The Iran Wars

by Jay Solomon

  From the early stages of the conflict, though, the outside powers’ commitment to the battle was lopsided. For its part, the United States had imposed sanctions, but trained only small numbers of militiamen to take part in the fight. Iran, seeing its closest ally on the brink of collapse, committed vast financial and military resources to prop up Assad, and in many ways it was the Iranians who ended up running the Syrian regime’s war, according to Arab and U.S. intelligence officials. Russian president Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, who was committed to challenging Washington’s power in the Mideast, continued arms and energy shipments to Syria despite international opprobrium. His diplomats also provided Assad unflinching diplomatic cover to continue with his military crackdown by vetoing multiple UN Security Council resolutions aimed at censuring and sanctioning the Syrian regime. U.S. and Israeli intelligence officials believed the IRGC had deployed hundreds of advisors to oversee thousands of fighters from Hezbollah and other Shiite groups by 2013.

  The Obama administration and its allies never agreed on a coherent strategy to topple Assad or on whom to support as his successor. The White House was deeply skeptical about providing arms to the secular Syrian militias, which fought under the banner of the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Washington feared weapons shipments could be diverted to more radical elements fighting Assad inside Syria. But at the same time, the United States largely turned a blind eye as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and Turkey sent in arms and funds to Syrian fighters with only limited oversight. Significant amounts of these resources went to groups with ties to al Qaeda, including the Al Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), both of which marginalized Washington’s chosen allies in Syria. Their empowerment then fueled the spread of violent Islamist militias back into Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan as the war ground on. The fact that the United States never acted strengthened the very radical groups it had pledged to fight.

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  GENERAL SOLEIMANI, COMMANDER OF the Qods Force, increasingly visited Damascus to liaise with Syria’s security chiefs. He personally dispatched one of the IRGC’s top commanders, General Hossein Hamedani, to be his emissary in Damascus. Hamedani was among the top Iranian generals who had overseen the crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tehran in 2009, expertly using social media and the Internet to track the regime’s political opponents, both within Iran and outside it. Soleimani saw Hamedani’s experience and skills as directly applicable to the task of putting down Assad’s insurrection.

  Iran’s widening military presence inside Syria revealed itself publicly in August 2012, just a month after U.S. officials were predicting Assad’s fall was imminent. That month, Free Syrian Army rebels kidnapped forty-eight IRGC commanders and personnel in Damascus. Iran’s government first called the men Shiite pilgrims, but then later described them as “retired” Revolutionary Guard officers who had made the trip to Syria through an Iranian travel agency that was owned by the Guard, and said that they had been captured en route to the Damascus airport. Assad, under intense pressure from Tehran, eventually agreed to swap more than two thousand Free Syrian Army soldiers in order to get the IRGC staff back home.

  Later that summer, the Guard began deploying soldiers in Syria for the first time, according to Iranian military officials and Syrian rebels. The majority didn’t fight, but rather were used to repair equipment and guard military installations, though many filled in for Syrian officers who had defected. FSA commanders obtained identification cards and dog tags of Iranian soldiers they said had been captured or killed in battle. “Assad asked for them to be on the ground,” the head of the FSA’s intelligence operations, General Yahya Bittar, said in an interview at the time. “The Iranians are now part of Syria’s command-and-control structure.”

  The Revolutionary Guard and its allies deployed soldiers on a wider scale in the spring of 2013 as Arab states such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar increased their shipments of arms and cash to Syrian rebels, according to Syrian government officials and Hezbollah. The United States believed many of the opposition’s militias had ties to al Qaeda, which further eroded any desire in the White House to arm them. Tehran particularly focused on fortifying western and central Syria, regions that controlled access into Lebanon and the Hezbollah militiamen stationed there. That May, Hezbollah sent thousands of its elite fighters into the central Syrian city of Qusayr and almost single-handedly pushed out the rebels threatening their supply lines.

