnic and ideological stripes through the IRGC-Quds Force, according to U.S. intelligence. The haphazard way Iran has sought to play all sides off each other in pursuit of its short-term interests imperils its longer-term interest in a stable, friendly Afghanistan. It has also engendered enmity among broad swathes of the population, as evidenced by pushback and demonstrations against Iranian meddling in recent years.

Support for the Taliban

Demonstrating the lengths Tehran was willing to go to repel U.S. influence, one of the primary groups the Quds Force began arming was the Taliban. Beginning in 2006, the IRGC-Quds Force began “training the Taliban in Afghanistan on small unit tactics, small arms, explosives, and indirect fire weapons” in addition to providing armaments “including small arms and associated ammunition, rocket propelled grenades, mortar rounds, 107mm rockets, and plastic explosives.” Iran has also permitted the Taliban free movement of foreign fighters through Iranian territory to support its insurgency in Afghanistan.

On October 25, 2007, the U.S. Department of the Treasury designated the IRGC-Quds Force under Executive Order 13382 for providing material support to the Taliban and other terrorist organizations. In 2014, the U.S. Department of Treasury added three Iranian IRGC Quds Force operatives and one “associate” to its list of global terrorists for their efforts to “plan and execute attacks in Afghanistan” including providing “logistical support” in order to advance Iran’s interests in the region. The Treasury Department has stated that these designations “[underscore] Tehran’s use of terrorism and intelligence operations as tools of influence against the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.”

In 2018, the U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctioned additional individuals who spearheaded cooperation between the Taliban and Tehran. They included Mohammad Ebrahim Owhadi, a Quds Force operative, who, according to the U.S. government, provided the Taliban Shadow Governor of Herat Province “with military and financial assistance” in exchange for Taliban forces launching attacks against the Afghan government, and Esma’il Razavi, who ran a training camp for Taliban forces in Birjand, Iran, which, according to the U.S. government, “provided training, intelligence, and weapons to Taliban forces in Farah, Ghor, Badhis, and Helmand Provinces.” News reports indicate that Iran directly supported the Taliban offensive against Farah Province in May 2018.

Brigadier-General Esmail Ghaani became the head of the IRGC Quds Force, following the death of Qassem Soleimani in January 2020. Ghaani has deep contacts and experience in Afghanistan—dating back to the 1980s. After Soleimani’s demise, Iranian media began circulating unconfirmed reports that high-ranking Central Intelligence Agency officials perished in a plane crash in Taliban-controlled territory of a Bombardier E-11A electronic surveillance plane, and that one of those officials was involved in the death of Soleimani. Days later, the U.S. government announced only two U.S. Air Force pilots were killed in the incident, and there was no indication of hostile action in the downing of the jet. There has been speculation that the circulation of this story was part of an Iranian propaganda campaign. Such allegations also come on the heels of an increasingly close relationship between Tehran and the Taliban, with Iranian media repeatedly interviewing its officials.

Days after the plane crash, the head of U.S. Central Command warned of a “worrisome trend” in intelligence pointing to an uptick of Iran’s malign behavior in Afghanistan. This could be evidence of the new Quds Force commander seeking to deploy his existing network inside Afghanistan against U.S. forces.

On February 29, 2020, the U.S. and the Taliban signed a peace agreement in Doha that envisioned a complete U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in exchange for assurances from the Taliban that the group would prevent Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven for terrorists. The agreement was meant to pave the way for negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government on a power sharing agreement that would shape Afghanistan’s future.

Since the agreement was reached, Iran has continued to play a destabilizing double game in Afghanistan, seeking to ensure that it will retain influence in the country regardless of the outcome of the peace process. On the one hand, Iran has sought to ingratiate itself with the Afghan government and has encouraged various stakeholder factions from across the political spectrum in the government to form a joint committee to ensure a unified front in future talks with the Taliban. Iran even offered to play a mediation role in future talks as well between the government and Taliban. In July 2020, Iran announced that it had formulated a "Comprehensive Document of Strategic Cooperation between Iran and Afghanistan" whose fundamental principles are "non-interference in each other's affairs," "non-aggression" and "non-use of each other's territory to attack and invade other countries."

