by Jay Solomon
“He said that [SCIRI] would win throughout the south…because [of] Iranian money, intimidation, and because the process which Bremer proposed and the Governing Council accepted would disproportionately favor the Islamists,” Rubin wrote in a memo to his CPA higher-ups. “The Iranians are thinking three or four steps ahead of the game; I am not sure we are thinking more than one or two. If we are embarking on a process we believe will have even a 20 percent chance of resulting in [Iraq becoming another] Islamic Republic, we need to reconsider right now.”
Frustrated with the Iraqi operation, Rubin returned to Washington in 2004 to take up residence at the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative Washington think tank. He and others from AEI were proponents of the invasion but would emerge as critics of both the Bush and Obama administrations’ handling of the occupation. They particularly warned that Iran was using the conflict to gain de facto control of Iraq. Rubin’s warnings were often challenged by Democrats and other critics of the Iraq War who feared the Bush White House might directly target the Iranians.
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AFTER THIS INITIAL IRANIAN SURGE into Iraq following the U.S. invasion, Tehran appeared content with allowing Baghdad’s political process to play itself out. The first two democratically elected governments in Baghdad in 2005 and 2006, headed by Ibrahim al-Jaafari and Nouri al-Maliki, promoted good relations with the Islamic Republic and a sharp break from the confrontational foreign policy of the Baathist governments. Diplomats in Baghdad at the time said neither man was just an Iranian stooge. Iraqi Arabs, even Shiite ones, were wary of Persian domination, they said. For example, Maliki pursued military operations against the Iranian-funded Mahdi Army, headed by the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, when his militias sought to control parts of Baghdad, Najaf, and the southern city of Basra. Still, Maliki aligned Iraq closely with Iran on key regional strategic issues, such as oil pricing by OPEC and diplomatic support for Shiite populations in Lebanon, Bahrain, and Yemen. Post-Saddam Iraq also began providing huge business opportunities for Iranian companies in everything from consumer products to banking and construction. Many of these companies were tied to the IRGC. Trade between Iran and Iraq would go from virtually zero during Saddam’s rule to billions of dollars annually.
Iran and the Revolutionary Guard began to intensify their military involvement inside Iraq, both through their intelligence activities and via support for Iraqi militias, following the election of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005. A onetime mayor of Tehran, he was elected to replace the reformist cleric Mohammad Khatami as president and had been backed by the IRGC in the vote. Tehran subsequently took an increasingly confrontational stance toward the United States and the West on issues ranging from Iran’s nuclear program to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Ahmadinejad was a former officer in the IRGC’s paramilitary wing, the Basij, and didn’t share any of his predecessor’s desires for reconciliation with the West. Rather, he wanted to challenge it.
Ahmadinejad quickly reversed some key foreign policy initiatives promoted by the Khatami government. Among them was Tehran’s diplomacy with three European powers focused on Iran’s nuclear program. Khatami’s ministers had agreed to freeze Iran’s enrichment of uranium beginning in 2003 in pursuit of a lasting deal with the West and the removal of what at the time were very limited Western sanctions. The talks stalled after Iran argued that it had failed to quickly receive any economic boosts from the deal. Ahmadinejad subsequently ended the freeze and rapidly expanded Iran’s nuclear work starting in 2005. The Bush administration responded by pushing the first of four rounds of economic sanctions on Iran through the UN Security Council in 2006. The U.S. Treasury Department, meanwhile, initiated a global campaign to freeze Iran’s major banks out of the international financial system.
Ahmadinejad voiced an even greater willingness to support the militant groups fighting Israel from Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. He appalled Western leaders when he called for the Jewish state to be “wiped off the face of time” and questioned the historical reality of the Holocaust. Tehran was hardening its line. In just Ahmadinejad’s first year in office, the flow of Iranian arms to Shiite militias inside Iraq began to dramatically increase. “In 2006, Iran seemed to make a tactical decision to significantly turn up the heat in Iraq,” said Stephen Hadley, then President Bush’s national security advisor. “We believe it was in response to our economic pressure on the nuclear program.”
