Iranian-Supported Iraqi Militia
Iran created the Badr Corps from Iraqi refugees and prisoners of war in the early 1980s. Analysts have compared the Badr Organization in Iraq to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Badr conducted covert paramilitary operations in Iraq during the 1980s and 1990s under orders from the Qods Force. Many Badr Corps fighters have either dual Iraqi-Iranian citizenship or were born in Iran and only received their Iraqi citizenship post-2003.
Badr Corps leaders are highly influential in Iraq’s Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Interior. Badr recruits are often assigned to the Iraqi Army Intelligence and the Ministry of the Interior. The Ministry of Interior commands the Federal Police, a five-division motorized infantry force, and the Emergency Response Division. The AAH was formed in late 2006 with the support of the Guards as an elite force. The Guards extensively trained and funded the AAH. The group is openly loyal to Iranian leaders. It was founded in 2006 as an offshoot of the Mahdi Army, which fought the United States in Iraq from 2003 to 7. It fought alongside Hezbollah against Israel in the Lebanon War. In 2011, AAH shifted its focus to politics and social services before resuming military activities against the Islamic State.
The KH was founded in 2003. It is an Iranian-funded, anti-American Shia militia that earned a reputation for targeting U.S. and coalition forces with roadside bombs and mortars. The U.S. State Department designated it a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 2009. The KH has also sent fighters to defend the Assad regime in Syria. In addition to its military and paramilitary roles, the KH is involved in organized crime, including kidnapping and armed robbery. In April 2018, Qatar paid at least $276 million to the KH and the Guards to secure the release of members of the Qatari royal family kidnapped during a hunting trip in southern Iraq.
Some observers of Iran downplay Iranian control over events in Syria and Iraq. For example, Harvard professor Stephen Walt wrote, “Tehran’s present allies will not blindly follow its orders if doing so would jeopardize their own positions. To see these collaborations as a new Persian empire, as Henry Kissinger and Max Boot do, is risible.” Other observers of events in the Greater Middle East hold a very different view. They see the Guards as a potent force for enduring political, demographic, and military change.
Lebanon, Yemen, and Bahrain
As noted in chapter 3, Mustafa Chamran, the first commander of the Guards, helped build AMAL, Hezbollah’s precursor. Established by the Guards in the early 1980s, Hezbollah flourished and supplanted Amal in the Beirut area. In 1982, Israel drove the PLO from southern Lebanon. Although Iran was engaged in the Iran-Iraq War at the time, the Guards took the lead in organizing, training, and equipping Hezbollah.
Hezbollah also recruits, trains, and leads other groups of fighters in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Nigeria. The Party of God espouses the same ideology as the Iranian regime and pledged its allegiance to Ayatollah Khomeini. Hezbollah’s leader describes the group’s struggle with Israel and the Jews as a “total life-or-death war.” Soleimani claimed that Lebanese Hezbollah has evolved from a “Resistance Party” to a “Resistance State.”
In addition to using commercial cover to transfer funds to Hezbollah, Iran established training camps among the Shia population in the Beqa’a Valley, an important farming region in eastern Lebanon. Training at the Guards’ camp became a prerequisite for membership in Hezbollah. Hezbollah remains Iran’s most skilled militia, but anecdotal accounts suggest it may no longer enjoy its privileged status with Tehran, at least in how its forces are treated on the battlefield. Hezbollah provides Iran with a measure of plausible deniability in regional meddling, even as the Guards use commercial cover to transfer funds to the Lebanese organization.
Hezbollah carried out the 1983 truck suicide bombings of the U.S. Marine and French barracks at Beirut International Airport, killing 241 U.S. and 58 French servicemen. The Guards' deputy commander celebrated the attack. He proclaimed, “In 1983, the flames of Islamic revolution flared among Lebanese youth for the first time, and in a courageous act, a young Muslim buried 260 United States Marines under the rebels east of the Mediterranean Sea.”
Among other nefarious activities, Hezbollah kidnapped U.S. citizens Terry Anderson and CIA station chief William Buckley. The organization has built an impressive social base in Lebanon, and its medical facilities are superior to those of government hospitals. After Israel’s 2000 withdrawal from the country, Hezbollah became a major political party, and its members were hailed as victors by Shia worldwide. Hezbollah has been adept at conducting cyber operations against a wide range of Middle East targets. Hezbollah operatives are deployed worldwide, including in Latin America.
