Authors: Matthew Levitt
Sometime in 2006, at the height of sectarian violence then engulfing Iraq, Gen. Soleimani traveled secretly to Baghdad. Only after he returned safely to Iran did US intelligence and military forces discover he had been right in their backyard.
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Washington’s reaction was furious. Ever since the April 2005 election, Iranian-sponsored Shi’a militants had intensified attacks targeting coalition forces in Iraq. Now, Soleimani’s confidence in his political and military proxies in Iraq was apparently so great that he felt secure paying a house call to Baghdad. Correspondingly, the Qods Force seemed to be riding high, deploying proxy groups in Iraq capable of striking at coalition forces with impunity and basking in Hezbollah’s self-declared victory against the Israel Defense Forces in the July 2006 war.
That same summer, the White House began a process of reviewing its policy toward Iranian meddling in Iraq. Over the course of 2006, coalition forces detained dozens of suspected Iranian operatives in a “catch and release” program intended to signal to Iran the coalition’s awareness of Tehran’s aggressive activities in Iraq. DNA samples collected surreptitiously from the Iranian detainees were added to a database before the detainees were released after three or four days in custody. According
to US intelligence, as many as 150 Iranian intelligence and IRGC operatives were deployed to Iraq at a time.
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“There were no costs for the Iranians,” a senior administration official commented, explaining the reason for the policy review. The resulting presidential directive, or “finding,” was signed by President Bush in November 2006 and authorized US forces to kill or capture Iranian operatives in Iraq. Coined “Counter Iranian Influence,” the initiative included measures to roll back Iranian successes in five different theaters from Lebanon to Afghanistan and isolate the regime in Tehran. In Lebanon, for example, the White House authorized the intelligence community to engage in broadened operations targeting Hezbollah’s engagement in a spectrum of activities called the Blue Game Matrix.
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In Iraq, the program to counter Iranian influence quickly bore fruit. The evening of December 19, 2006, a US military patrol stopped an official Iranian embassy vehicle in Baghdad and arrested three Iranians with diplomatic credentials and one Iraqi, presumably their driver. Two of the men were held for two days, the other two for four days.
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The more significant arrests, however, came just a few hours later in a predawn raid of the Baghdad compound of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of the SCIRI. US Special Forces detained ten men in this second raid, including two Iranians carrying diplomatic passports—passports later determined to have been issued under false identities. Neither of the Iranians, traveling in Iraq under aliases with false documents, was a diplomat in the traditional sense. In fact, they were important IRGC officials on a covert mission to Iraq. One, Mohsen Chizari, was the Qods Force’s third-highest ranking officer. The Iranians quickly realized that US forces were holding one of Qassem Soleimani’s most senior deputies.
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The evidence amounted to a “smoking gun,” in one American official’s description. “We found plans for attacks, phone numbers affiliated with Sunni bad guys, a lot of things that filled in the blanks on what these guys are up to.”
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Some of these detainees tried to destroy maps and other evidence as US Special Forces raided the house.
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The evidence the military collected in the raid included maps, detailed weapons lists, reports of weapons shipped into Iraq, organization charts, telephone records, computers, and “other sensitive intelligence information.”
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According to US officials, some of this intelligence “dealt explicitly with force-protection issues, including attacks on MNF-I [Multi-National Force–Iraq] forces.”
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In other words, the Iranians were in possession of intelligence about weapons being smuggled into Iraq from Iran and about attacks on the Multi-National Force–Iraq by Tehran’s proxy militias in Iraq.
Aside from Mohsen Chizari’s high rank within the Qods Force, his capture was significant for underscoring a reality long known by the coalition, but only through extremely sensitive intelligence: that Iran was training Iraqi Shi’a militias to attack coalition forces and stoke sectarian tensions in Iraq. Further, this raid and others like it led US officials to refer to “a super-secret group called Department 9000,” a part of the Qods Force that provided guidance and support to Iraqi insurgents and coordinated meetings between them and the IRGC.
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In other words, the Ramazan Corps had been exposed.