At the same time, though, Iran has continued to maintain contact with the Taliban to retain leverage over the Afghan government and peace process. Moreover, Iran is evidently working to sabotage the peace process by backing more radical elements and splinter groups from the Talibanwho oppose negotiations and wish to keep fighting the central government and U.S. military presence.

Iran, which has been hard hit by sanctions and the COVID-19 pandemic, is likely in the immediate term to avoid proxy confrontation with the U.S., instead pursuing strategic patience in the hopes that the U.S. will withdraw on its own accord. However, its influence over radical Taliban elements ensures that it is capable of resuming hostilities against the U.S. and turning Afghanistan into a proxy war battlefield at a time of Tehran’s choosing.

This reality was underscored by an August 2020 CNN report that U.S. intelligence agencies assessed that Iran had provided bounty payments to the Haqqani Network, a terrorist offshoot of the Taliban, for attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in recent years. The report found that Iran had paid bounties for six Haqqani Network attacks in 2019 alone, including a major suicide bombing at Bagram Air Base in December 2019 that killed two civilians and wounded over 70 people, including four U.S. service personnel. The U.S. ultimately refrained from retaliation for the attack in order to preserve the peace process with the Taliban, but Iran’s role in financing attacks targeting the U.S. shows the potential for Tehran to play spoiler through its ties to the Taliban.

Economic and Cultural Influence

Tehran has also dramatically expanded its economic ties with Afghanistan to buy influence in the country. According to the Afghanistan Chamber of Commerce, Iran surpassed Pakistan as Afghanistan’s largest trading partner from March 2017-2018—with Iran exporting goods worth $1.98 billion. While foreign investment supports Afghanistan’s development, Iranian investment seeks to undermine NATO and the Afghan regime’s efforts to stabilize the country. In 2010, Afghan President Hamid Karzai admitted that Iran was paying his government $2 million annually, but U.S. officials believe that this is just the “tip of the iceberg” in a multitude of Iranian cash inflows to Afghan groups and officials.

Iran’s economic influence in Afghanistan is best illustrated by its development of the western city of Herat, where Iran has developed the electrical grid, invested heavily in the mining industry, and invested over $150 million to build a school, mosque, residential apartments, a seven-mile road, and even stocked store shelves with Iranian goods. According to the head of Herat’s provincial council, Nazir Ahmad Haidar, “Iran has influence in every sphere: economic, social, political and daily life. When someone gives so much money, people fall into their way of thinking. It’s not just a matter of being neighborly.”

Furthermore, Iranian influence in Afghanistan extends past its economy and into Afghan culture and religion. Coordinated by an official under the office of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran has funded the development of Shia organizations, schools, and media outlets in order to expand Iranian influence in Afghanistan. Mohammad Omar Daudzai, Afghanistan’s former Ambassador to Iran, has stated that “thousands of Afghan religious leaders are on the Iranian payroll.”

Recently, Iran has bridged its international regional influence by creating the IRGC-backed Fatemiyoun Division, a group of Afghan Shi’a fighting in support of the al-Assad regime of Syria. Often recruiting Afghan Shia refugees in Iran, and to a lesser extent, Shias within Afghanistan itself, the IRGC offers a $500/month stipend and Iranian residency in return for joining pro-Assad militias. The Fatemiyoun was upgraded from a brigade to a division in 2015, indicating the militia’s ranks had grown to at least 10,000 fighters, with some estimates reaching as high as 20,000. The Fatemiyoun militants in Syria have typically been dispatched to dangerous fighting on the front lines with inadequate training and tactical preparation, leading to high casualty rates. Fatemiyoun survivors and deserters have described heavy-handed recruitment methods, including threats of being expelled from Iran and handed over to the Taliban in order to coerce marginalized Afghan refugees to fight in a war they have little understanding of or connection to. Human Rights Watch has identified at least 14 minors who fought and died in Syria for the Fatemiyoun Division.

Lastly, Iran has even weaponized Afghanistan’s environment. For example, the governor of Helmand Province accused the IRGC in 2017 of giving the Taliban weapons to attack Afghanistan’s water infrastructure so that Iran could receive a larger portion of water from the Helmand River.

