Dexter Wilkins writes a disturbing portrait of the
most fearsome commander of our time- Qassem Suleimani.
"Last February, some of Iran’s most influential
leaders gathered at the Amir al-Momenin Mosque, in northeast Tehran, inside a
gated community reserved for officers of the Revolutionary Guard. They had come
to pay their last respects to a fallen comrade. Hassan Shateri, a veteran of
Iran’s covert wars throughout the Middle East and South Asia, was a senior
commander in a powerful, élite branch of the Revolutionary Guard called the
Quds Force...
The force is the sharp instrument of Iranian foreign policy,
roughly analogous to a combined C.I.A. and Special Forces; its name comes from
the Persian word for Jerusalem, which its fighters have promised to liberate.
Since 1979, its goal has been to subvert Iran’s enemies and extend the country’s
influence across the Middle East. At the funeral was the commander of
the Revolutionary Guard, Qassem, dressed in green fatigues; a member of the
plot to murder four exiled opposition leaders in a Berlin restaurant in 1992;
and the father of Imad Mughniyeh, the Hezbollah commander believed to be
responsible for the bombings that killed more than two hundred and fifty
Americans in Beirut in 1983. ..
Major General Qassem Suleimani, the Quds Force’s
leader is a small man of fifty-six, with silver hair, a close-cropped beard,
and a look of intense self-containment. It was Suleimani who had sent Shateri,
an old and trusted friend, to his death. As Revolutionary Guard commanders, he
and Shateri belonged to a small fraternity formed during the Sacred Defense,
the name given to the Iran-Iraq War, which lasted from 1980 to 1988 and left as
many as a million people dead. It was a catastrophic fight, but for Iran it was
the beginning of a three-decade project to build a Shiite sphere of influence,
stretching across Iraq and Syria to the Mediterranean. Along with its allies in
Syria and Lebanon, Iran forms an Axis of Resistance, arrayed against the region’s
dominant Sunni powers and the West. ..
Suleimani took command of the Quds Force fifteen years
ago, and in that time he has sought to reshape the Middle East in Iran’s favor,
working as a power broker and as a military force: assassinating rivals, arming
allies, and, for most of a decade, directing a network of militant groups that
killed hundreds of Americans in Iraq. The U.S. Department of the Treasury has
sanctioned Suleimani for his role in supporting the Assad regime, and for
abetting terrorism. And yet he has remained mostly invisible to the outside
world, even as he runs agents and directs operations.
When Suleimani appears in public—often to speak at
veterans’ events or to meet with Khamenei—he carries himself inconspicuously
and rarely raises his voice, exhibiting a trait that Arabs call khilib, or understated charisma.
“He is
so short, but he has this presence,” a former senior Iraqi official told me. “There
will be ten people in a room, and when Suleimani walks in he doesn’t come and
sit with you. He sits over there on the other side of room, by himself, in a
very quiet way. Doesn’t speak, doesn’t comment, just sits and listens. And so
of course everyone is thinking only about him.”
For Suleimani, saving Assad seemed a matter of pride,
especially if it meant distinguishing himself from the Americans. “Suleimani
told us the Iranians would do whatever was necessary,” a former Iraqi leader
told me. “He said, ‘We’re not like the Americans. We don’t abandon our friends.’
”
Last year, Suleimani asked Kurdish leaders in Iraq to
allow him to open a supply route across northern Iraq and into Syria. For
years, he had bullied and bribed the Kurds into coöperating with his plans, but
this time they rebuffed him. Worse, Assad’s soldiers wouldn’t fight—or, when
they did, they mostly butchered civilians, driving the populace to the rebels. “The
Syrian Army is useless!” Suleimani told an Iraqi politician. He longed for the
Basij, the Iranian militia whose fighters crushed the popular uprisings against
the regime in 2009. “Give me one brigade of the Basij, and I could conquer the
whole country,” he said.
Finally, Suleimani began flying into Damascus
frequently so that he could assume personal control of the Iranian intervention. In
Damascus, he is said to work out of a heavily fortified command post in a
nondescript building, where he has installed a multinational array of officers:
the heads of the Syrian military, a Hezbollah commander, and a coördinator of
Iraqi Shiite militias, which Suleimani mobilized and brought to the fight. If
Suleimani couldn’t have the Basij, he settled for the next best thing:
Brigadier General Hossein Hamedani, the Basij’s former deputy commander.
Hamedani, another comrade from the Iran-Iraq War, was experienced in running
the kind of irregular militias that the Iranians were assembling, in order to
keep on fighting if Assad fell...
A turning point came in April, after rebels captured
the Syrian town of Qusayr, near the Lebanese border. To retake the town,
Suleimani called on Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, to send in more than
two thousand fighters. It wasn’t a difficult sell. Qusayr sits at the entrance
to the Bekaa Valley, the main conduit for missiles and other matériel to
Hezbollah; if it was closed, Hezbollah would find it difficult to survive.
