Qasem Soleimani’s ‘ring of fire’ strategic concept envisioned surrounding Israel with IRGC units—in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, Iraq, and Yemen—that are steadily equipped with better and better missiles to threaten Jewish population centres and the Israeli economy, making Israeli life unliveable as part of a grinding war of attrition that ends in Israel’s destruction. Analyst Kyle Orton argues that although this Iranian attack was ‘essentially a symbolic episode’ choreographed with the US not to be military significant, the pressure on Israel from the West not to retaliate has shifted the Overton window yet again. The view that Israel was supposed to just live with rocket fire on her civilians from Gaza was long ago normalised, and the idea has now entered the mainstream of respectable Western opinion that an enemy State can openly fire hundreds of drones, cruise and ballistic missiles at Israel and Israel should absorb this without response. This will have lasting effects whether or not Israel defies this pressure.
Iran’s massive attack on Israel in the early hours of 14 April has garnered a lot of attention, and understandably so. The Islamic Republic attacking the Jewish State from Iranian territory is unprecedented, and it is likely to incur an equally unprecedented response, an overt Israeli attack into Iran, which might well have taken place by the time you read this. It is important to keep things in proportion, though. The coverage raising the spectre of ‘World War Three’ is a hysterical misreading of these events specifically, and has the further deleterious effect of misdirecting analytical resources onto what is essentially a symbolic episode, while missing the more important dynamics that characterise the Israel-Iran war.
IRAN’S ATTACK ON ISRAEL
The clerical regime in Iran put itself in a political position where it had to carry out the attack on Israel after the Israelis struck at the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ (IRGC) terrorist infrastructure in Syria on 1 April. The airstrike, which killed a senior Quds Force operative, Mohammad Reza Zahedi, and his deputy, Mohammad Hadi Haji-Rahimi, demolished an annex building to the Iranian Consulate in Damascus, and Tehran declared itself outraged at ‘this despicable and humiliating attack [that] violates the immunity of diplomatic personnel and premises’.
Diplomatic immunity, of course, ceases to apply when facilities are being used by terrorists, and it is audacious in the extreme for the clerical regime to claim it is a guardian of diplomatic norms. One of the first acts of the Islamic Revolution when it took over Iran in 1979 was to storm the U.S. Embassy and hold its staff hostage for more than a year, a plain statement that the theocracy did not consider itself bound by existing international convention. In the forty-five years since, the Islamic Republic has carried out terrorism against Embassies all over the world and persistently used Iranian diplomatic facilities to orchestrate terrorism. The two threads often combine, as seen with the Argentine court ruling earlier this month, which found that Iran was behind the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992, an attack that was run out of the Iranian Embassy.
Nonetheless, the Iranian regime had set out a rhetorical stance where attacking the Consulate was ‘as if [the Israelis] have attacked our soil’, and after telegraphing its intention to launch a direct attack on Israel for two weeks, it did so, with 350 missiles and drones. Israel was helped by intelligence from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in making its preparations, and fighter jets from America, Britain, and Jordan brought down a third of the projectiles before they reached Israeli territory. Most of Iran’s ordnance was targeted at the lightly-populated Golan Heights and Negev desert. Of the five Iranian missiles that made it through Israel’s air defence network, four landed in the Negev, hitting the Nevatim Airbase, where Israel’s F-35s are based. Nevatim seems to have been the main target because the airstrike that killed General Zahedi was carried out by an F-35. There was a single casualty, a seven-year-old Israeli Arab girl struck by shrapnel in a Bedouin village in the Negev, currently undergoing surgeries to save her life.
The Iranian attack might have been larger in scale than Israel was expecting, but overall the effect was somewhat embarrassing for Iran. About half the missiles did not launch or failed in flight, for instance, and a 98 per cent interception rate is difficult to spin as a success from any angle. The Iranians approached the U.S. through Oman with assurances that the then-impending attack on Israel was to be done in a way that ‘aims to avoid major escalation’, a message the Iranians evidently wished the Americans to transmit to Israel. This echoes the Iranian response after the U.S. killed Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani in January 2020: the clerical regime informed President Donald Trump ahead of time that a token barrage of missiles would be launched against the U.S.’s Ayn al-Asad Airbase in Iraq.