  The Guard and General Soleimani directly coordinated with Hezbollah in prosecuting this fight, sending military advisors to the city, according to rebel fighters and a journalist who saw them there. Hezbollah moved to take over the governance of Qusayr, and its commanders were charged with maintaining discipline among Assad’s forces. A Hezbollah commander who identified himself as Abu Ahmed spoke with Sam Dagher of The Wall Street Journal on a spring 2013 afternoon and appeared in complete control of the city. Driving in a pickup truck with Hezbollah fighters, he said only regime loyalists were allowed back into the city, and that they must be vetted by him personally.

  Much of the city was deserted and badly damaged. Dueling Sunni-Shiite graffiti covered many walls, sometimes referencing epic battles dating from the seventh century. Christians who lived in the town praised Hezbollah for restoring order and preventing the Sunni rebels from slaughtering Syria’s religious minorities. “We feel safe, we don’t want them to leave,” said a Christian resident of Qusayr, referring to Hezbollah.

  Commander Ahmed praised the discipline of Hezbollah fighters and their ability to make up for the strategic missteps of the Syrian military. He noted that one Syrian army officer rushed to capture two villages near Qusayr during the battle and proclaimed victory even before the territory was secured. Subsequently the Syrian units were besieged when the rebels reinforced their positions. Hezbollah initiated a “superb surgical procedure” to free the Syrian soldiers from the rebels, he said. “We could have butchered them all, but we did not, we let the wounded go,” Commander Ahmed said. He noted that Hezbollah’s chief, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, ordered that “mercy” be shown to the captured rebels, and added, “I would have not done it.”

  Hezbollah, and Syrian militias under its command, also led the Assad regime’s campaign to retake Homs, a strategic province bisecting the country. In coordinated strikes in the spring and summer of 2013, they pushed out rebels from most of the capital, Homs city. The Assad regime’s fighter jets and tanks pounded rebel-held sections of the city, while Hezbollah-led units fought street battles to push back the rebels, according to fighters who took part. “We did the heavy lifting,” said a nineteen-year-old Syrian militiaman, identified as Abdullah, who fought under a Hezbollah commander in a district called Khalidiya, that August. “If we take back all of Homs, the revolution is going to be completely finished.”

  The battle left many areas of Homs nearly destroyed. The domes and minarets of the city’s main mosque were riddled with bullet holes and marks left by mortar fire. Piles of debris and the twisted carcasses of cars lined the streets. An eight-story building was flattened, and mattresses, pieces of furniture, and people’s personal belongings protruded from the heap of rubble.

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  THE REVOLUTIONARY GUARD CONTINUED to supply the Assad regime with Shiite fighters from across the Mideast. Among the centers for Iran’s resupply was a training camp the IRGC established on the outskirts of Tehran, called Amir al-Momenin. The facility, kept secret from the Iranian public for years because of security concerns, had been used by the IRGC to train Iraqi militias fighting the American forces after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Now, every night dozens of buses with tinted windows carried recruits from Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan into the base, which was surrounded by quiet farmlands. Many entered Iran under the pretext of being religious pilgrims and later were sent to Syria via Iraq. The training at Amir al-Momenin focused on small arms fire, munitions, and religious doctrine. “They are told that the war in Syria is akin to Imam Hussein’s epic battle
for Shiite Islam in Karbala, and if they die, they will be martyrs of the highest rank,” said a Revolutionary Guard officer briefed on the running of the training camp. The Battle of Karbala, fought fourteen hundred years earlier, had been a rallying call for the Iranian regime and its Shiite allies across the Middle East, and now it was being used again.

  Members of two Iraqi militias, Kata’ib Hezbollah and Asaib Ahl al-Haq, said in interviews near Damascus that they had been deployed into Syria in greater numbers throughout 2013 to help stabilize Assad’s rule and protect Shiite mosques and shrines. Their members were seen patrolling sites near Damascus. Both groups were formed by the IRGC during the Iraq War and carried out some of the most sophisticated and lethal attacks on U.S. troops there. “Syria is the front line of resistance. We will support Syria until the end,” General Soleimani told Iranian state media in the summer of 2013.