Suleimani and Nasrallah are old friends, having coöperated for years in Lebanon
and in the many places around the world where Hezbollah operatives have
performed terrorist missions at the Iranians’ behest. According to Will Fulton,
an Iran expert at the American Enterprise Institute, Hezbollah fighters
encircled Qusayr, cutting off the roads, then moved in. Dozens of them were
killed, as were at least eight Iranian officers. On June 5th, the town fell. “The
whole operation was orchestrated by Suleimani,” Maguire, who is still active in
the region, said. “It was a great victory for him.”
Despite all of Suleimani’s rough work, his image among
Iran’s faithful is that of an irreproachable war hero—a decorated veteran of
the Iran-Iraq War, in which he became a division commander while still in his
twenties. In public, he is almost theatrically modest. During a recent
appearance, he described himself as “the smallest soldier,” and, according to
the Iranian press, rebuffed members of the audience who tried to kiss his hand.
His power comes mostly from his close relationship with Khamenei, who provides
the guiding vision for Iranian society. The Supreme Leader, who usually
reserves his highest praise for fallen soldiers, has referred to Suleimani as “a
living martyr of the revolution.” Suleimani is a hard-line supporter of Iran’s
authoritarian system. In July, 1999, at the height of student protests, he
signed, with other Revolutionary Guard commanders, a letter warning the
reformist President Mohammad Khatami that if he didn’t put down the revolt the
military would—perhaps deposing Khatami in the process. “Our patience has run
out,” the generals wrote. The police crushed the demonstrators, as they did
again, a decade later.
Iran’s government is intensely fractious, and there
are many figures around Khamenei who help shape foreign policy, including Revolutionary
Guard commanders, senior clerics, and Foreign Ministry officials. But Suleimani
has been given a remarkably free hand in implementing Khamenei’s vision. He
has ties to every corner of the system. Officials describe him as a believer in Islam and in the revolution;
while many senior figures in the Revolutionary Guard have grown wealthy through
the Guard’s control over key Iranian industries, Suleimani has been endowed
with a personal fortune by the Supreme Leader. “He’s well taken care of,”
Maguire said.
Suleimani lives in Tehran, and appears to lead the
home life of a bureaucrat in middle age. “He gets up at four every morning, and
he’s in bed by nine-thirty every night,” the Iraqi politician said, who has known
him for many years, shaking his head in disbelief. Suleimani has a bad
prostate and recurring back pain. He’s “respectful of his wife,” he has
three sons and two daughters, and is evidently a strict but loving father. He
is said to be especially worried about his daughter Nargis, who lives in
Malaysia. “She is deviating from the ways of Islam,” the Middle Eastern
official said.
Suleimani has little formal education, but “he is a
very shrewd, frighteningly intelligent strategist.” His tools include payoffs
for politicians across the Middle East, intimidation when it is needed, and murder
as a last resort. Over the years, the Quds Force has built an international
network of assets, some of them drawn from the Iranian diaspora, who can be
called on to support missions. “They’re everywhere,” a second Middle Eastern
security official said. In 2010, according to Western officials, the Quds Force
and Hezbollah launched a new campaign against American and Israeli targets—in
apparent retaliation for the covert effort to slow down the Iranian nuclear
program, which has included cyber attacks and assassinations of Iranian nuclear
scientists.
Since then, Suleimani has orchestrated attacks in
places as far flung as Thailand, New Delhi, Lagos, and Nairobi—at least thirty
attempts in the past two years alone. The most notorious was a scheme, in 2011,
to hire a Mexican drug cartel to blow up the Saudi Ambassador to the United
States as he sat down to eat at a restaurant a few miles from the White House.
The cartel member approached by Suleimani’s agent turned out to be an informant
for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. (The Quds Force appears to be
more effective close to home, and a number of the remote plans have gone awry.)
Still, after the plot collapsed, two former American officials told a
congressional committee that Suleimani should be assassinated. “Suleimani
travels a lot,” one said. “He is all over the place. Go get him. Either try to
capture him or kill him.” In Iran, more than two hundred dignitaries signed an
outraged letter in his defense; a social-media campaign proclaimed, “We are all
Qassem Suleimani.”
Among spies in the West, he appears to exist in a
special category, an enemy both hated and admired: a Middle Eastern equivalent
of Karla, the elusive Soviet master spy in John le Carré’s novels.
In March, 2009, on the eve of the Iranian New Year,
Suleimani led a group of Iran-Iraq War veterans to the Paa-Alam Heights, a
barren, rocky promontory on the Iraqi border. In 1986, Paa-Alam was the scene
of one of the terrible battles over the Faw Peninsula, where tens of thousands
of men died while hardly advancing a step. A video recording from the visit
shows Suleimani standing on a mountaintop, recounting the battle to his old
comrades. In a gentle voice, he speaks over a soundtrack of music and prayers.
