by Jay Solomon
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SOLEIMANI’S OFFENSIVE FINALLY CAPTURED the attention of the Pentagon’s top brass as the numbers of roadside bombs and militants coming in from Iran increased in 2006 and 2007. During the early stages of the war, the Bush administration was almost singularly focused on containing the Sunni insurgency and the waves of suicide bombers launched by al Qaeda and Zarqawi. Now they began taking countermeasures.
In the fall of 2006, the Pentagon’s Iraq command set up a special unit, called Task Force 17, to work against Iran and its allies. American intelligence officials in Baghdad believed that Soleimani’s men were all over the country, posing as diplomats, businessmen, journalists, and Shiite pilgrims. Iran’s ambassador to Baghdad, Hassan Kazemi Qomi, was a known Qods Force officer. And IRGC and Qods Force officers—including possibly General Soleimani himself—continued to pay visits to the heavily fortified Green Zone.
The U.S. Special Operations Command intensified its efforts to directly target the Qods Force. General Stanley McChrystal headed the Special Operations unit from its headquarters in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, but increasingly worked out of forward U.S. bases in Iraq as he prepared his operations. He closely studied the nexus between Soleimani’s men and the Iraqi “special groups,” according to his advisors.
On December 21, 2006, General McChrystal’s men made their first major capture of a senior Qods Force officer inside Iraq. U.S. intelligence showed that a commander named Mohsen Chizari, a key lieutenant of Soleimani’s, was staying at the compound of an Iraqi politician associated with SCIRI, just across the Tigris River from the Green Zone. General Chizari commanded an operations staff inside the Qods Force, called Department 600, which the United States believed was playing a central role in smuggling arms to the Shiite groups. Other senior Qods Force officers were believed to be at the SCIRI compound with him, including men focused on Iranian operations inside the Persian Gulf and Yemen.
In a lightning operation, the Special Operations unit raided the SCIRI office, using drones and U.S. military helicopters. The United States held and interrogated Chizari and his cohorts for ten days before their eventual release. The U.S. action drew heavy protests from both the Iraqi prime minister’s office and the Iranian government. “They were totally shocked,” General McChrystal said. “But it was a necessary first step” to push back the Iranians. Khalilzad said he pressed the Iraqis to obtain the travel documents of those Iranians who had been detained, which they didn’t. “We had good information on the IRGC’s role,” he said.
Three weeks later, on January 11, the U.S. military raided the Iranian government’s liaison office in Erbil, capital of the autonomous Kurdish region, to look for Qods Force officers. Both Iranian and Kurdish officials said Tehran’s mission there was a regular diplomatic compound, legally hosting trade, energy, and cultural delegations, and was in the process of being upgraded to a formal consulate. The Iranian government had maintained the office since 1992, they said. But McChrystal’s team believed a senior delegation of IRGC and Qods Force officers were transiting through Erbil that day.
At daybreak American military helicopters landed on the roof of the Iranian compound, and U.S. soldiers quickly sprinted into its offices at gunpoint. The Americans took away five of the Iranians who were sleeping there and confiscated a trove of computers and Iranian-government documents. The men were moved to Camp Cropper, the prison for high-value targets where Saddam Hussein had been detained.
Iraqi and Kurdish officials vehemently criticized the U.S. operation, saying it violated international law and that the men were accredited diplomats. Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, said the Americans had actually captured the wrong men. “The Americans came to detain this delegation, not the people in the office,” Barzani said. “They came to the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The Americans, however, learned that the men they had detained were traveling with fake civilian identification papers. General McChrystal and other Americans insist that at least three of the men detained were senior Qods Force officials and that they provided the United States with substantial intelligence following their capture.
The Iranians retaliated. On the evening of January 20, 2007, a dozen armed insurgents raided a joint U.S.-Iraqi military command in the city of Karbala. The militants were dressed in American combat uniforms and carried U.S.-made weapons. Iraqi guards later said they waved the men through in their Suburban vehicles because some spoke English.