Hezbollah personnel partner with the Qods Force in Arabic-speaking countries. A typical Hezbollah member wears insignia similar to those of the Guards and adheres to the doctrine of velayat-e faghih. The Qods Force maintains a joint command-and-control structure with Hezbollah. Hezbollah also assists the Qods Force in advising, supporting, and training other Shia militia groups, including the Yemeni Houthis. Iran controls a proxy network in Yemen to support the Shia Ansar Allah, or Houthi Movement. Iran also supports groups in Bahrain, where the population is 70 percent Shia. Iran has provided Iranian-origin missiles and small arms, including sniper rifles, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), AK variants, and hand grenades. The Houthis seized control of the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, in September 2014 and forced its president to seek refuge in Saudi Arabia. The Houthis and their allies advanced south, aiming to seize the Gulf of Aden and unite the country. In March 2015, a military coalition of Arab nations led by Saudi Arabia launched a bombing campaign to oust the Houthis and restore the government.
The Saudis fear that the Houthis' success, fueled by weapons shipments from Iran and training from Iranian proxies such as Hezbollah, will stir nationalism among the Shia in Saudi Arabia. Yemeni security forces have intercepted a shipment from the Guards to the Houthis that included RPGs, surface-to-air missiles, and high explosives.
The area was the site of widespread protests in early 2011, which were crushed by an intervention by Gulf states led by Saudi Arabia. Iranian leaders have claimed that Bahrain, which has a Shia majority, is an integral part of Iran and should be restored to it. The Qods Force sponsors militant Shia groups that have attacked government targets using arms and explosives transferred to the country by Qods Force operatives and affiliates, including Iraqi Shia militia groups. In 2017, U.S. Vice Admiral Kevin M. Donegan opined that Iran’s involvement in Yemen is one element of its Middle East strategy to promote civil unrest and establish a power vacuum. This allows Iranian forces and its proxies to fill that void and build security that favors Iran.
Population Transfers
Like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union before it, Iran uses panic and devastation in neighboring states to alter the region’s ethnic and religious composition. Iran employs coercive methods to drive Sunnis from their homes and resettle the areas with Shias. Under Hitler’s leadership, Germany pursued internal colonization. With the German invasion of the Soviet Union came plans to eliminate indigenous populations in Poland and Ukraine and repopulate subjugated terrain with Germans and locals who conformed to specific racial characteristics. This German colony would be administered by Himmler’s SS. Hitler spoke of “shaping the landscape” by enticing ten million Germans to go east and settle families there. The colonizers were to be given plots of land to be tilled by Polish slaves, who would be killed when they were no longer useful.
The Soviet Union, too, shifted populations. During his reign, Joseph Stalin oversaw the forced resettlement of six million people. Lenin relocated ethnic groups immediately after the Civil War in 1921, and the practice accelerated in the 1930s and 1940s under Stalin. This was part of a broader plan to purge the new Soviet state of nationalists, religious leaders and believers, and free thinkers. Iran, like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, has used demography as foreign policy. The wars that have overwhelmed societies in Iraq and Syria have dispersed besieged populations throughout the Middle East, with some families taking refuge in Europe or the United States. Taking advantage of these population shifts, Iran has resettled Shia in the Middle East. By late 2017, Iran began consolidating its presence throughout Syria by settling militiamen and their families there. Schools in Syria teach the Persian language, and Iran has subsidized the tuition and food costs of many students aged eight to fifteen, each of whom receives a $20 monthly stipend for attending. Shia clerics cultivate ties with locals. This demographic shift in the Syrian Shia population boosts Iran’s long-term influence.
Summary
Iran’s theocratic leadership has cast its foreign policy in the context of a holy war, and the Qods Force is the engine through which Iran expands its global power. Iran has built a land corridor connecting Iran through Iraq to Syria and Lebanon. Iran’s forces or its proxies defend shrines in Syria and Iraq, and the Guards help prepare Hezbollah to destroy Israel’s cities.
The Qods Force’s SLA comprises three divisions deployed across Iran’s Shia Arc. The Guards continue to target their enemies for assassination in the Middle East, Europe, the United States, and around the world. Iran provides Hezbollah $700 million a year and offers Palestinian terrorist groups another $100 million, with another $300 million to other terrorist groups. Patiently and steadily, the Guards are changing the demographics of Iran’s neighborhoods. Christians and Sunnis are declining in proportion, while the Shia are growing.