“This is the Dasht-e-Abbas Road,” Suleimani says,
pointing into the valley below. “This area stood between us and the enemy.”
Later, Suleimani and the group stand on the banks of a creek, where he reads
aloud the names of fallen Iranian soldiers, his voice trembling with emotion.
During a break, he speaks with an interviewer, and describes the fighting in
near-mystical terms. “The battlefield is mankind’s lost paradise—the paradise
in which morality and human conduct are at their highest,” he says. “One type
of paradise that men imagine is about streams, beautiful maidens, and lush
landscape. But there is another kind of paradise—the battlefield.”
Suleimani was born in Rabor, an impoverished mountain
village in eastern Iran. When he was a boy, his father, like many other
farmers, took out an agricultural loan from the government of the Shah. He owed
nine hundred toman—about a hundred dollars at the time—and couldn’t pay it
back. In a brief memoir, Suleimani wrote of leaving home with a young relative
named Ahmad Suleimani, who was in a similar situation. “At night, we couldn’t
fall asleep with the sadness of thinking that government agents were coming to
arrest our fathers,” he wrote. Together, they travelled to Kerman, the nearest
city, to try to clear their family’s debt. The place was unwelcoming. “We were
only thirteen, and our bodies were so tiny, wherever we went, they wouldn’t
hire us,” he wrote. “Until one day, when we were hired as laborers at a school
construction site on Khajoo Street, which was where the city ended. They paid
us two toman per day.” After eight months, they had saved enough money to bring
home, but the winter snow was too deep. ”
As a young man, Suleimani gave few signs of greater
ambition. According to Ali Alfoneh, an Iran expert at the Foundation for
Defense of Democracies, he had only a high-school education, and worked for
Kerman’s municipal water department. But it was a revolutionary time, and the
country’s gathering unrest was making itself felt. Away from work, Suleimani
spent hours lifting weights in local gyms, which, like many in the Middle East,
offered physical training and inspiration for the warrior spirit. During
Ramadan, he attended sermons by a travelling preacher named Hojjat Kamyab—a
protégé of Khamenei’s—and it was there that he became inspired by the
possibility of Islamic revolution. In 1979, when Suleimani was twenty-two, the Shah fell
to a popular uprising led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the name of Islam.
Swept up in the fervor, Suleimani joined the Revolutionary Guard, a force
established by Iran’s new clerical leadership to prevent the military from
mounting a coup. Though he received little training—perhaps only a
forty-five-day course—he advanced rapidly. As a young guardsman, Suleimani was
dispatched to northwestern Iran, where he helped crush an uprising by ethnic
Kurds.
When the revolution was eighteen months old, Saddam
Hussein sent the Iraqi Army sweeping across the border, hoping to take
advantage of the internal chaos. Instead, the invasion solidified Khomeini’s
leadership and unified the country in resistance, starting a brutal, entrenched
war. Suleimani was sent to the front with a simple task, to supply water to the
soldiers there, and he never left. “I entered the war on a fifteen-day mission,
and ended up staying until the end,” he has said. A photograph from that time
shows the young Suleimani dressed in green fatigues, with no insignia of rank,
his black eyes focussed on a far horizon. “We were all young and wanted to
serve the revolution,” he told an interviewer in 2005.
Suleimani earned a reputation for bravery and élan,
especially as a result of reconnaissance missions he undertook behind Iraqi
lines. He returned from several missions bearing a goat, which his soldiers
slaughtered and grilled. “Even the Iraqis, our enemy, admired him for this,” a
former Revolutionary Guard officer who defected to the United States told me.
On Iraqi radio, Suleimani became known as “the goat thief.” In recognition of
his effectiveness, Alfoneh said, he was put in charge of a brigade from Kerman,
with men from the gyms where he lifted weights.
The Iranian Army was badly overmatched, and its
commanders resorted to crude and costly tactics. In “human wave” assaults, they
sent thousands of young men directly into the Iraqi lines, often to clear
minefields, and soldiers died at a precipitous rate. Suleimani seemed
distressed by the loss of life. Before sending his men into battle, he would
embrace each one and bid him goodbye; in speeches, he praised martyred soldiers
and begged their forgiveness for not being martyred himself. When Suleimani’s
superiors announced plans to attack the Faw Peninsula, he dismissed them as
wasteful and foolhardy. The former Revolutionary Guard officer recalled seeing
Suleimani in 1985, after a battle in which his brigade had suffered many dead
and wounded. He was sitting alone in a corner of a tent. “He was very silent,
thinking about the people he’d lost,” the officer said.