Bahrain

Active proxy groups & Military forces

IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps)

Hezbollah

The tiny island Kingdom of Bahrain, ruled by the Sunni Al Khalifa family, has been acutely vulnerable to interference from its much larger Shiite neighbor, Iran, given that approximately 70-75 percent of its population is Shiite. Iran’s ties to Bahrain are more than sectarian. Successive Persian empires controlled Bahrain for centuries, ending in the 1780s. Not until 1970 did Iran drop its territorial claims to Bahrain. Nevertheless, since 1979, the Iranian regime has persistently attempted to return Bahrain to Shiite rule and has even referenced its former sovereignty over the island. In September 1979, only months after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Iran from exile, Sadegh Rouhani, a leading cleric, warned that if the emir of Bahrain did “not want to stop oppressing the people and restore Islamic laws, we will call on the people of Bahrain to demand annexaton to the Islamic government of Iran.”

The saber-rattling has continued ever since the onset of Iran’s Islamic Revolution. In 2009, Ali Akbar Nategh Nouri, a senior official and advisor to Iran’s Supreme Leader, bluntly stated that “Bahrain was the fourteenth province of Iran until 1970,” precipitating a crisis between the two countries. Similarly, in 2018, Hossein Shariatmadari, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s representative at the Kayhan newspaper, reiterated his statement from 10 years prior that “Bahrain is ours [Iran’s]” and that the people of Bahrain want their country to become part of Iran again.

Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah Activity in Bahrain

In 1981, the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain (IFLB), a militant Shiite organization established by Ayatollah Hadi Modarresi, Ayatollah Khomeini’s personal representative to Bahrain, attempted a coup. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Bahraini authorities also worked to incapacitate the country’s local branch of Hezbollah.

Beginning in the 1990s and continuing to the present day, Bahraini authorities accused Iran of spearheading a series of “popular petitions” to reform the Bahraini monarchy. For example, authorities in Manama accused a Shiite cleric, Ali Salman, of organizing such a drive 1994 which acquired, according to some estimates, as many as 25,000 signatures. This led to both Bahrain and Iran recalling their respective ambassadors, with Bahraini authorities alleging that the petitions were “planned and backed by foreign propaganda” rather than homegrown. Separately, in June 1996, Bahraini authorities accused Iran of organizing a coup.

Since anti-monarchy protests began in Bahrain in 2011 amid the wider “Arab Spring,” Tehran has attempted to exploit these demonstrations for sectarian purposes and to undermine the monarchy. Bahrain has repeatedly warned Iran to refrain from meddling in its internal affairs and said in 2011 that it “had foiled a decades long terror plot by outsiders,” referring to the Iranian regime. The main opposition party’s spiritual leader, Sheikh Isa Ahmad Qassem, is, according to a Bahrain expert, “a religious representative of Khamenei” who “propagates his religious authority” and “encourages people to follow [Khamenei] rather than other ‘sources of emulation.’”

On April 22, 2013, Bahraini authorities arrested eight of its citizens for plotting with an Iranian Revolutionary Guard member to assassinate Bahraini officials and target government buildings and the international airport. Later that same year, on December 30, the Bahraini coast guard interceptedan Iranian shipment of over 220 pounds of C4 explosives, 50 hand grenades, land mines, and detonators labeled “made in Syria” that were en route to Shiite opposition groups in Bahrain. During interrogation, the detained suspects “admitted to receiving paramilitary training in Iran.”

In September 2015, Bahrain uncovered an illicit Iranian weapons factory aimed at supplying militant elements within the opposition with heavy weaponry to fuel unrest in the kingdom. Bahrain recalled its ambassador to Iran the next month. In November of that year, Bahrain arrested 47 members of an Iran-linked cell that was plotting to execute imminent attacks.

In June 2016, two men alleged to have “received training in weapons and explosives from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards” planted a bomb that killed a Bahraini woman. In February 2017, a 14-member cell linked to Iran bombed a bus carrying Bahraini police officers, wounding five. According to Bahraini officials, six of the arrestees received military training in IRGC camps, five in Kata’ib Hezbollah facilities, and three in Bahrain. In March 2017, Bahraini authorities broke up an IRGC-linked terror cell, which they accused of plotting to assassinate government officials and attack police and U.S. military targets. In March 2018, the government revealed that it had arrested 116 members of an IRGC-run group that was planning to attack senior Bahrain officials and critical infrastructure. Manama claimed that almost half of the arrestees received training from the IRGC in Iran or in Iran-linked facilities in Iraq and Lebanon.