Chizari’s arrest clearly unnerved Iran. Over the next few days, an Iraqi official noted, the Iranian ambassador to Iraq desperately ran “around from office to office,” in an effort to secure Chizari’s release.
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Iraqi leaders were also upset. The Iranians had reportedly come to Iraq at the invitation of President Jalal Talabani, leader of a prominent Iraqi Kurdish group. Under intense pressure from the Iraqis, the US military transferred the Iranian detainees to Iraqi custody. Days later they were “expelled” home to Iran, much to the frustration and dismay of US officials.
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A few days later, on January 11, 2007, former CIA director R. James Woolsey Jr. and former undersecretary of state Thomas Pickering appeared before the US House Foreign Affairs Committee to testify on “The Next Steps in the Iran Crisis.” Just the day before, President Bush had given a national address, noting, “Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops.”
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Then, just a few hours before the hearing, US troops arrested six more Iranians in an Iranian diplomatic office in Irbil in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq. One individual was quickly released, but the other five were determined to be IRGC members, not diplomats. Publicly, the Iranian liaison office in Irbil processed papers for Iraqis attempting to travel to Iran. But intelligence indicated it doubled as a Qods Force base of operations. As US Special Forces entered, they found the Iranians frantically flushing documents down a toilet. Perhaps trying to pass themselves off as something other than Iranian Qods Force officers, the Iranians had recently shaved their heads. Soldiers carted away still more documents and computers for analysis, just as they had a few days earlier in Baghdad.
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Mining data on seized cell phones indicated the officers were in direct contact with a wide array of insurgent groups. Analysts would find in the seized materials and devices evidence tying the Iranian officers to military operations carried out not only by Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army in places like Kirkuk but also by the al-Qaeda-affiliated Ansar al-Sunna group targeting Iraqi Kurds.
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A much clearer picture of Iran’s policy of inserting “managed chaos” into Iraq was quickly emerging. Iran, US, and UK policymakers and intelligence officials concurred, hoped to raise the cost of US intervention in Iraq with an eye toward making Washington think twice about pursuing regime change elsewhere, especially in Tehran. While Iran insisted the five detained men held diplomatic immunity and demanded their release, the military held onto the five Qods Force operatives until May 2009. The Baghdad and Irbil raids came like a one-two punch, forcing the Iranians to reconsider the wisdom of putting their own people on the line in Iraq. According to one American military commander, with the Baghdad and Irbil raids the Iranians “realized we were coming after them. The Iranians didn’t like doing much dirty work or getting their hands dirty. A lot of them would prefer the Arabs to do the dying.”
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To that end, Tehran prioritized sending sophisticated weapons—especially explosively formed penetrators (EFPs)—to militants in Iraq. The uptick in attacks led US officials to decide the time had come to expose the breadth and lethality of Iranian arms smuggled to Iraqi Shi’a militias.
The press briefing was prepared for Sunday, February 11, 2007, in Baghdad’s Green Zone. Laid out on the table were EFP launchers and their shaped metal
charges, mortar shells, rocket-propelled grenades, and the false identification cards found on two of the Qods Force officials captured in the Irbil raid a month earlier. According to US officials, serial numbers on some of the grenades indicated they were manufactured in Iran in 2006.
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The centerpiece of the weapons spread was the EFP, a deceptively simple-looking cylinder of PVC piping about eight inches long. What made the weapon so deadly was the concave-shaped soft metal slug, often made out of copper, launched with such force that it could penetrate the armor of a tank or Humvee. The briefing was more than just a show-and-tell, however. Though unable to share the intelligence underpinning the charge, the military and intelligence briefers insisted the Qods Force was responsible for the flow of arms to Shi’a militia groups. “We have been able to determine that this material, especially on the EFP level, is coming from the IRGC–Qods Force,” the intelligence analyst stated. In reality, they report directly to the “supreme leader,” a reference to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
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The direction for this arming and smuggling operation, the analyst added, was “coming from the highest levels of the Iranian government.”