The squads used concussion bombs to enter the barracks housing the Americans. One U.S. soldier was killed in a firefight at the base. But the commando team kidnapped four other Americans and fled the scene under pursuit by U.S. military attack helicopters, apparently trying to get back to the Iranian border. Two of the U.S. soldiers were found dead in the back of a Suburban abandoned by the assailants, shot in the chest and head execution-style. The body of one of the other soldiers was found in a ditch, while the fourth American survived his capture but died en route to a hospital after he was rescued by American soldiers.
U.S. Special Forces eventually tracked the assailants back to Najaf. Two days later they raided a compound there and arrested four men for overseeing the Karbala attack. Two of them, Qais and Laith al-Khazali, were brothers and former members of the Mahdi Army. In 2006 they had established a much more radical splinter group, called Asaib Ahl al-Haq, or “League of the Righteous,” which U.S. officials said was central to Iran’s arms smuggling network. Another man, Ali Musa Daqduq, was identified as a senior Lebanese Hezbollah member whose activities inside Iraq had been approved by the Shiite movement’s senior leadership.
During lengthy interrogations, both Qais al-Khazali and Daqduq provided detailed information on the Qods Force’s role in the attack. (Daqduq initially refused to talk to his captors, pretending to be mute. But after weeks of detainment and interrogation he eventually talked.) The Qods Force had developed detailed intelligence on the Karbala military structure and the movement and shifts of the U.S. troops based there, which they passed on to the attack team. The Iranians had also assisted by acquiring the American uniforms and arms used in the deception. “Daqduq contends that the Iraqi special groups could not have conducted this complex operation without the support and direction of the Qods Force,” Brigadier General Kevin Bergner, a spokesman for the multinational force in Iraq, said at the time. General McChrystal added during that interview that the Karbala attack might well have been the most dangerous incident inside Iraq in terms of possibly sparking a direct conflict between the United States and Iran, saying, “They did a very good job of doing a lot of damage.”
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IN JANUARY 2007 GENERAL David Petraeus became the top U.S. military commander in Iraq and quickly moved to refocus the Pentagon on Iran’s role in fueling the insurgency. Petraeus’s star was rising in the Pentagon and Washington thanks to the performance of forces under his command in Sunni-dominated areas in northern Iraq during the early stages of the war. He had been able to pacify the area by forming alliances with Sunni tribesmen, often using cash, to fight against al Qaeda and insurgents. His operations were viewed as a model for the later efforts to fight al Qaeda in Iraq with an influx of troops, known as the “surge.”
Petraeus fixated on the Qods Force and General Soleimani, for whom he developed a personal hatred because the Iranian targeted American personnel and seemed to want to destabilize Iraq. Petraeus was furious that the Iranians publicly assured the world that they were promoting stability in Iraq while covertly funneling arms and trained militants across the border and buying off Iraqi politicians.
Petraeus and Soleimani communicated with each other via the Iraqi politicians who courted both Washington and Tehran. In early 2008, according to U.S. military officials, Soleimani sent an electronic message to Petraeus in Baghdad via Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish politician and Iraqi president. The message arrived as U.S. forces were supporting an Iraqi government crackdown on the Mahdi Army in Baghdad’s largest Sh
iite slum, called Sadr City. Soleimani stressed to Petraeus that stability in the Iraqi capital could only be achieved with his involvement. “General Petraeus, you should know that I, Qasem Soleimani, control the policy of Iran with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza and Afghanistan,” the electronic message read, according to the officials who saw it.
Petraeus answered that the Iranian commander should know that the United States and the Western world were aware of what the Qods Force was doing inside Iraq and that this was only going to further isolate Tehran economically and diplomatically. “General Petraeus mentioned that we continue to see on average one rocket and one [armor-piercing bomb] attack daily,” a State Department diplomat in Baghdad wrote to Foggy Bottom in a cable, recounting a recent meeting between the American general and Talabani. “The next time Talabani spoke to Qasem Soleimani, he might pass along that we are concerned about Iranian actions,” Petraeus told Talabani, according to a recounting of the conversation to Washington.