  Soleimani’s presence in Syria showed that the Iranian regime would do almost anything to save the Assad regime and to maintain regional power.

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  AS THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION tracked the increase of Iranian support for Syria during 2013, the pressure on the White House to provide significant amounts of arms and training to the Free Syrian Army intensified. Washington’s key Mideast allies, particularly Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan, and the UAE, believed President Obama was essentially sitting on his hands while Iran secured another major strategic victory in the Middle East. In saving Assad, the Revolutionary Guard was holding on to a land bridge linking Iran’s borders to the Mediterranean via Iraq and Syria, Arab officials believed. Iran also continued to provide weapons and money to militias and political parties in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Bahrain, giving Tehran greater sway over the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. “They’re trying to reconstitute the Persian Empire in just a few years,” said a senior Jordanian official who tracked Tehran’s regional activities after 9/11. “And the U.S. policies are only helping the Iranians.”

  For the United States, matching the Iranians gun for gun was never really an option because of Obama’s aversion to being dragged into the conflict. The atrocities committed against civilians inside Syria were the worst the West had faced since the Balkan wars of the 1990s. And the Assad regime’s systematic killing of its opposition was reminiscent of Nazi war crimes. Political opponents were tortured inside government camps or medical facilities and tracked using numbers instead of their names. Sixty thousand people were estimated to be killed in the camps alone.

  Human rights groups increasingly charged the Assad regime with committing genocide against its own people. Some of President Obama’s closest aides, including National Security Advisor Susan Rice, who served in the Clinton administration’s State Department in the 1990s, and UN ambassador Samantha Power, were particularly sensitive to such accusations. Both had been critical of the Clinton administration’s refusal to intervene in Rwanda in 1994 to stop tribal killings that left between eight hundred thousand and one million people dead in a little over a hundred days.

  In 2012, the CIA established a small training facility for Syrian rebel fighters in Jordan in a bid to strengthen the performance of the opposition on the ground. The scale of the operation, however, was so minuscule that it was viewed as largely irrelevant by the Arab governments and Syrian rebel commanders who were briefed on it. The facility operated almost solely as a vetting house to ensure that the arms the Saudis and the Qataris were sending into Syria ended up in the hands of moderate Syrian fighters and not al Qaeda or ISIS. Washington’s refusal to use the training base to send significant arms to the Free Syrian Army, specifically shoulder-fired missiles aimed at taking down Syrian aircraft, meant that Assad and his Iranian backers were able to maintain their military superiority on the battlefield. Washington’s passivity left many Arab governments convinced the United States was secretly in league with Tehran. “We’ve seen almost nothing in terms of help from the Americans,” General Yahya, the FSA intelligence chief, told me in the summer of 2013. “The Iranians are the only ones who are really active in the war.”

  A major shift in American strategy appeared to be taking shape after the United States and other Western powers accused President Assad and his generals of using nerve gas on Syrian civilians in late August 2013. For months Israel, Syria’s rebel groups, and Arab governments had been amassing intelligence showing how the Syrian regime was using small amounts of weaponized gas to clear out rebel-controlled areas. The deaths associated with these attacks were low in number, but Assad’s opponents believed he was increasingly testing the international community’s resolve. Israel had traced around a half dozen of these small attacks in late 2012 and early 2013. President Obama had publicly stated that Damascus would be crossing a “red line” if it used weapons of mass destruction on its population, and could possibly face outside military retaliation. But the White House was largely silent about the deployment of these weapons, even as evidence of their use increased.

  The mood shifted early on the morning of August 21, 2013, when Western intelligence agencies and Syrian rebels tracked the regime’s bombardment of an opposition stronghold in the Damascus suburb of East Ghouta. The onslaught resulted in tons of mustard gas being dispersed on the local population within minutes, eventually leading to the deaths of nearly seventeen hundred Syrians. Videos of the victims captured on cellphones and video cameras showed women and children retching and gasping for air as the chemical agents seared their lungs. Very few of those afflicted—as few as fifty—were believed to be rebel fighters, according to the United Nations. The pressure on President Obama to enforce his red lines against Assad grew.

