Authors: Matthew Levitt
Two years later, when British special forces detained Ali Moussa Daqduq, the Hezbollah official, along with Qais al-Khazali and his brother Laith, they would find a document detailing a layered Iranian strategy to develop three distinct but overlapping categories of proxy groups. Iran wanted its proxies to vary in size and mission, with larger groups focusing on building grassroots support through political and social movements and using violence only intermittently as a means to secure political influence. Smaller groups would make more reliable militant proxies, focused as they were on securing social influence through violence alone. Still smaller, more radical groups would receive more sophisticated training and weapons.
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Iran stuck to this strategy and in 2007, when even the League of the Righteous began
engaging in Iraqi politics, formed yet another Special Group, Kata’ab Hezbollah (Hezbollah Brigades), which received the most sophisticated training and sensitive equipment. An Iraqi group with reported ties to longtime Dawa operative and Qods Force adviser Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the Hezbollah Brigades was distinct from Lebanese Hezbollah but would develop especially close ties with its Lebanese namesake.
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Mirroring the creation of Unit 1800, a unit dedicated to supporting Palestinian terrorist groups and targeting Israel, Hezbollah created Unit 3800, a unit dedicated to supporting Iraqi Shi’a terrorist groups targeting multinational forces in Iraq.
The unit, established by Nasrallah at the request of Iran, trained and advised Iraqi militant groups.
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Almost immediately following the US invasion of Iraq, reports emerged indicating Hezbollah operatives were reaching out to establish ties to Iraqi Shi’a groups. A July 29, 2003, US intelligence report citing Israeli military intelligence stated that Hezbollah “military activists” were trying to make contact with Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army. By late August they had succeeded, according to a report prepared by a US military analyst. Based on information from a source with “direct access to the reported information,” the report claimed Hezbollah had assembled a team of thirty to forty operatives in Najaf “in support of Moqtada Sadr’s Shia paramilitary group.” Hezbollah was both recruiting and training new members of the Mahdi Army, the report added.
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More reports documenting Hezbollah’s then-still-small presence followed, including one citing multiple sources that said Hezbollah was “buying rocket-propelled grenades … antitank missiles” and other weapons for the Mahdi Army. Hezbollah’s relationship with al-Sadr and his militia were not seen as ad hoc ties between individual Hezbollah and Mahdi Army members but as decisions made at the top of the respective organizations. A US Army report noted that “reporting also confirms the relationship between … Sadr and Hassan Nasrallah.” According to unconfirmed information, the report added, a senior adviser to Nasrallah delivered funds to al-Sadr.
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The connection rings true, given that “al-Sadr sought to model his organization on Lebanese Hezbollah, combining a political party with an armed militia and an organization providing social services.”
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The American and Israeli intelligence services were not the only ones investigating Iran and Hezbollah’s support to Shi’a militant groups at the time. In fact, one of the most prolific sources was also one of the most controversial: the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), the Iranian exile group deeply and sometimes violently committed to the overthrow of the regime in Tehran. While the MEK has a track record of collecting critical intelligence later proven to be surprisingly accurate, it remained a US-designated terrorist group until September 2012 (it had already been removed from the European Union and British lists).
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The gist of the MEK’s reporting on Hezbollah in Iraq would be corroborated by other sources. According to the MEK, some 800 Hezbollah operatives were on the ground in Iraq by January 2004, including assassination teams.
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According to other MEK reports, nearly 100 Hezbollah members—including both “agents and clerics”—infiltrated postwar Iraq at Iran’s behest. Following its established modus
operandi in Lebanon, Hezbollah reportedly established charitable organizations in Iraq “to create a favorable environment for recruiting.”
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As early as October 2003, Israeli intelligence also warned their American counterparts that according to their information Hezbollah—at Iran’s instruction—intended to help set up a “resistance movement,” likely in the group’s own image, that could conduct mass casualty attacks.
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Watching the phenomenon, the CIA reported in November 2003 not to have seen a “major influx” of Hezbollah operatives in the intervening months. “Hezbollah has moved to establish a presence inside Iraq,” one administration official said, “but it isn’t clear from the intelligence reports what their intent is.”
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It was clear, however, that they were traveling through Syria and crossing the long and porous Syrian-Iraqi border to gain entry to Iraq. In November 2003, Israel’s defense minister Shaul Mofaz went public with information that a wide range of insurgents—from Sunnis affiliated with al-Qaeda to Shi’a tied to Hezbollah—were crossing Syria to fight coalition forces in Iraq.