Once asked if Suleimani was especially
religious. The answer was “Not really,” “He attends mosque
periodically. Religion doesn’t drive him. Nationalism drives him, and the love
of the fight.”
Iran’s leaders took two lessons from the Iran-Iraq
War. The first was that Iran was surrounded by enemies, near and far. To the
regime, the invasion was not so much an Iraqi plot as a Western one. American
officials were aware of Saddam’s preparations to invade Iran in 1980, and they
later provided him with targeting information used in chemical-weapons attacks;
the weapons themselves were built with the help of Western European firms. The
memory of these attacks is an especially bitter one. “Do you know how many
people are still suffering from the effects of chemical weapons?” Mehdi
Khalaji, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said. “Thousands
of former soldiers. They believe these were Western weapons given to Saddam.” In 1987, during a battle with the Iraqi Army, a division under Suleimani’s
command was attacked by artillery shells containing chemical weapons. More than
a hundred of his men suffered the effects.
The other lesson drawn from the Iran-Iraq War was the
futility of fighting a head-to-head confrontation. In 1982, after the Iranians
expelled the Iraqi forces, Khomeini ordered his men to keep going, to “liberate”
Iraq and push on to Jerusalem. Six years and hundreds of thousands of lives
later, he agreed to a ceasefire. According to Alfoneh, many of the generals of
Suleimani’s generation believe they could have succeeded had the clerics not
flinched. “Many of them feel like they were stabbed in the back,” he said. “They
have nurtured this myth for nearly thirty years.” But Iran’s leaders did not
want another bloodbath. Instead, they had to build the capacity to wage
asymmetrical warfare—attacking stronger powers indirectly, outside of Iran.
The Quds Force was an ideal tool. Khomeini had created
the prototype for the force in 1979, with the goal of protecting Iran and
exporting the Islamic Revolution. The first big opportunity came in Lebanon,
where Revolutionary Guard officers were dispatched in 1982 to help organize
Shiite militias in the many-sided Lebanese civil war. Those efforts resulted in
the creation of Hezbollah, which developed under Iranian guidance. Hezbollah’s
military commander, the brilliant and murderous Imad Mughniyeh, helped form
what became known as the Special Security Apparatus, a wing of Hezbollah that
works closely with the Quds Force. With assistance from Iran, Hezbollah helped
orchestrate attacks on the American Embassy and on French and American military
barracks. “In the early days, when Hezbollah was totally dependent on Iranian
help, Mughniyeh and others were basically willing Iranian assets,” David Crist,
a historian for the U.S. military and the author of “The Twilight War,” says.
For all of the Iranian regime’s aggressiveness, some
of its religious zeal seemed to burn out. In 1989, Khomeini stopped urging
Iranians to spread the revolution, and called instead for expediency to
preserve its gains. Persian self-interest was the order of the day, even if it
was indistinguishable from revolutionary fervor. In those years, Suleimani
worked along Iran’s eastern frontier, aiding Afghan rebels who were holding out
against the Taliban. The Iranian regime regarded the Taliban with intense
hostility, in large part because of their persecution of Afghanistan’s minority
Shiite population. (At one point, the two countries nearly went to war; Iran
mobilized a quarter of a million troops, and its leaders denounced the Taliban
as an affront to Islam.) In an area that breeds corruption, Suleimani made a
name for himself battling opium smugglers along the Afghan border.
In 1998, Suleimani was named the head of the Quds
Force, taking over an agency that had already built a lethal résumé: American
and Argentine officials believe that the Iranian regime helped Hezbollah
orchestrate the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992, which
killed twenty-nine people, and the attack on the Jewish center in the same city
two years later, which killed eighty-five. Suleimani has built the Quds Force
into an organization with extraordinary reach, with branches focussed on
intelligence, finance, politics, sabotage, and special operations. With a base
in the former U.S. Embassy compound in Tehran, the force has between ten thousand
and twenty thousand members, divided between combatants and those who train and
oversee foreign assets. Its members are picked for their skill and their
allegiance to the doctrine of the Islamic Revolution (as well as, in some
cases, their family connections). According to the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom, fighters are recruited
throughout the region, trained in Shiraz and Tehran, indoctrinated at the
Jerusalem Operation College, in Qom, and then “sent on months-long missions to
Afghanistan and Iraq to gain experience in field operational work. They usually
travel under the guise of Iranian construction workers.”
After taking command, Suleimani strengthened
relationships in Lebanon, with Mughniyeh and with Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s
chief. By then, the Israeli military had occupied southern Lebanon for sixteen
years, and Hezbollah was eager to take control of the country, so Suleimani
sent in Quds Force operatives to help. “They had a huge presence—training,
advising, planning,” Crocker said. In 2000, the Israelis withdrew, exhausted by
relentless Hezbollah attacks. It was a signal victory for the Shiites, and,
Crocker said, “another example of how countries like Syria and Iran can play a
long game, knowing that we can’t.”