  The following two weeks marked the most important deliberations on foreign policy during President Obama’s first five years in office, according to U.S. and Arab officials who took part in them. The White House initially gave strong assurances to its Mideast allies and the rebels that the United States would strike Syria’s air force and missile batteries as part of a limited campaign to cripple Assad’s war machine. The White House believed the international community needed to send a strong warning to Syria and other rogue regimes that the use of chemical weapons wouldn’t go unpunished in the modern era. Israeli and Arab officials said they hoped the strikes would also send a signal to Iran that the United States was serious about the potential of using force to prevent Iran’s development of nuclear technologies.

  Senior Saudi and Emirati officials said they received assurances from the Americans during those two weeks that the strikes on Assad were imminent. Commanders of the Free Syrian Army, meanwhile, prepared to launch a much broader military operation in parallel with the U.S. attack in the hope of quickly overthrowing the Assad regime. Syria’s neighbors anticipated the U.S. onslaught with the hope it would put an end to the flood of refugees streaming across their borders, which was straining their resources.

  On a trip I conducted along the Turkish-Syrian border in August 2013, senior FSA commanders were frantically and excitedly sending bombing targets and coordinates to the Pentagon from their bases in Turkish cities such as Gaziantep and Reyhanli. They identified key regime air bases and munitions factories they argued should be hit, as well as Syrian command-and-control centers. They planned to sequence their attacks with the U.S. air war. “We are getting ready and mobilized for the strikes,” Abu Mohammad al-Attar, a Free Syrian Army commander, told me during a nighttime meeting at a hotel coffee shop in Gaziantep. He and other rebel leaders expressed concern that the Obama administration was more interested in punishing Assad for using chemical weapons than in seeking to topple his regime. But they remained optimistic that a major change in U.S. policy was at hand. “If the objective of the strikes is to collapse the regime, then there must be greater military and intelligence cooperation with the FSA,” he said.

  But just when Obama appeared ready to strike, the president reversed course. The White House officially cited the need for the administration to get congressional approval to launch military operations against the
Syrian regime. They said such a legislative process could take weeks. Senior U.S. officials, however, privately said the president was never 100 percent committed to hitting Assad because of his continuing worry about dragging the United States into another Middle East war. The president and his senior staff were also still wary of allying too closely with Syria’s rebels, given the presence of al Qaeda and other Sunni extremist groups within their ranks.

  At the eleventh hour, the administration inexplicably made a U-turn and used the Syrian conflict to increase its engagement with Iran and Russia, Assad’s principal backers. Even as the White House planned for military operations, the Obama administration was secretly holding talks with both Tehran and Moscow. U.S. and Iranian officials had already initiated the clandestine diplomacy on Tehran’s nuclear program through Oman when the chemical weapons attacks occurred. President Obama and Secretary Kerry also had separately begun discussing with Vladimir Putin and his top aides a diplomatic process aimed at peacefully dismantling Assad’s chemical weapons arsenal. The White House and Kremlin eventually agreed on such a deal. But it came at a significant cost—providing Assad a lease on life by giving him new legitimacy on the international stage. Iran’s closest Arab ally had in essence been saved by Obama’s reversal.

  Iranian officials briefed on the talks with the United States in the summer of 2013 said Tehran made it clear to the American delegation that the nuclear negotiations would be halted if the United States went ahead with its attack on Assad. Iran’s military and clerics would view such strikes as equivalent to the United States’ declaring war on Iran. “The Iranian diplomats said it wouldn’t be their decision to end the dialogue, but that support in Tehran for the negotiations would evaporate,” said a senior Iranian official briefed on the U.S.-Iranian diplomacy that August. “The Revolutionary Guard and the leader’s office would view this as another sign of the U.S.’s efforts to weaken the regime. They couldn’t lose Syria.”