That said, what this all makes clear is that the Iranian attack was not intended to be militarily significant. The intent was symbolic, and the Iranians might well gain from that. While several Arab governments assisted Israel, and there has been some mockery of Iran in the Turkish and Arab press because of the extended choreography leading up to an ultimately impotent attack, there is a definite current in regional popular sentiment that admires Iran for openly confronting Israel and resents the ‘collaboration’ of their own governments with the ‘Zionist Entity’. As importantly, the public official pressure on Israel from the West not to retaliate has already shifted the Overton window yet again: the view that Israel was supposed to just live with rocket fire on her civilians from Gaza was long ago normalised, and the idea has now entered the mainstream of respectable Western opinion that an enemy State can openly fire hundreds of drones, cruise and ballistic missiles at Israel and Israel should absorb this without response. This will have lasting effects whether or not Israel defies this pressure.
Arguably the most important political ramification is the Islamic Republic stepping out from behind its ‘proxies’—always a problematic term, as we shall see. It is true, as Phillip Smyth, an expert on the Iranian Shi’a militias, pointed out, that this ‘stopped being a shadow war over a decade ago’, and the zombie analysis presenting it as such has staggered on primarily because it was easier for Western governments to embrace the pretence. We have seen this continue up to the present, with the tortured attempts by the U.S. and even Israel to avoid recognising that the 7 October pogrom was Iran’s handiwork because they want to keep the war contained to Gaza. The logic of accepting that Hamas is an IRGC unit would mean the response should not be limited to uprooting the IRGC base in Gaza, but punishing the people in Tehran who supplied the training, money, and orders. Still, as obvious as this has been for some time, Iran has now taken an irrevocable step in making this ‘compartmentalisation’ more difficult to sustain, and unintentionally offered the West a chance for a course correction.
To see the implications of admitting that ‘compartmentalisation’ between Iran and its militias is a sham, we can look at Iraq, one of three countries—the others were Syria and Yemen—outside Iran from which the IRGC fired ordnance at Israel.
IRAN’S LONG MARCH THROUGH IRAQI INSTITUTIONS
During the long Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), which broke out less than two years after the Iranian Revolution had brought Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power, many Iraqi Arab Shi’is fought for their country, their national and ethnic identity outweighing their qualms about the brutality of a Sunni-dominated Ba’thi regime that was already showing signs of the sectarianism that would become so pronounced in the 1990s. Not all Iraqi Shi’is thought this way, however. Khomeini had triumphed in a ‘proper’ Revolution, akin to the French and Russian Revolutions, and the first thing such systems do is try to create sister republics. The spread of Khomeinism, formally velayat-e faqih (or wilayat al-faqih in Arabic), among Iraqi Shi’is had led to political unrest even before the Iranian Revolution and in its aftermath there been a counter-part uprising in Iraq in May 1979. Eliminating the perceived source of domestic subversion was a key factor in Saddam Hussein’s decision to invade Iran in September 1980, and the reason he attracted so much support from regional States. The war would show the threat was not wholly imaginary.
The IRGC established the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) in 1982 as an umbrella organisation for Iraqi Shi’is who had adopted Khomeinist ideology. SCIRI had an armed wing, the Badr Corps—the Badr Organisation since it separated from SCIRI in 2012—made up of some small Iran-backed Iraqi anti-Saddam Shi’a groups that had existed before the war, both political outfits and terrorist units, and many were Shi’a conscripts who had either defected when they got the chance or been captured and turned in Iranian prisons.
Badr was fully integrated into the IRGC. Its leader since 2002, Hadi al-Ameri, makes no bones about his loyalty to the Iranian Supreme Leader, and boasted of his close friendship with Soleimani. Badr fought as part of the IRGC alongside the Iranian regular army (Artesh) in the war with Iraq, it partook in the Shi’a rebellion inside Iraq in March 1991 after Saddam was evicted from Kuwait, and throughout the 1990s was used by Iran to infiltrate and recruit in southern Iraq, where Badr waged a low-level insurgency right up until the Saddam regime came down.