Petraeus sent another message to Soleimani in 2008, this time using an Iraqi Shiite militia leader close to Tehran. At the time, American forces were being targeted by a particularly lethal munition called an IRAM. The Pentagon’s intelligence networks showed the Revolutionary Guard was providing theses bombs to its Iraqi allies and training them on their use.
“If we sustain casualties from one of these IRAMs, there’s going to be a very significant response,” Petraeus told Soleimani via Hadi al-Amiri, a leader of the Badr Corps and future lawmaker. The Americans didn’t see another IRAM attack for twelve to eighteen months. “The Iranians would have had a death wish if they wanted to go head-to-head with the United States,” Petraeus believed. “They always stopped short of this.”
But now, five years after the invasion, it was clear that Washington’s strategy had backfired in Iraq in regard to curbing Iran’s influence. Rather than weakening Khamenei and the state, the war had empowered Tehran to spread its power and influence farther into Arab lands. Iran could target American troops in Iraq at will, and U.S. allies were even more vulnerable. And Iran would be able to use this leverage against the United States and Europe, particularly on the nuclear issue.
CHAPTER 4
The Axis of Resistance
The training and arming of Shiite insurgent fighters by Iran hamstrung the U.S. military in Iraq as the war intensified. But Tehran’s closest regional ally, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, was facilitating the movement of an equally deadly enemy across Iraq’s western border: al Qaeda’s jihadist fighters and suicide bombers. Iran and Syria, to the horror of the United States and Baghdad’s leaders, were backing competing sides in Iraq’s civil war—Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents—in an effort to sabotage the Bush administration’s ambitious Middle East project. The result was the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in a gruesome Sunni-Shiite sectarian war. “It was a very cynical alliance in every respect,” said Mouwaffak al-Rubaie, a long-serving national security advisor to Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, describing the Syrian-Iranian strategy.
Assad publicly signaled Syria’s preparations to undermine U.S. military operations in Iraq from the early days of the American buildup to war in 2003. The Syrian dictator and his government were convinced that any American campaign to topple Saddam Hussein would invariably also seek to destabilize, if not overthrow, the Baathist regime in Damascus at a later stage. Assad and Saddam were hardly allies: in 1991 the Syrians joined a U.S.-led coalition in 1991 that drove Iraqi troops out of Kuwait. But the two Baathist states shared an ideology based on terrorism and state-sanctioned violence, particularly political assassinations, connecting them in the West’s eyes in the years after 9/11.
Assad felt particularly vulnerable at the time of the Iraq invasion, according to his presidential aides, because he was still in the process of consolidating power after succeeding his father in 2000. Bashar didn’t trust the old guard of his party and military, and he feared they would link up with the United States and other Western powers to unseat him. Subverting the U.S. project in Iraq, Assad believed, was a preemptive move. “The United States and Britain will not be able to control Iraq. There will be much tougher resistance,” Assad told Lebanon’s as-Safir newspaper after the invasion started in March 2003. “But if the American-British designs succeed—and we hope they do not succeed and we doubt that they will succeed—there will be Arab popular resistance anyway and this has begun.”
Syria’s grand mufti, Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro, the highest-ranking Sunni Muslim in the country, publicly called for martyrdom operations against coalition forces in Iraq in a six-point statement he put out at the time. He also called on Muslims worldwide to disrupt the U.S. war effort in Iraq. “Muslims must use all possible means to repel the aggressors, including martyr operations,” he announced. “Muslims all over the world must boycott American and British products and those from coalition forces.”
Damascus International Airport emerged as the primary pipeline for al Qaeda fighters and other Sunni militants traveling to Iraq from all over the Middle East. Syrian government officials repeatedly denied to the Bush administration that they had the ability to control the movement of these jihadists or to seal Syria’s border with Iraq. Assad also stressed that his government was among the most committed in the region to fighting Sunni extremists, including al Qaeda, citing his father’s war in the 1980s against the Muslim Brotherhood, a global Islamist movement, which killed tens of thousands of Syrians in the western city of Hama. The Assad family was a member of Syria’s minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, which many Sunni clerics considered heretical. These religious ties bonded the Assad regime even more closely with Iran and alienated them from the region’s Sunni Arab powers, particularly Saudi Arabia.