“No one in Tehran started out with a master
plan to build the Axis of Resistance, but opportunities presented themselves,”
a Western diplomat in Baghdad said. “In each case, Suleimani was smarter,
faster, and better resourced than anyone else in the region. By grasping at
opportunities as they came, he built the thing, slowly but surely.”
It seemed clear to Crocker that the
Iranians were answering to Suleimani, whom they referred to as “Haji Qassem,”
and that they were eager to help the United States destroy their mutual enemy,
the Taliban. Although the United States and Iran broke off diplomatic relations
in 1980, after American diplomats in Tehran were taken hostage, Crocker wasn’t
surprised to find that Suleimani was flexible. “You don’t live through eight
years of brutal war without being pretty pragmatic,” he said. Sometimes
Suleimani passed messages to Crocker, but he avoided putting anything in writing.
“Haji Qassem’s way too smart for that,” Crocker said. “He’s not going to leave
paper trails for the Americans.”
After Saddam’s regime collapsed, Crocker was
dispatched to Baghdad to organize a fledgling government, called the Iraqi
Governing Council. He realized that many Iraqi politicians were flying to
Tehran for consultations, and he jumped at the chance to negotiate indirectly
with Suleimani. In the course of the summer, Crocker passed him the names of
prospective Shiite candidates, and the two men vetted each one. Crocker did not
offer veto power, but he abandoned candidates whom Suleimani found especially
objectionable. “The formation of the governing council was in its essence a
negotiation between Tehran and Washington,” he said.
For years, Suleimani had sent operatives into Iraq to
cultivate Shiite militias, so, when Saddam fell, he already had a fighting
force in place: the Badr Brigade, the armed wing of a Shiite political party
called the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. The Party’s
leaders so thoroughly identified with the Iranian revolution that Badr’s
militiamen had fought alongside Iranian forces in the Iran-Iraq War. The Badr Brigade spent much of its time carrying out
revenge killings against Baathists, and largely held its fire against the
Americans. But another Iranian-backed militia—the Mahdi Army, headed by the
populist cleric Moqtada al-Sadr—began confronting the Americans early.
Suleimani found Sadr unpredictable and difficult to
manage, so the Quds Force began to organize other militias that were willing to
attack the Americans. Its operatives trained fighters in Iran, sometimes helped
by their comrades in Hezbollah. Suleimani’s control over some of the Iraqi
militias at times appeared to be total. At one point, a senior Iraqi official,
on a trip to Washington, publicly blamed the Supreme Leader for escalating the
violence in Iraq. Soon after returning to Baghdad, he received
messages from the leaders of two Iraqi Shiite militias. Both posed the same
question: Do you want to die?
In 2004, the Quds Force began flooding Iraq with
lethal roadside bombs that the Americans referred to as E.F.P.s, for “explosively
formed projectiles.” The E.F.P.s, which fire a molten copper slug able to
penetrate armor, began to wreak havoc on American troops, accounting for nearly
twenty per cent of combat deaths. E.F.P.s could be made only by skilled
technicians, and they were often triggered by sophisticated motion sensors. “There
was zero question where they were coming from,” General Stanley McChrystal, who
at the time was the head of the Joint Special Operations Command, aid “We
knew where all the factories were in Iran. The E.F.P.s killed hundreds of
Americans.”
Suleimani’s campaign against the United States crossed
the Sunni-Shiite divide, which he has always been willing to set aside for a
larger purpose. Early in the war,
Suleimani encouraged the head of intelligence for the Assad regime to
facilitate the movement of Sunni extremists through Syria to fight the
Americans. In many cases, Al Qaeda was also allowed a degree of freedom in Iran
as well.
As it turned out, the Iranian strategy of abetting
Sunni extremists backfired horrendously: shortly after the occupation began,
the same extremists began attacking Shiite civilians and the Shiite-dominated
Iraqi government. It was a preview of the civil war to come. “Welcome to the
Middle East,” the Western diplomat in Baghdad said. “Suleimani wanted to
bleed the Americans, so he invited in the jihadis, and things got out of
control.”
Still, Iran’s policy toward the Americans in Iraq was
not entirely hostile—both countries, after all, were trying to empower Iraq’s
Shiite majority—and so Suleimani alternated between bargaining with the
Americans and killing them. Throughout the war, he summoned Iraqi leaders to
Tehran to broker deals, usually intended to maximize Shiite power. At least
once, he even travelled into the heart of American power in Baghdad.