When the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq removed Saddam, Badr was well-placed to be the leading edge as Iran immediately began entrenching its control in the Shi’a areas of southern Iraq and in Baghdad. Badr had many of its members reflagged as members of the nascent Iraqi security forces, quickly taking effective control of the Interior Ministry, a useful position from which to wage sectarian civil war and oversee the expulsion of Sunni Arabs from Baghdad in 2006-07, and Badr was the seedbed of the other ‘Special Groups’, the Shi’a jihadist units the IRGC created that killed hundreds of Western soldiers and thousands of Iraqi civilians.
The Western Coalition was consumed with the problem of the Sunni insurgency, the combined forces of the Saddamist remnants and the then-Al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic State movement that was in Iraq before they arrived, and did not notice that under their noses an IRGC ‘Deep State’ had been set up that really ran the show in the New Iraq. Even once this realisation set in, the Coalition tried to compartmentalise. On the one hand, the extra-legal IRGC jihadists would be fought on the battlefield, and, after the infamous January 2007 kidnapping and murder of U.S. soldiers from a base in Karbala, there were several ostentatious arrests of Iranian IRGC officers to try to have the Iranians rein themselves in. On the other hand, the U.S. would in effect work with Iran in the formation and functioning of Iraq’s government and ‘official’ institutions, believing that any effort to too-vigorously combat Iranian influence at the centre would destabilise an already fragile State amid raging violence throughout the country and possibly collapse the whole enterprise.
The overarching problem by 2007 was that the dominant Iraqi political forces were Shi’a parties closely tied to Iran. Eliminating Iranian influence in Baghdad would have been tantamount to a second regime-change, in the middle of a terrifying war with an Islamic State movement that had by then eclipsed the Saddamists in the insurgency and taken serious steps toward occupying and governing multiple provinces in central and western Iraq.
The Dawa Party, for instance, which in some form has led Iraq for most of the post-Saddam era, was drawn into the orbit of the Iranian revolutionary clergy in the early 1970s, forming part of the militant network that would capture Iran in 1979: thereafter, its members would work under the banner of the IRGC in Iran, Hizballah in Lebanon, and Dawa in Iraq, but it remained a singular network ‘with the same leadership and goals that shift[ed] the same personnel and resources to various fronts of its transnational jihad under different aliases’. This structure makes the description of Hizballah or the Iraqi Shi’a militias as IRGC ‘proxies’ actively misleading; they are the IRGC. This is not an academic point; such conceptual confusion has real-world consequences. The U.S. belief that Dawa was fundamentally Iraqi, with some Iranian support, led to an attempt to ‘constructively engage’ it, while fighting the IRGC militias. But this was a fantasy. Dawa was part of the same fluid transnational IRGC Network that was taking Iraqi recruits for the militias to train in Iran and Lebanon, and sending ‘Hizballah’ embeds—specifically from its so-called Unit 3800—into Iraq to play a significant role on the ground directing the militias.
In December 2010, the fictional distinctions between the Iraqi government and the IRGC became more difficult to uphold when Al-Ameri was made Transport Minister. Within months, Al-Ameri was using his position to send IRGC resources into Syria to assist and ultimately capture the Syrian State of Bashar al-Assad as it fought an increasingly armed rebellion. The Islamic Republic does not recognise the region’s borders any more than the Islamic State does, and soon mobilised a full-scale international Shi’a jihad to save Assad. The bulk of the IRGC’s legions sent to Syria were from the ‘Iraqi’ militias, but recruits came from as far away as the Ivory Coast. By 2013, the tide had turned in Assad’s favour in Syria, and Iran had control of a contiguous imperial sphere that included Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. Gaza, of course, had been in IRGC hands through HAMAS and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) since 2007. The IRGC jihadists using the name ‘Ansarallah’ or ‘the Huthis’ took the Yemeni capital in 2014, adding that country to the Islamic Revolution’s roster.
The Islamic State overrunning much of central and western Iraq in June 2014 and proclaiming their ‘caliphate’ provided cover for the final stage of Iran’s takeover of the Iraqi State. The most senior Shi’a cleric in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, issued a fatwa calling for volunteers to fight ISIS, and these volunteers were then supposedly organised into a new formation called al-Hashd al-Shabi. In reality, the Hashd concept originated months earlier, directed by Qassem Soleimani, and in practice the Hashd was entirely controlled at the leadership level by the IRGC, with most of its ranks filled out by the ‘Special Groups’ that had already started redeploying from Syria to Iraq as the danger signs gathered when ISIS took over Fallujah in January 2014.