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In September 2007, US forces in Iraqi Kurdistan arrested Mahmoud Farhadi, a “very senior member of the Qods Force.” Posing as an Iranian trade representative, Farhadi’s actual mission involved facilitating the transport of weapons into Iraq, according to a US military spokesman. In particular, he oversaw the smuggling of “weapons, people and money” across the border from Iran. “Multiple sources implicate Farhadi in providing weapon[s] to Iraqi criminal elements and surrogate[s] of Iran. We also know that for more than a decade he was involved in Iranian intelligence operation[s] in Iraq.”
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Officials were not surprised. In August 2004, for example, Qods Force Brig. Gen. Ahmed Foruzandeh drove a cache of explosives and other materials specifically designated for use in suicide bombings across the border into Iraq, according to US government information. In another case, he supplied a Shi’a militia with a specific target to hit.
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The capture of senior Qods Force officials, and the public airing of evidence demonstrating Iranian agents were arming and training Iraqi Shi’a extremists, embarrassed Tehran and appears to have accelerated Iran’s efforts to put an Arab face on this mission. Using Hezbollah offered multiple advantages, not least the shared language of Lebanese Hezbollah operatives and Iraqi militants, Arabic. Farsi-speaking Iranian trainers could not communicate with their trainees as effectively, aside from the perception by some Iraqis that their Iranian trainers were aloof and patronizing. Reliable polling data would later reveal that Iranian intervention in Iraq faced “substantial popular resentment even among Iraqi Shiites, who are wrongly presumed to share Iran’s interests due to their common sectarian background.”
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The use by Hezbollah of Iranian-manufactured EFPs in Lebanon, before and during the July 2006 war, positioned Hezbollah operatives with in-the-field experience as ideal candidates to train Iraqi Shi’a in deploying this particular weapon.
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A number of Iraqi Shi’a militants reportedly observed and trained alongside Hezbollah militants in Lebanon during the 2006 war, according to US intelligence.
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Having seen Hezbollah in action, they would have been well situated to seek training from their Lebanese compatriots in the use of EFPs and other weapons and tactics.
The advantages of enlisting Hezbollah operatives as middlemen soon spurred action. But multinational forces would appreciate the full scope of this shift only when they arrested Ali Moussa Daqduq, a senior Hezbollah official, along with key leaders of the Special Groups, in a Basra raid on March 20, 2007.
“Generally,” US military intelligence assessed in 2010, the Qods Force “directs and supports groups actually executing attacks, thereby maintaining plausible deniability within the international community.”
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This assessment proved as true in Iraq as it long had been in Lebanon. In Lebanon, the IRGC helped create Hezbollah. In Iraq, the Revolutionary Guards would do much the same for Iraqi Shi’a militias, sometimes on their own but often using Hezbollah to provide training and operational supervision on its behalf.
A variety of militant Shi’a groups in Iraq have benefited from Iranian and Hezbollah training and support, with the nature and extent of that support changing over time as these groups themselves evolved. Some groups supported by Iran, like SCIRI and the Dawa Party, focused primarily on establishing political influence in Iraq. And although Iran has supported both militant and political activities in Iraq, depending on its needs and assessments at a given time, its fundamental long-term goal has been establishing political influence in the country. At times, Iran appears to have temporarily curtailed support for militant activities when violence might undermine its political goals in Iraq, such as in the period before the January 2005 elections.
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But even as it supported political allies like SCIRI and Moqtada al-Sadr, Iran also backed the Badr Corps and Mahdi Army, the groups’ respective military wings. When the renamed Badr Organization entered politics, Iran encouraged extremist militants to splinter off and form their own militant groups, echoing Iran’s encouragement of Shi’a radicals years before to split from the Amal Party in Lebanon to form Hezbollah.
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Both Mustafa al-Sheibani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis broke with Badr and founded terrorist groups that played central roles in Iran’s proxy networks.
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In 2005, when al-Sadr turned similarly to politics, radical members of his Mahdi Army, like Qais al-Khazali, who created Asaib Ahl al-Haq, broke away to form splinter groups of their own, too.