Iranian leaders and clerics also spoke of Iran’s religious duty to protect the Shiites of Iraq. The conflict in the country was quickly morphing into a sectarian war between Iraq’s two major sects. This was fueled by al Qaeda’s assassinations of Shiite leaders with whom the United States had sought to cooperate, such as SCIRI chief Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim in Najaf, and the slaughter of tens of thousands of Shiites in mass bombings throughout the country. In early 2006, the commander of al Qaeda’s Iraq franchise (called al Qaeda in Iraq), the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, orchestrated the destruction of the al-Askari mosque in the city of Samarra, one of the most renowned mosques in the Shiite world. Many Shiites took this as a call to war. Zarqawi spoke of wiping out the Shiites on the way to maintaining Sunni dominance in Iraq. His position was so extreme that al Qaeda’s leaders, such as Ayman al-Zawahiri, warned him that too much violence could alienate Muslims, including Sunnis.
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AS THE VIOLENCE IN Iraq intensified, Major General Qasem Soleimani inserted himself more aggressively into the conflict. And he greatly changed the direction of the war, earning a nearly mythic status among American, Israeli, and Arab intelligence officers. A veteran of the Iran-Iraq War, the Qods Force’s commander rose to fame inside his country with operations he led for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps deep inside Iraqi territory during the eight-year conflict. Iranian media described him as a deeply devout Muslim who courted his own martyrdom against Saddam’s forces. He often appears in public sans his military uniform, dressed in the simple clothes of a Hezbollah adherent—a plain, collarless shirt and threadbare jacket. He also sports a graying, closely cropped beard, a standard fashion among Iran’s revolutionary leadership.
Soleimani, who was in his early twenties at the start of the Iran-Iraq War, moved up the ranks of the IRGC in the mid-1990s by overseeing military operations against Central Asian narcotics smugglers and by cultivating the Qods Force’s military proxies in Afghanistan, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories. Born in Iran’s southeast Kerman province, he was raised in a tribal society where the Iranian government had only a limited presence and very little control. Growing up in such an atmosphere made Soleimani adept at rallying Islamist militias, tribal warlords, and Arab businessmen far from Iran.
“Soleimani can be brutal or cunning, depending upon what’s required,” said Mouwaffak al-Rubaie, who served as the Iraqi government’s national security advisor for six years under Prime Minister Maliki. “His ultimate goal is to further the revolution.” This means opposing U.S. foreign policy across the region and Washington’s Arab allies.
U.S. intelligence officials describe Soleimani as a Persian version of Karla, the Soviet spymaster depicted in John le Carré’s Cold War novels, who is habitually playing geopolitical chess against his British nemesis, MI6, and its intelligence chief, George Smiley. Like Karla, Soleimani’s endgame has always been to blunt the West’s advances and to cement ties with Washington’s adversaries, using any means possible.
The general’s work eventually made him one of Supreme Leader Khamenei’s closest strategists and confidants, one who may yet have a future political career in Tehran. Iranian state-controlled newspapers regularly carry photos of General Soleimani standing next to Khamenei at the front during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. This may mean that Soleimani could emerge as a future president.
As tensions in Iraq between the United States and Iran began to boil over in 2005 and 2006, Soleimani and his Qods Force executed an increasingly aggressive plan to empower Tehran’s political and m
ilitary allies in Iraq and bleed American forces there. Members of Iraq’s Shiite political bloc were intimidated and bribed. Soleimani also established a vast network of arms smuggling, military training, and religious indoctrination that ran through paramilitary camps established by the IRGC and Qods Force inside Iran. Tehran’s close Lebanese ally, Hezbollah, helped oversee this network and sent its own men into Iran and Iraq to run training missions and operations.
The Qods Force, in many ways, acted like an old-world mafia in Iraq during the U.S. military occupation, keeping a close watch on local politicians who threatened Tehran’s interests and objectives. Persian officers were generally polite and diplomatic, but the threat of violence lurked just below the surface. They made it clear to the Iraqis that Tehran was the dominant power in the region. Even Iraqi Shiite leaders and parties would be targeted.
Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region became a central area of conflict between the United States and Iran. Kurdistan has long been a fault line between the Middle East’s Arab, Kurdish, and Persian peoples. The United States became the region’s protector after the first Gulf War, policing its borders with American aircraft.
The Kurds in northern Iraq were in a political bind because of their close ties to both Washington and Tehran. Both countries wanted the autonomous Kurdish region as their ally. The Kurdish politician Noshirwan Mustafa reported angrily to Americans that two senior officers in Soleimani’s Qods Force had come to his home in the Kurdish capital and warned him and his party against running in local parliamentary elections scheduled to be held that May. “What you are doing is very dangerous, and the situation might become very dangerous [for you],” Mustafa told the Americans.
Soleimani also gained leverage over Iraq’s affairs by investing in competing political factions. Tehran’s ties to Prime Minister Maliki and his Dawa Party traced back decades to the party’s formation in Iraq. But later in the U.S. occupation, Iran also began funding and training fighters from Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, which was a competitor to Dawa. Sadr hailed from one of Iraq’s most beloved and powerful Shiite families, which never left Iraq during Saddam’s rule and therefore was hailed for its bravery, martyrdom, and nationalist ethos. Indeed, despite being Shiite, the Sadrist movement was historically suspicious of Iran, if not actually hostile to it.
The Mahdi Army, however, quickly became a central force in the Shiite insurgency against the United States. Despite its anti-Iranian position, its fighters increasingly received training and funding from Tehran. Sadr’s forces became so powerful that they directly challenged the Iraqi government for control of Najaf and parts of Baghdad, leading to a virtual state of war between the Iraqi government and the Mahdi Army. U.S. officials watched incredulously as General Soleimani sought to be the only international official capable of brokering a truce between the two sides, largely because the Qods Force had been arming both the government and the militias, while the Americans had less leverage with either.
Indeed, General Soleimani would travel into Baghdad’s so-called Green Zone, the U.S.-controlled seat of the Iraqi government, to meet with government officials, sometimes behind the Americans’ back. But in April 2006 the U.S. embassy and military intercepted communications showing that the Qods Force commander planned to meet Iraqi prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari ahead of key Iraqi elections. According to the U.S. ambassador at the time, Zalmay Khalilzad, the Bush administration decided to let Soleimani travel into Baghdad unhindered because intelligence showed he was going to ask the Iraqi leader to stand down. The United States sought the same goal because it believed that Jaafari, a Shiite politician, was incapable of healing the political rift between Sunni and Shiite that was fueling the internal conflict in Iraq. “He came to get rid of Jaafari in the spring of 2006,” Khalilzad said of General Soleimani. “He thought we didn’t know.”
Around that time the Pentagon, with coalition and Iraqi forces, began piecing together the magnitude of the training and arms smuggling network established by Soleimani and the Qods Force to empower their Iraqi allies. Up until that year, the United States had detected only a relatively small influx of arms and roadside bomb technology coming in from Iran, though the Pentagon and CIA were aware of the Qods Force’s links to the Badr Corps and Mahdi Army. The Americans’ primary focus in Iraq at that point had been the Sunni insurgents and al Qaeda. But now the death toll of American troops attributable to Iranian-supplied bombs was skyrocketing. In the last quarter of 2006, the Pentagon concluded, these munitions were responsible for nearly 20 percent of the deaths of coalition forces in Iraq.
Soleimani and the Qods Force, the U.S. and Iraqi militaries learned, had created a virtual underground railroad for Iraq’s Shiite fighters to get training inside Iran, Syria, and Lebanon. The Iranians had established at least a half dozen military training camps, some centered around Tehran and others close to the Iran-Iraq border. Recruits were taught the religious philosophy of the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
U.S. military intelligence also learned that Hezbollah operatives from Lebanon were playing a central role in the Qods Force’s operations. Many of the Iranian military trainers couldn’t speak fluent Arabic and relied on these Lebanese Arabs to communicate with the Iraqis. Hezbollah had extensive experience in conducting guerilla warfare from its twenty-year conflict with Israel and had become expert in the use of roadside bombs, suicide attacks, and snipers.