But the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies didn’t buy the Syrian line that it was committed to the fight. The Assad family regime, often in collaboration with Iran, had for decades manipulated extremist groups, terrorists, and militias to control Lebanon and to fight Israel. Assad’s brother-in-law, Assef Shawkat, headed Syria’s military-intelligence unit and was a master of using proxies to fight Damascus’s battles. Shawkat and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard were central players in building up Hezbollah and Hamas, even though the latter didn’t share the Shiite faith. Damascus’s and Tehran’s intelligence services became intertwined in the 2000s. U.S. officials grew convinced that Shawkat either turned a blind eye to the sophisticated smuggling networks being established by al Qaeda in his country or directly ran them. His intelligence apparatus inside Syria was so pervasive that Shawkat couldn’t be unaware of the movement of Sunni fighters across his borders, American officials believed.
Damascus made little effort to hide its support for the Iraqi insurgency as the war in Iraq gathered steam in 2003 and 2004. Directly across the street from the U.S. embassy in the Syrian capital, in the upscale suburb of Abu Roumaneh, Iraqi Sunnis opened a recruitment office to lure young Arab men, both Syrians and foreigners, to the fight. The facility was guarded by Syrian intelligence and military officers twenty-four hours a day, according to eyewitness accounts. The recruits quickly boarded buses that took them directly to Baghdad and other Iraqi cities where the insurgency was intensifying.
The recruitment became so overt that Washington’s ambassador to Syria in 2003, Ted Kattouf, repeatedly filed protests with the Syrian government, demanding they break up the human-smuggling operation. Syrian authorities first responded by denying these activities were taking place and then simply moved the recruitment center to Damascus’s fairgrounds, at the center of the capital, where the transfer of foreign fighters to Iraq continued unabated. “The Damascus fairgrounds are owned and operated by the government of Syria,” said David Schenker, a former Pentagon official who oversaw U.S. defense policy toward Syria during the first George W. Bush administration. “There’s no way the regime couldn’t have been involved in overseeing these types of activities.”
Iran’s and Syria’s joint efforts t
o undermine the American war effort in Iraq strengthened their “Axis of Resistance,” as Iranian and Syrian officials called it. This alliance included other movements and militias across the Middle East committed both to fighting Israel and to challenging U.S. foreign policy. These included Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Shiite militias in Iraq, Yemen, and Afghanistan. The Resistance Axis would only strengthen as American involvement in their region grew, with disastrous consequences for U.S. interests.
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DAMASCUS, UNDER PRESIDENT BASHAR AL-ASSAD’S leadership, became the forward operating base for Iran’s Axis of Resistance during the 2000s. The Arab capital, considered the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city, had maintained its sophisticated Levantine culture, architecture, and cuisine. The streetscape of Damascus is a sweep of Ottoman-era mosques, Byzantine churches, and French-colonial cafés and restaurants. Before the Syrian civil war, European tourists regularly visited the city, as did Christian and Shiite pilgrims seeking to trace the final steps of John the Baptist or to pray at the blue-tiled Shrine of Sayyida Zeinab, the Prophet Muhammad’s granddaughter. Owing to Syria’s history of Arab nationalism and economic socialism, Western brands and products were almost nonexistent inside the city’s walls, except for the elite. The anomalies were a Four Seasons hotel and a Kentucky Fried Chicken tucked inside a diplomatic enclave.
In contrast with his father’s tough but modest appearance, Bashar al-Assad and his London-born wife, Asma, cultivated the image of the Middle East’s most glamorous and modern couple. His first trips after taking power in 2000 were to Western capitals, including London and Paris, where he sought to end Syria’s isolation and open the country to foreign investment. Asma, meanwhile, built NGOs and hosted visiting international women’s delegations at Assad’s Damascus palaces, lecturing about the need for education, poverty alleviation, and the emancipation of the Palestinian people. Vogue famously called her “a rose in the desert” in a 2011 hagiography, which was eventually pulled from Condé Nast’s website after civil war broke out in the country later that year. In that article she talked about her designer shoes and the fairy-tale life she lived.