As both sides sought an advantage, the shifting
allegiances led to uncomfortable, sometimes bizarre encounters. The leaders of
the two main Kurdish parties, Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, met regularly
with both Suleimani and the Americans. While the Kurds’ relationship with the
U.S. was usually warm, their ties to Iranian leaders like Suleimani were deeper
and more complex; the Iranian regime had sheltered Iraq’s Kurds during their
war with Saddam. But it was never an equal relationship. Kurdish leaders say
that Suleimani’s objective has always been to keep Iraq’s political parties
divided and unstable, insuring that the country stayed weak: the Iran-Iraq War
was never far from his mind. “It is very difficult for us to say no to
Suleimani,” a senior Kurdish official told me. “When we say no, he makes
trouble for us. Bombings. Shootings. The Iranians are our neighbors. They’ve
always been there, and they always will be. We have to deal with them.”
In the years after the invasion, General McChrystal
concentrated on defeating Sunni insurgents, and, like other American commanders
in Iraq, he largely refrained from pursuing Quds Force agents. Provoking Iran
would only exacerbate the conflict, and, in any case, many of the agents
operated under the protection of diplomatic cover. But, as the war dragged on,
the Iranian-backed militias loomed ever larger. In late 2006, McChrystal told
me, he formed a task force to kill and capture Iranian-backed insurgents, as
well as Quds Force operatives.
Around the same time, Suleimani struck up a
correspondence with senior American officials, sending messages through
intermediaries—sometimes seeking to reassure the Americans, sometimes to
extract something. One of the first came in early 2008, when the Iraqi
President, Jalal Talabani, handed a cell phone with a text message to General
David Petraeus, who had taken over the year before as the commander of American
forces. “Dear General Petraeus,” the text read, “you should know that I, Qassem
Suleimani, control the policy for Iran with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza and
Afghanistan. And indeed, the ambassador in Baghdad is a Quds Force member. The
individual who’s going to replace him is a Quds Force member.” After the five
American soldiers were killed in Karbala, Suleimani sent a message to the
American Ambassador. “I swear on the grave of Khomeini I haven’t authorized a
bullet against the U.S.,” Suleimani said. None of the Americans believed him.
In a report to the White House, Petraeus wrote that
Suleimani was “truly evil.” Yet at times the two men were all but negotiating.
According to diplomatic cables revealed by WikiLeaks, Petraeus sent messages
through Iraqi officials to Suleimani, asking him to call off rocket attacks on
the American Embassy and on U.S. bases. In 2008, the Americans and the Iraqi
Army were pressing an offensive against the Mahdi Army—Moqtada al-Sadr’s Shiite
militia—and, in retribution, the militia was bombarding the Green Zone
regularly. Suleimani, who sensed a political opening, sent Petraeus a message
lamenting the situation and saying that he had assigned men to apprehend the
attackers. Petraeus replied, “I was born on a Sunday, but it wasn’t last
Sunday.” Eventually, Suleimani brokered a ceasefire between Sadr and the
government.
At times, Suleimani seemed to take pleasure in
taunting his American counterparts, and stories of his exploits spread. In the
summer of 2006, during the thirty-four-day war between Israel and Hezbollah in
Lebanon, the violence in Baghdad appeared to ebb. When the fighting ended, the
Iraqi politician told me, Suleimani supposedly sent a message to the American
command. “I hope you have been enjoying the peace and quiet in Baghdad,” it
read. “I’ve been busy in Beirut!”
In a speech in 1990, Khamenei said that the mission of
the Quds Force is to “establish popular Hezbollah cells all over the world.”
Although that goal has not been met, Hezbollah has become the most influential
force in Lebanon—a military power and a political party that nearly supersedes
the state. Some experts on the region believe that it has grown less dependent
on Iran as it has matured. But, at a dinner in Beirut last year, Walid
Joumblatt, a Lebanese politician, complained that Hezbollah’s leaders were
still in thrall to Tehran. “You have to sit and talk with them, but what do you
say?” he said to me. “They don’t decide. It’s Khamenei and Qassem Suleimani who
decide.”
Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has endorsed the
concept of Velayat-e Faqih, which recognizes Iran’s Supreme Leader as the
ultimate authority, and he has acknowledged the presence of Quds Force
operatives in Lebanon. From 2000 to 2006, Iran contributed a hundred million
dollars a year to Hezbollah. Its fighters are attractive proxies: unlike the
Iranians, they speak Arabic, making them better equipped to operate in Syria
and elsewhere in the Arab world. Working with the Iranians, they have either
launched or prepared to launch attacks in Cyprus, Azerbaijan, and Turkey.
They don’t always act together. After a Hezbollah
operative attacked a tour bus filled with Israelis in Bulgaria, last July,
American authorities learned that Suleimani had asked his subordinates, “Does
anyone know about this?” No one did. “Hezbollah acted on its own in that one,”
an American defense official told me. Nonetheless, the Quds Force appears to
have been involved in a number of the most significant moments in Lebanon’s
recent history. In 2006, Nasrallah ordered a group of his fighters to kidnap
Israeli soldiers—an operation that the Middle Eastern security official told me
was carried out with Suleimani’s help. A brief but fierce war ensued, in which
the Israel Defense Forces destroyed much of Lebanon. “I don’t think Suleimani
expected that reaction,” the official said.