In April 2019, a Bahraini court sentenced to prison 139 Bahrainis, of whom 69 received life sentences (25 years), on terrorism 113 charges; the court also ordered the revocation of their citizenships. The GOB accused the individuals of forming an organization it referred to as “Bahraini Hizballah” with the intention of carrying out attacks in Bahrain.

The al-Ashtar Brigades

In January 2016, Bahrain caught an IRGC- and Hezbollah-backed cell plotting a series of bombings, claiming that one of the main suspects had gone to Iran and met with Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, who provided him $20,000. The cell was allegedly part of the Shiite al-Ashtar Brigades (AAB), which have claimed responsibility for more than 20 attacks in Bahrain since 2013, including one in March 2014 that killed three police officers, two Bahraini and one from the United Arab Emirates.

In February 2018, the AAB changed their logo to adopt IRGC branding, in order to reflect their role as part of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” against the U.S. and its allies. The AAB also reaffirmed its fealty to the Iranian regime, stating, “We believe that the commander and ruler of the Islamic religion is the line of the two imams, Khomeini and Khamenei…” It also outlined new objectives, including cultivating a “resistance and martyrdom culture” and “creat[ing] a deterrent force,” that indicate its intention to create a Hezbollah-style “state within a state” in Bahrain.

Bahrain added the AAB to its list of terrorist groups in 2014. In March 2017, the U.S. State Department designated two AAB members, Alsayed Murtadha Majeed Ramadhan Alawi and the Iran-based Ahmad Hasan Yusuf, as Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGTs).In July 2018, the State Department designated the AAB itself as a Foreign Terrorist Organization and an SDGT, stating that AAB “members have received weapons and explosives from Iran, training at IRGC-funded camps in Iraq, and senior AAB members have taken refuge in Iran to evade prosecution by Bahraini authorities.” In August of that year, State Department also designated an Iran-based AAB senior member, Qassimal-Muamen, as an SDGT.

On October 31, 2019, the Bahraini judiciary issued life sentences to five nationals for “forming a terrorist cell” affiliated with al-Ashtar Brigades. In February 2019, AAB released a video statement promising more attacks in Bahrain to mark the anniversary of Bahrain’s Arab Spring-inspired political uprising.

Additional Shiite Militant Groups

In addition to AAB, a variety of other Shiite militant groups remain committed to the overthrow of the Bahraini monarchy given its Western-leaning geopolitical posture. The Al-Mukhtar Brigades, which has similar branding to the IRGC and which the British Home Office listed as a proscribed organization in December 2017, maintains an online presence which has promoted terrorism via social media. Saraya al-Muqawama al-Shabiya is another similar organization with purported connections to the IRGC. It reportedly was behind the detonation of an IED near the U.S. Fifth Fleet and an attack on a branch of the National Bank of Bahrain. Bahrain’s chief of public security estimated in May 2018 that since 2011, AAB and other Shiite militant organizations causes 22 deaths and more than 3,500 injuries to policemen.

After the killing of former Commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force Qassem Soleimani, reports circulated about the formation of the Qassem Soleimani Brigades, dedicated to avenging his death. Bahraini officials alleged that they foiled a terror plot in early 2020, which involved an attempted attack on a visiting foreign delegation, using an explosive device. In December 2020, the United States imposed terrorism sanctions on the al-Mukhtar Brigades under Executive Order 13224. In the designation, the U.S. government cited the significant risk of committing acts of terrorism, as well as past plots against U.S. personnel in Bahrain and the offering of cash rewards for the assassination of Bahraini officials.

Kuwait

Active proxy groups & Military forces

IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps)

Hezbollah

Iranian proxies were responsible for a series of coordinated bombings in Kuwait in 1983, which struck the U.S. embassy (pictured), among other targets.

Iran has long attempted to increase its influence over Kuwait due to the latter’s sizeable Shiite minority (approximately 30 percent of its population), extensive oil reserves, proximity to the Gulf, and importance to American and Saudi Arabian security.

