THE SHADOW COMMANDER
Qassem
Suleimani is the Iranian operative who has been reshaping the Middle East. Now
he’s directing Assad’s war in Syria.
SEPTEMBER 30, 2013
A former C.I.A. officer
calls Suleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds Force, the “most powerful operative in
the Middle East today.” Illustration by Krzysztof Domaradzki.
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. Shateri had spent much of his career abroad, first in
Afghanistan and then in Iraq, where the Quds Force helped Shiite militias kill
American soldiers.
Shateri had been killed two days before, on the road that runs between
Damascus and Beirut. He had gone to Syria, along with thousands of other
members of the Quds Force, to rescue the country’s besieged President, Bashar
al-Assad, a crucial ally of Iran. In the past few years, Shateri had worked
under an alias as the Quds Force’s chief in Lebanon; there he had helped
sustain the armed group Hezbollah, which at the time of the funeral had begun
to pour men into Syria to fight for the regime. The circumstances of his death
were unclear: one Iranian official said that Shateri had been “directly
targeted” by “the Zionist regime,” as Iranians habitually refer to Israel.
At the funeral, the mourners sobbed, and some beat their chests in the
Shiite way. Shateri’s casket was wrapped in an Iranian flag, and gathered
around it were the commander of the Revolutionary Guard, 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. Mughniyeh was assassinated in
2008, purportedly by Israeli agents. In the ethos of the Iranian revolution, to
die was to serve. Before Shateri’s funeral, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the
country’s Supreme Leader, released a note of praise: “In the end, he drank the
sweet syrup of martyrdom.”
Kneeling in the second row on the mosque’s carpeted floor was Major
General Qassem Suleimani, the Quds Force’s leader: 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. In Syria, the project hung in the
balance, and Suleimani was mounting a desperate fight, even if the price of
victory was a sectarian conflict that engulfed the region for years.
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. “Suleimani is the single most powerful operative
in the Middle East today,” John Maguire, a former C.I.A. officer in Iraq, told
me, “and no one’s ever heard of him.”
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.”
At the funeral, Suleimani was dressed in a black jacket and a black shirt
with no tie, in the Iranian style; his long, angular face and his arched
eyebrows were twisted with pain. The Quds Force had never lost such a
high-ranking officer abroad. The day before the funeral, Suleimani had travelled
to Shateri’s home to offer condolences to his family. He has a fierce
attachment to martyred soldiers, and often visits their families; in a recent
interview with Iranian media, he said, “When I see the children of the martyrs,
I want to smell their scent, and I lose myself.” As the funeral continued, he
and the other mourners bent forward to pray, pressing their foreheads to the
carpet. “One of the rarest people, who brought the revolution and the whole
world to you, is gone,” Alireza Panahian, the imam, told the mourners.
Suleimani cradled his head in his palm and began to weep.
The early months of 2013,
around the time of Shateri’s death, marked a low point for the Iranian
intervention in Syria. Assad was steadily losing ground to the rebels, who are
dominated by Sunnis, Iran’s rivals. If Assad fell, the Iranian regime would
lose its link to Hezbollah, its forward base against Israel. In a speech, one
Iranian cleric said, “If we lose Syria, we cannot keep Tehran.”Although the
Iranians were severely strained by American sanctions, imposed to stop the
regime from developing a nuclear weapon, they were unstinting in their efforts
to save Assad.
Among other things, they extended a seven-billion-dollar loan to
shore up the Syrian economy. “I don’t think the Iranians are calculating this
in terms of dollars,” a Middle Eastern security official told me. “They regard
the loss of Assad as an existential threat.” 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. In August, 2012, anti-Assad rebels
captured forty-eight Iranians inside Syria. Iranian leaders protested that they
were pilgrims, come to pray at a holy Shiite shrine, but the rebels, as well as
Western intelligence agencies, said that they were members of the Quds Force.
In any case, they were valuable enough so that Assad agreed to release more
than two thousand captured rebels to have them freed. And then Shateri was
killed.Finally, Suleimani began flying into Damascus frequently so that he
could assume personal control of the Iranian intervention. “He’s running the
war himself,” an American defense official told me. 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.
Late last year, Western officials began to notice a sharp increase in
Iranian supply flights into the Damascus airport. Instead of a handful a week,
planes were coming every day, carrying weapons and ammunition—“tons of it,” the
Middle Eastern security official told me—along with officers from the Quds
Force. According to American officials, the officers coördinated attacks,
trained militias, and set up an elaborate system to monitor rebel
communications. They also forced the various branches of Assad’s security
services—designed to spy on one another—to work together. The Middle Eastern
security official said that the number of Quds Force operatives, along with the
Iraqi Shiite militiamen they brought with them, reached into the thousands.
“They’re spread out across the entire country,” he told me.
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.