The question of Iranian influence in Lebanon
resurfaced in 2011, when the United Nations-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon
charged four senior members of Hezbollah with assassinating the former Lebanese
Prime Minister, Rafik Hariri, in 2005. Hariri, a Sunni, had been trying to take
Lebanon out of the Iranian-Syrian orbit. On Valentine’s Day, he was killed by a
suicide truck bomb whose payload weighed more than five thousand pounds.
Prosecutors identified the alleged Hezbollah assassins
by means of “co-location analysis”—matching disposable cell phones used at the
time of the murder with other phones that belonged to the suspects. They
refrained from indicting Syrian officials, but, they said, they had convincing
evidence that Assad’s government was involved in Hariri’s killing. A senior
investigator for the Special Tribunal told me that there was also reason to
suspect the Iranians: “Our theory of the case was that Hezbollah pulled the
trigger, but could not and would not have done so without the blessing and
logistical support from both Syria and Iran.” One of the phones believed to
have been used by the killers had made at least a dozen calls to Iran before
and after the assassination. But investigators told me that they didn’t know
who in Iran was called, and that they couldn’t persuade Western intelligence
agencies to help them. As it turned out, the agencies knew quite a bit. The
senior intelligence officer told me that Iranian operatives were overheard
talking minutes before the assassination. “There were Iranians on the phones
directing the attack,” he said. Robert Baer, a former senior C.I.A. official,
told me, “If indeed Iran was involved, Suleimani was undoubtedly at the center
of this.”
What Jeffrey and Austin didn’t say was that the crucial
deal that brought the Iraqi government together was made not by them but by
Suleimani. In the months before, according to several Iraqi and Western
officials, Suleimani invited senior Shiite and Kurdish leaders to meet with him
in Tehran and Qom, and extracted from them a promise to support Maliki, his
preferred candidate. The deal had a complex array of enticements. Maliki and
Assad disliked each other; Suleimani brought them together by forging an
agreement to build a lucrative oil pipeline from Iraq to the Syrian border. In
order to bring the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in line, Suleimani agreed to place
his men in the Iraqi service ministries.
Most remarkable, according to the Iraqi and Western
officials, were the two conditions that Suleimani imposed on the Iraqis. The
first was that Jalal Talabani, a longtime friend of the Iranian regime, become
President. The second was that Maliki and his coalition partners insist that
all American troops leave the country. “Suleimani said: no Americans,” the
former Iraqi leader told me. “A ten-year relationship, down the drain.”
Iraqi officials told me that, at the time of Jeffrey’s
announcement, the Americans knew that Suleimani had pushed them out of the
country but were too embarrassed to admit it in public. “We were laughing at
the Americans,” the former Iraqi leader told me, growing angry as he recalled
the situation. “Fuck it! Fuck it!” he said. “Suleimani completely outmaneuvered
them, and in public they were congratulating themselves for putting the
government together.”
According to American and Iraqi former officials,
Suleimani exerts leverage over Iraqi politics by paying officials, by
subsidizing newspapers and television stations, and, when necessary, by
intimidation. Few are immune to his enticements. “I have yet to see one Shia
political party not taking money from Qassem Suleimani,” the former senior
Iraqi official told me. “He’s the most powerful man in Iraq, without question.”
Even Maliki often feels like a prisoner of the
Iranians. Exiled by Saddam, Maliki lived for a short time in Iran, but then
moved to Syria—in part to escape Iranian influence, Iraqis who know him say.
Crocker said that Maliki once told him, “You can’t know what arrogance is until
you are an Iraqi Arab forced to take refuge with the Iranians.” The Iraqi
politician, who is close to both men, told me that Maliki resents Suleimani,
and that the feeling is mutual. “Maliki says Suleimani doesn’t listen,” he told
me. “Suleimani says Maliki just lies.”
Still, Maliki may be amply repaying Suleimani for his
efforts to make him Prime Minister. According to the former senior intelligence
officer, Maliki’s government is presiding over a number of schemes, amounting
to hundreds of millions of dollars a year, to help the Iranian regime outwit
Western economic sanctions. A prominent Iraqi businessman told me that
Iranian-backed agents regularly use the Iraqi banking system to undertake
fraudulent transactions that allow them to sell Iraqi currency at a huge
profit. “If the banks refuse, they are shut down by the government,” he said.