The de facto Hashd commander was Jamal al-Ibrahimi (Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis), an Iraqi by birth but with no nationalist loyalty, an IRGC officer for decades and Soleimani’s deputy. The U.S. acted as the Hashd’s air force in the anti-ISIS war, but the U.S. got little credit for this: Soleimani regularly appeared on the frontlines and Iranian-fostered conspiracy theories that the Americans (and the Jews) were behind ISIS gained traction. Once the ISIS crisis passed, the Hashd was not disbanded. Instead, the Hashd cashed in the prestige it had earned from many Iraqis as the ‘saviour’ of the country to become a legal part of the Iraqi State, a formation that was at once parallel to, had overlapping membership with, and was more powerful than the official institutions—the IRGC template to the letter, seen already in Iran, Lebanon, and Yemen. Al-Ibrahimi was killed alongside Soleimani by the U.S. in January 2020. The hopes this would destabilise the IRGC Network came to naught. The system Soleimani built did not depend on one man for its durability.
CONCLUSION
Thus, the U.S. and her allies with troops remaining in Iraq to hold ISIS down are there formally at the invitation of—and with the intention of protecting—an Iraqi government that is a keystone in the IRGC Empire. As is well-known, the IRGC controls most of the Iranian economy. Less often remarked upon is the IRGC control of large swathes of the Iraqi economy, which is to say the oil industry, giving the Iranian regime access to billions of dollars, rendering the sanctions on Iran moot and providing an enormous slush fund that can be diverted to whichever front(s) of the IRGC jihad are in need at any moment. Soleimani’s ‘ring of fire’ strategic concept envisioned surrounding Israel with IRGC units—in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, Iraq, and Yemen—that are steadily equipped with better and better missiles to threaten Jewish population centres and the Israeli economy, making Israeli life unliveable as part of a grinding war of attrition that ends in Israel’s destruction. Money from Iraq is essential to the ‘ring of fire’ strategy, and Soleimani’s successor, Esmail Qaani, has put it to good use, furthering the coordination within the IRGC Network.
Despite this situation, the day after Iran’s attack on Israel, the Iran-appointed Prime Minister of Iraq was received in Washington, D.C., the justification being that this somehow allows the U.S. to compete with Iran for influence over the Iraqi government. Unsurprisingly, since this is one problem with multiple theatres, the Iraq problem has very close analogues, especially in Lebanon, where the IRGC first successfully replicated the Islamic Revolution model it had imposed upon Iran. The West has continued to fund the Lebanese State, and train-and-equip the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), despite the IRGC/Hizballah controlling both, on the premise that this will weaken Hizballah and ultimately lead to the restoration of Lebanese sovereignty—by a mechanism and at a time undisclosed. That this game has been played for decades with no identifiable results does not inspire much confidence that reality will intrude on Iraq policy any time soon.
If reality is ever allowed to intrude, the primary corrective needed is to develop a strategy equal to Iran’s, which has for decades kept all of the moving pieces pushing in the same direction, never losing sight of the central objective: expanding the reach of the Islamic Revolution. As I wrote for Fathom three years ago, Israel has managed to cripple the IRGC’s foreign terrorist apparatus, yet this tactical victory had been combined with a dangerous complacency nearer to home. The ‘ring of fire’ had been visibly tightening for years by then, but distorted perceptions of, for example, the effectiveness and deterrence value of the airstrike campaign in Syria, not to mention the ‘purchase of quiet‘ in Gaza, had induced an unwillingness to take the initiative, which was only postponing—and making more difficult and costly—an inevitable confrontation. Israel seems to some extent to have understood the error now, even if public rhetoric remains frozen in the former paradigm. The West shows no such inclination: visible crises like the 7 October pogrom and the wave of piracy off the Yemeni coast continue to be treated as separate issues; there is not even a discussion of formulating a strategy that would integrate policy for Gaza and Yemen with policy for Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon; and no mention whatever of dealing with the problems at source, in Tehran. Only when countering Iran’s Islamist imperialism is front-and-centre in guiding Middle East policy will a corner have been turned. The exchange of missiles is a sideshow to that.