The strained relationship between Kuwait and Iran intensified during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. In response to Kuwait shipping Iraqi oil, Iran began attacking Kuwaiti ships and refineries and engaging in terrorist attacks on Kuwaiti soil. In 1983, operatives of Iranian-backed Hezbollah and Al Da’wa targeted, as one analyst noted, “the American and French embassies, the Kuwait airport, the grounds of the Raytheon Corporation, a Kuwait National Petroleum Company oil rig, and a government-owned power station” in coordinated suicide bombings which killed six people and wounded another ninety. Consequently, Kuwait imprisoned 17 people for their involvement in these attacks, including several members of Hezbollah.

In order to pressure Kuwait to release these 17 prisoners, known as the “Kuwait 17,” Iran directed Hezbollah to engage in a campaign of terrorism and kidnappings throughout the Middle East. In 1984, Kuwait Airways Flight 221 was hijacked on its way to Pakistan and diverted to Tehran. Although Iran eventually arrested the hijackers, the perpetrators murdered two employees of USAID, were never tried in Iranian court, and were permitted to leave the country. The next year, Hezbollah attempted to assassinate the Emir of Kuwait by driving a bomb-laden vehicle into the leader’s motorcade.

More recently, Kuwait has uncovered Iranian covert operations designed to undermine American-Kuwaiti military cooperation and inflame sectarian tensions among Kuwait’s Shiite minority. In April 2011, the Kuwaiti foreign minister reported the discovery of an Iranian spy cell that had operated in Kuwait since the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003. The cell “monitored the U.S. military presence and possessed explosives to bomb ‘strategic’ facilities” in addition to lists of “names of officers” and “extremely sensitive information.” This announcement followed the March sentencing of two Iranians and one Kuwaiti for spying on behalf of Iran and coincided with the expulsion of several Iranian diplomats from Kuwait.

In August 2015, Kuwaiti officials foiled a plot by Hezbollah to carry out attacks in the country, planned by 25 of its own nationals and one Iranian. Authorities seized a huge arms cache that they said was smuggled from Iraq and hidden underneath houses close to the Kuwaiti-Iraqi border. In Kuwait’s Al-Abdali area, they discovered a total of 42,000 lbs. of ammunition, 144 kg of explosives—including C4—68 weapons, and 204 grenades. The cell was charged with plotting with Iran and Hezbollah to destabilize Kuwait’s national security. Subsequently, the Kuwaiti government closed Iran’s cultural mission and expelled some Iranian diplomats.

In June 2017, Kuwait’s Supreme Court upheld the convictions of 21 members of the al-Abdali terrorist cell, noting the group’s intention to carry out terror attacks around the country. Kuwait protested to Lebanon that Hezbollah, which is part of the Lebanese government, played an active role in training the members of the terror cell.

In March 2016, Kuwait expelled over 70 Lebanese nationals with permanent residency status for alleged links to Hezbollah. The move came shortly after the GCC declared Hezbollah a terrorist organization.

In May 2018, Kuwait joined the U.S. and other Gulf states in sanctioning 9 Hezbollah-affiliated persons and entities, but did not join the other governments in designating Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah as well.

In July 2020, Kuwaiti authorities broke up a money laundering cell with alleged ties to Hezbollah. The cell, whose mastermind was an Iranian resident of Kuwait, was reportedly active for five years. The members reportedly laundered over 3 million dinars ($9.8 million USD) through online auctions of luxury goods using a Gulf bank in their operations, with the money subsequently being sent to an unnamed regional state.

Despite Iran’s meddling and support for terrorism in Kuwait, Kuwait has sought to cultivate good relations with Tehran, placing it at odds with other GCC nations. Kuwait opted to maintain diplomatic ties with Iran following the 2016 attacks on Saudi diplomatic missions in Iran, which led to Saudi Arabia and Bahrain severing relations with Iran. Kuwait has also sought to serve as a mediator in the dispute between Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain; a dispute which centers in part on Qatar’s links to Tehran.

Saudi Arabia

Active proxy groups & Military forces

IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps)

Hezbollah

Houthis

Iranian Meddling and Terrorism Within Saudi Arabia

Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Saudi officials have feared growing Shiite influence in their country and the region as the Iranian regime has sought to “export” the revolution throughout the Persian Gulf. An estimated 15 percent of Saudi Arabia’s 25 million citizens are Shiite Muslims, the vast majority of whom are concentrated in Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich Eastern Province. Shiites are the majority in key towns such as Qatif, Dammam, and al-Hasa, which, as the BBC notes, “are home to the largest oil fields and processing and refining facilities.”