The other main source of revenue for the Iranians is
oil, officials say: Maliki’s government sets aside the equivalent of two
hundred thousand barrels of oil a day—about twenty million dollars’ worth, at
current prices—and sends the money to Suleimani. In this way, the Quds Force
has made itself immune to the economic pressures of Western sanctions. “It’s a
self-funding covert-action program,” the former senior intelligence officer
said. “Suleimani doesn’t even need the Iranian budget to fund his operations.”
Suleimani’s sentiments about the ethics of chemical
weapons are unknown. During the Iran-Iraq War, thousands of Iranian soldiers
suffered from chemical attacks, and the survivors still speak publicly of the
trauma. But some American officials believe that his efforts to restrain Assad
had a more pragmatic inspiration: the fear of provoking American military
intervention. “Both the Russians and the Iranians have said to Assad, ‘We can’t
support you in the court of world opinion if you use this stuff,’ ” a former
senior American military official said.
The regime is believed to have used chemical weapons
at least fourteen times since last year. Yet even after the enormous sarin
attack on August 21st, which killed fourteen hundred civilians, Suleimani’s
support for Syria has been unbending. To save Assad, Suleimani has called on
every asset he built since taking over the Quds Force: Hezbollah fighters,
Shiite militiamen from around the Arab world, and all the money and matériel he
could squeeze out of his own besieged government.
Suleimani’s greatest achievement may be persuading his
proxies in the Iraqi government to allow Iran to use its airspace to fly men
and munitions to Damascus. General James Mattis, who until March was the
commander of all American military forces in the Middle East, told me that
without this aid the Assad regime would have collapsed months ago. The flights
are overseen by the Iraqi transportation minister, Hadi al-Amri, who is an old
ally of Suleimani’s—the former head of the Badr Brigade, and a soldier on the
Iranian side in the Iran-Iraq War. In an interview in Baghdad, Amri denied that
the Iranians were using Iraqi airspace to send weapons. But he made clear his
affection for his former commander. “I love Qassem Suleimani!” he said,
pounding the table. “He is my dearest friend.”
“Maliki dislikes the Iranians, and he loathes Assad, but he hates Al Nusra,” Crocker told me. “He
doesn’t want an Al Qaeda government in Damascus.”
This kind of starkly sectarian atmosphere may be
Suleimani’s most lasting impact on the Middle East. To save his Iranian empire
in Syria and Lebanon, he has helped fuel a Sunni-Shiite conflict that threatens
to engulf the region for years to come—a war that he appears happy to wage. “He
has every reason to believe that Iran is the rising power in the region,”
Mattis told me. “We’ve never dealt him a body blow.”
In June, a new, moderate President, Hassan Rouhani,
was elected in Iran, promising to end the sanctions, which have exhausted the
country and demolished its middle class. Hopes have risen in the West that
Khamenei might allow Rouhani to strike a deal. Although Rouhani is a moderate
only by Iranian standards—he is a Shiite cleric and a longtime adherent of the
revolution—his new administration has made a series of good-will gestures,
including the release of eleven political prisoners and an exchange of letters
with President Obama.
Many in the West are hoping that Iran will also help
find an end to the grinding war in Syria. Assad’s deputy prime minister
recently offered the possibility of a cease-fire, saying, “Let nobody have any
fear that the regime in its present form will continue.” But he did not say
that Assad would step down, which the rebels have said is a necessary condition
of negotiations. There have been hints from powerful Iranians that Assad isn’t
worth holding on to. In a recent speech, the former President Hashemi
Rafsanjani said, “The people have been the target of chemical attacks by their
own government.”
But a less sympathetic regime in Syria would
split the Axis of Resistance, and radically complicate Iran’s partnership with
Hezbollah. In any case, the Iranian regime may be too fragmented to come to a
consensus. “Anytime you see a statement coming out of the government, just
remember there’s a rat’s nest of people fighting underneath the surface,” Kevan
Harris, a sociologist at Princeton who has studied Iran extensively, told me.
As Rouhani tries to engage the West, he will have to contend with the
hard-liners, including Suleimani and his comrades, who for more than a decade
have defined their foreign policy as a covert war on the U.S. and Israel. “They
don’t trust the other side,” Harris said. “They feel that any concession they
make will be seen by the West as a sign of weakness.”
For Suleimani, giving up Assad would mean abandoning
the project of expansion that has occupied him for fifteen years. In a recent
speech before the Assembly of Experts—the clerics who choose the Supreme Leader—he
spoke about Syria in fiercely determined language. “We do not pay attention to
the propaganda of the enemy, because Syria is the front line of the resistance
and this reality is undeniable,’’ he said. “We have a duty to defend Muslims
because they are under pressure and oppression.” Suleimani was fighting the
same war, against the same foes, that he’d been fighting his entire life; for
him, it seemed, the compromises of statecraft could not compare with the
paradise of the battlefield. “We will support Syria to the end,” he said.
♦