The U.S. military and Iraqi security captured and interrogated dozens of Shiite fighters beginning in 2006. They described remarkably similar paths that took them to training camps both inside and outside Iran. American officials began calling these pro-Iranian militias “special groups,” due to their focus on military attacks rather than political maneuvering.
The experience of one Iraqi captured by coalition forces in 2007 outlined the extensive networks Iran and its allies in Syria and Lebanon had established to fight the war against the Americans in Iraq. The militant, whose name was redacted from the Pentagon’s interrogation record, traveled, like many in Tehran’s underground pipeline, to the southern city of al-Amarah, where he and a dozen other men hid in a safe house that was described as a “garage.” There they were given fake passports and waited for Iranian couriers to contact them for the trip across the border. They secretly traveled in a boat that plied the southern marshlands dividing Iran and Iraq.
Once inside Iran, the trainee and his companions took buses and planes to reach an IRGC military compound near Tehran. The men were given uniforms and bunked in small sleeping areas, four to a room. Every morning they received training in small arms, counterinterrogation techniques, and physical surveillance. They would also be schooled in the tenets of the Iranian revolution. “The schedule was demanding, and several of the students felt that the course was too demanding,” the militant told his interrogators.
But the men’s odyssey had only just begun. After nearly three weeks at the camp, the trainee and other fighters were flown to Damascus. In the Syrian capital, they were quickly shuttled over the Lebanese border into the Bekaa Valley, the stronghold of Hezbollah. There they were given a second round of military training, conducted by Hezbollah members, that focused on the somewhat staid tasks of project planning and weapons warehousing, as well as on coded communications and small weapons use.
“The instructors were members of Lebanese Hezbollah,” said the Iraqi militant. “They had complete control of the area, the students and the familiarity with all of the management process needed to run a paramilitary organization.” It was only after he returned to Iraq that the man’s Iranian handlers paid him—in U.S. dollars. The amount wasn’t cited in the documents. But Americans believe it was in the hundreds of dollars, indicating how well funded the operation was.
A second Iraqi insurgent captured by coalition forces in 2007 also described traveling with about a dozen recruits to Iran via al-Amarah and the southern marshlands. The trip involved multiple stops in smaller Iranian cities, such as Kerma
nshah and Mashhad. Along the way the trainees were allowed to do some sightseeing: they visited the holy shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad and the local zoo.
In Tehran, the men were taken to a military base, Sayid Shuhada, run by the IRGC on the outskirts of the capital. There they were given instruction in using Russian Dragunov sniper rifles. They were also taught how to use night-vision goggles to identify coalition forces in the dark.
After thirty days, the Shiite militants returned to Iraq and were deposited in one of three locations: Baghdad or the southern cities of Diyala and Kut. One who went to Kut told his interrogators that he was put in charge of training other local insurgents fighting the U.S. forces. The man was associated with the Mahdi Army, which often went by the Arabic acronym JAM. He told his interrogators that he wanted “to take the opportunity in detention to learn if what everyone else said about the [coalition forces] is true,” he said. “Everyone in JAM tells everyone that the CF will use people and throw them away in prison.”
Still, many of Iran’s Iraqi recruits voiced little love for their Iranian trainers or Soleimani’s Qods Force. They viewed them as arrogant, with an air of cultural superiority toward Arabs. Their alliance, they noted, wouldn’t last forever. And this played into the hope of American strategists that Iraq could eventually be broken from Iran. “Iraqi [Special Group] trainees do not like their Iranian trainers,” said one of the captured militants. “The Shia in Iraq would be led by an Iraqi. Even a bad Iraqi leader is better than a good Iranian leader.”
U.S. officials hoped this Arab-Persian divide would eventually allow Washington to peel the Iraqis away from Tehran. But the sectarian war between the Sunnis and the Shiites wouldn’t allow the United States to truly test this proposition. Some Americans believed Tehran was intentionally fueling this conflict as a way to ensure their control over any reconciliation efforts.