Consequently, Iran has often sought to stir unrest among the Shiite population in these areas. The Islamic Revolution sparked significant unrest in Qatif in November 1979. Emboldened by Ayatollah Khomeini’s claims that hereditary monarchies were incompatible with Islam, Shiites in Qatif mobilized against the Saudi government.

Ayatollah Khomeini’s declaration that he was the leader of not only Iran but the entire Muslim world threatened the Saudi monarchy’s religious legitimacy as custodians of Islam’s holiest sites. On July 31, 1987, Iranian Revolutionary Guard operatives incited Iranian pilgrims to riot outside the Grand Mosque in Mecca during the annual hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca. As 155,000 Iranian pilgrims chanted “Death to America!”and confronted Saudi riot police, a stampede ensued, resulting in the death over 400 people, including hundreds of Iranian pilgrims and Saudi policemen.

Shortly following these attacks, Tehran’s proxy Hezbollah carried out Iranian interference in Saudi Arabia via attacks on the Saudi petrochemical industry, targeted assassinations of Saudi politicians worldwide, and a foiled plot involving explosives placed near Mecca’s Grand Mosque.

On June 25, 1996, Saudi Hezbollah—directed and funded by Iran—bombed the Khobar Towers housing compound in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where U.S. and allied forces supporting air operations in Iraq were housed. The attack killed 19 American servicemen and one Saudi, and injured hundreds of others. Iran is also believed to be responsible for the August 2012 cyber attack on ARAMCO, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company. This attack disabled over 30,000 computers operated by ARAMCO, disrupting operations for nearly two weeks.

Tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia ratcheted up further in 2016 after an Iranian mob, chanting “Death to the Al Saud family,” ransacked and set fire to the Saudi embassy in Tehran and the Saudi consulate in Mashhad on January 3 after Saudi Arabia executed outspoken Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr. Riyadh accused al-Nimr of involvement in Iran-linked Shiite attacks on policemen and civilians in 2011. Iran's Supreme Leader proclaimed that “the unjustly spilled blood of this oppressed martyr will no doubt soon show its effect and divine vengeance will befall Saudi politicians” describing the execution as a “political error.”

Al-Nimr’s execution prompted unrest and anti-monarchy protests in Qatif, his home province. While most of the protests were peaceful, some skirmishes between Shiites and the Saudi security forces resulted in deaths or injuries. Further, in December 2016, Saudi Judge Mohammed al-Jirani was kidnapped in Qatif; his body was found one year later. Asharq al-Awsat reported that an Iranian cleric promulgated a fatwa ordering terroriststo kidnap and kill al-Jirani.

The Saudi government clamped down on Qatif and protests became more violent in 2017 and 2018, as Shiite fighters attacked and killed or wounded Saudi police and soldiers. The Saudi government blamed the violence on and prosecuted terrorists, including Saudis allegedly working for Iranian proxies like Hezbollah. Riyadh has pushed back against Hezbollah, joining the U.S. Treasury Department and other Gulf states in sanctioningHezbollah officials and entities in May 2018.

On May 14, 2019 unmanned aircraft systems targeted two pumping stations on the East-West pipeline carrying crude oil from Dhahran to Yanbu. Yemen-based Iran-backed Houthi militants claimed responsibility, but the U.S. government later concluded the systems were launched from Iraq. On June 12, 2019 Saudi-led coalition senior officials reported a cross-border cruise missiles attack at Abha International Airport, injuring 26 civilians. Yemen-based Iran-backed Houthi militants claimed responsibility for this attack. On August 17, 2019 Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militants struck a natural gas liquids plant at Shaybah oilfield in the Kingdom’s Empty Quarter with drones. The drone strike damaged the facility and caused a fire. No deaths or casualties were reported.

On September 14, 2019, Iranian attacks hit the Abqaiq and Khurais oil processing facilities in the Eastern province, initially taking 5.7 million barrels per day of crude oil production offline. Although Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militants claimed responsibility for the attack, investigations led by Saudi Arabia and the United States concluded the Iranian government was behind the attack. Saudi Aramco resumed pre-attack production levels less than two weeks later, ahead of schedule.

