IV. The Arab Spring: A New Phase of Iranian Proxy Warfare Strategy

In the decades following the Iranian revolution, Syria served both as a base of support for Iran’s most potent proxy Hezbollah and a territorial bridge that allowed Tehran to expand its strategic depth across the Middle East.¹ Syria was in effect Iran's "35th province," as Mehdi Taeb, the director of pro-Khamenei think tank Ammar Base, once put it, and if Assad’s Damascus fell, so too would Tehran.² The Arab Spring and the uprising against Bashar al-Assad’s government in Damascus in 2011, however, launched a new phase of Iranian proxy warfare strategy that saw not only a new managerial mode for Hezbollah but new roles for Afghan and Pakistani fighters.

As the conflict in Syria escalated, Iran, despite the harsh economic toll from sanctions imposed due to its nuclear program, progressively stepped up its support, spending billions to prop up Assad’s regime.³ In the early phases of the crisis, Iran deployed a Law Enforcement Forces commander to lead the mission, followed by Quds Force Operations and Training commander Mohsen Chizari.⁴ Syria dispatched teams of security and military officers for training on cyberwarfare and surveillance for training in Tehran.⁵ A Syrian officer who defected said that the Iranians were responsible for the arrest of many activists early on.⁶ Syria, said Ali Akbar Velayati, Khamenei’s foreign policy adviser, is the “golden ring of resistance” for Iran, and the Shia in the Middle East, and must be defended at all costs.⁷

At the beginning of Syria’s civil war in 2011, Iran’s military aid to Assad’s regime was largely covert, and Tehran strived to maintain a degree of plausible deniability.⁸ Initially Iran heavily censored coverage of the deteriorating security situation for Assad’s government and denied any military involvement. That changed after the U.S. Treasury issued several assessments in 2011 and 2012 detailing a number of arms embargo sanctions violations by Iranian airline companies. In May 2012, Quds Force commander Esmail Ghani openly acknowledged that Iranian forces were in the country serving in an advisory capacity and providing a transfer of experience to Syria.⁹

Throughout 2012, Iran progressively increased the number of advisers and operatives it sent to Syria and also provided forces loyal to Assad with training, weapons, communications, and internet surveillance equipment.¹⁰ Despite the extra support, Syria was, however, unable to staunch the flow of its massive manpower losses due to large-scale defections within the ranks of Syria’s security forces and high battlefield casualty numbers. Yet, the Quds Force, which was principally organized as an advisory train-and-equip force, was ill-prepared to take on a direct combat role in Syrian counterinsurgency operations.

Tehran, moreover, was unwilling to risk the potential escalation of retaliatory measures by Israel and the United States that the direct involvement of its own forces might trigger.¹¹ A new strategy was needed quickly and Soleimani turned to Hossein Hamedani, one of the Quds Force’s most experienced commanders, to roll out a plan for Iranian military assistance in Syria. During the 1970s under the Shah, Hamedani served in Iran’s airborne special forces, and after the revolution he played a crucial role in Khomeini’s violent suppression of the Kurdish insurgency.¹² Hamedani was subsequently on the frontlines for almost the entirety of the Iran-Iraq War.

He later led the Guard Corps' effort to crush the Green Movement in Tehran in the 2009 post-election protests.¹³ Years after the 2009 protests, Hamedani told Javan-e Hamedan weekly that he recruited and organized 5,000 thugs in three battalions to crack down on protests, which showed that "if we want to train mujahids we must bring such individuals who know their way with knives and blades."¹⁴ When, in January 2012, Hamedani arrived in Damascus with a new strategy in hand he encouraged Assad to apply similar techniques.¹⁵ Hamedani, however, soon encountered resistance from Syrian officials when he pushed to expand training to include urban warfare tactics, and Hamedani told Khamenei that he was unable to fulfill his mission there.¹⁶

Hamedani insisted that Assad’s best bet for survival was the formation of a homegrown Basij type militia force to help crush urban uprisings, but Syrian officials remained fixed on conventional warfare.¹⁷ After anti-Assad Syrian rebels took dozens of IRGC advisers hostage in August 2012, it was all the more evident that a new approach was urgently needed.¹⁸ Khamenei and Soleimani reassured Hamedani, telling him not to be discouraged: "Syria is sick, and it does not know it is sick… Syrian officials must be made to understand this sickness. If Syria refuses to go to the doctor, you force it to go to the doctor. If Syria refuses to take its medicine, you keep giving it medicine and make sure the medicine is taken until the sickness is cured.” ¹⁹

Hamedani eventually managed to convince his Syrian counterparts that a change was needed, and began fully training Syrian forces three months later.²⁰ Designated by Khamenei as the lead architect of Iran’s Syria strategy, Hamedani next turned his attention to crafting a more durable and comprehensive strategy for Syria and began working in consultation with Hezbollah’s chief Hasan Nasrallah. Nasrallah, in turn, acted as Iran’s official representative for Iran policy in Syria, and put Hezbollah in charge of managing day-to-day operations.²¹ By the summer and fall of 2013, scores of local recruits underwent intensive urban warfare training under the auspices of Iranian advised forces variously known early on as the People’s Army, Popular Defense Forces, and National Defense Forces.²²

Yet, while progress was made on some fronts, Russia’s entry into the war and progressive increase of deployments of military advisers hindered Iran’s ability to control strategic outcomes. The tug of war between Iran and Russia over how best to train and organize local paramilitary forces undercut Tehran’s influence and its ability to maintain plausible deniability.²³ In the fall of 2013, the BBC released a documentary that included video footage of an IRGC operational base near Aleppo taken by an IRGC videographer who had likely been sent to Syria to produce packaged propaganda, but was killed during a skirmish near the ancient city in August.²⁴ The subsequent escalation of U.S. sanctions and increasing financial involvement of Saudi Arabia and Turkey in backing their own proxies in Syria and other unstable parts of the Middle East in 2013 placed enormous strain on the Assad regime.²⁵ It was these events that paved the way in part for Iran’s reactivation of Quds Force networks in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and an aggressive push to backfill personnel gaps in the Syrian armed forces with the force of new recruits.