In early 2021, Iraq-based members of Iran’s Axis of Resistance claimed responsibility for targeting Riyadh with “missiles or drones.” The incident was more serious than initial reports indicated—with the Saudi royal palace in Riyadh being targeted. There is an emerging pattern of using Iraqi militants in Iran’s proxy network—as opposed to the Houthis in Yemen—to launch attacks on Saudi Arabia, following the May 2019 attack on the Saudi oil pipeline. The Houthis also claimed responsibility for a March 7 attack on Ras Tanura port, but there are some indications it originated elsewhere. In early 2021, there was an uptick in drone and missile attacks on Saudi Arabia after the Biden administration revoked the Houthis’ terrorism designations.

Iranian Meddling and Terrorism Against Saudi Interests in the Region

Saudi officials have viewed Iranian support for Shiite unrest in allied Bahrain during the “Arab Spring” as a “fundamental risk” to Saudi national security. Consequently, Saudi Arabia sent 1,000 troops to Bahrain in 2011 in an effort to stabilize the country and prevent Iranian and Shiite influence from spreading to the Saudi mainland. Similarly, Saudi Arabia has supported Yemeni government forces against the Iranian-backed Shiite Houthi rebels. Iran’s involvement in Yemen has led the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir, to conclude that the Saudi government must “deal with Iran's aggression in the region.” This Saudi determination resulted in the formation of a coalition with Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates which began launching airstrikes against the rebels in Yemen in March 2015. Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Nawaf harshly condemned Iran’s support for the Houthis and its meddling in the affairs of Arab states: “Their interference has ignited instability, they have created havoc in our part of the world…”

Since 2015, the Houthis have used Yemeni territory under their control as launching pads to fire more than 100 missiles and drones at Saudi Arabia. Such strikes have landed on multiple cities, including Riyadh, the Saudi capital. Targeted locations include the king’s official residence, military bases and encampments, oil refineries, the Riyadh international airport, and shopping malls. Further, as the Congressional Research Service notes, “Since 2016, the Houthis have periodically targeted commercial and military vessels transiting and patrolling the Red Sea using naval mines, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, anti-ship missiles, and waterborne improvised explosive devices (WBIEDs). Some of the weapons used reportedly have been supplied by Iran, including sea-skimming coastal defense cruise missiles.”

JOIN
US
NOW

STOP IRAN NOW

All it takes for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing

TAKE ACTION NOW

IRAN'S CAMPAIGN OF CONQUEST, SUBJUGATION AND MURDER

Introduction

Support for Shi’a Militias

Fight against ISIS

Political and Economic Influence

Backlash

Iranian Economic Support to the Assad Regime

Iranian Military Support to the Assad Regime

Provision of Proxies

Hezbollah

Additional Shiite Militia Proxies

Local Actors

Iran’s Gains in Syria

Iran’s Long-Term Influence in Syria

Arms Shipments and the Houthi Coup

Missile and Drone Attacks on Saudi Arabia

Hezbollah’s Assistance to the Houthis

Saleh Assassination

Afghanistan

Bahrain

Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah Activity in Bahrain

The al-Ashtar Brigades

Additional Shiite Militant Groups

Kuwait

Saudi Arabia

Iranian Meddling and Terrorism Within Saudi Arabia

Iranian Meddling and Terrorism Against Saudi Interests in the Region

IRAN'S CAMPAIGN OF CONQUEST, SUBJUGATION AND MURDER

Introduction

Support for Shi’a Militias

​

Fight against ISIS

​

Political and Economic Influence

​

Backlash

​

Iranian Economic Support to the Assad Regime

​

Iranian Military Support to the Assad Regime

​

Provision of Proxies

​

Hezbollah

​

Additional Shiite Militia Proxies

​

Local Actors

​

Iran’s Gains in Syria

​

Iran’s Long-Term Influence in Syria

​

Arms Shipments and the Houthi Coup

​

Missile and Drone Attacks on Saudi Arabia

Hezbollah’s Assistance to the Houthis

Saleh Assassination

Afghanistan

Bahrain

Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah Activity in Bahrain

​

The al-Ashtar Brigades

​

Additional Shiite Militant Groups

Kuwait

Saudi Arabia

Iranian Meddling and Terrorism Within Saudi Arabia

Iranian Meddling and Terrorism Against Saudi Interests in the Region

​