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A few months later, American officials came to the same conclusion, noting that the Syrian regime was believed to be knowingly allowing their passage through Syrian territory, supporting an Iranian initiative to inject battle-hardened foreign fighters into Iraq.
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By early 2005, the presence of Hezbollah operatives in Iraq would become an open secret when Iraqi interior minister Falah al-Naquib announced the arrest of eighteen Lebanese Hezbollah members on terrorism charges.
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That summer, US military officials noted that Abu Mustafa al-Sheibani, the former Badr Corps commander, headed a network of Iraqi Shi’a insurgents created by the IRGC’s Qods Force. Based out of Iran, Sheibani’s express goal was targeting US and coalition forces in Iraq, often employing a new, more lethal type of EFP based on a Hezbollah design. A Sheibani network device reportedly killed three British soldiers in Iraq in July 2005 and was responsible for at least thirty-seven bombing attacks in the first half of 2005 alone. According to US officials, Sheibani’s network of some 280 operatives was believed to train in Lebanon, in Baghdad’s Sadr City, and, in an apparently veiled reference to Iran, “in another country.”
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In London, British prime minister Tony Blair cited evidence linking Iran and Hezbollah to recent bombings in which British soldiers were killed in Iraq by a new type of explosive device. “The particular nature of those devices lead us either to Iranian elements or to Hezbollah, because they are similar to the devices used by Hezbollah, that is funded and supported by Iran,” he noted.
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Suddenly, Iran and Hezbollah’s training and weapons smuggling programs had become a priority issue for coalition forces. Still two more years would pass before coalition forces would learn that sometime in 2005 “senior Lebanese Hezbollah leadership” directed an experienced Hezbollah commander “to go to Iran and work with the Qods Force to train Iraqi extremists.”
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Hezbollah was about to accelerate its Unit 3800 mission in Iraq, with deadly consequences.
Until this point, Hezbollah’s ties were primarily with Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, for which Hezbollah provided expertise and training. But the formation of a
new Iraqi government in April 2005 brought Iran’s Shi’a allies, SCIRI and the Dawa Party, into key leadership positions. Already in 2004, splits had begun to develop within the Mahdi Army, providing Iran and Hezbollah with a variety of new splinter groups—at this point more akin to neighborhood gangs than full-fledged militias—with which they could partner. For some of these splinter groups, al-Sadr’s decision to align his movement with SCIRI and the Dawa Party under the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) umbrella for the upcoming General Assembly election in December 2005 was a step too far. Though Sadr’s political bloc gained control of key government ministries and therefore provided new sources of income and patronage, some Mahdi Army fighters fiercely opposed the movement’s turn to politics.
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Meanwhile, Iran saw in the Mahdi Army splinter groups—later known as the Special Groups—an opportunity to reproduce the successful Hezbollah model from Lebanon, but with an eye toward the unique political and social realities in Iraq.
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Beyond wanting to maintain plausible deniability for attacks in Iraq, Iranian leaders viewed Iraqi Shi’a groups as a mechanism through which they could influence Iraqi politics without arousing fears among Iraqi Shi’a and Sunnis alike that Iran, a longtime enemy of Iraq, still held animus and hostile intentions toward the new Iraqi government. Since direct Iranian support for Shi’a militants aroused concerns among Iraqis about Iran’s long-term intentions, Lebanese (Arab) Hezbollah made an attractive proxy for Iranian support to Shi’a Iraqi militants. Some 100 Shi’a militants traveled to Lebanon in December 2005 for military training. “They didn’t teach us anything about suicide bombings, they showed us real tactics and taught our snipers,” one trainee commented.
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In early 2006, reports emerged that Imad Mughniyeh himselfwas seen in Iraq, in the southern city of Basra, organizing Mahdi Army fighters’ travel to Iran for military training. By April, he had reportedly returned to Lebanon, where his skills were needed to plan the July 2006 kidnapping of Israeli soldiers that led to Hezbollah’s war with Israel later that month. By some accounts, this visit would not have been Mughniyeh’s first in Iraq. One of the many variations of Mughniyeh’s biography, this one promoted by Iranian military leaders, has him completing three months of basic training in Iran in the early 1980s and then traveling “with other Lebanese young men to the Iranian front and [taking] part in several daring operations behind Iraqi lines.”
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Whether or not Mughniyeh traveled to Iraq in 2006, by then American intelligence sources, as well as information gleaned from interviews with detainees in Iraq, revealed without a doubt that Hezbollah was training members of the Mahdi Army. A small number of Hezbollah trainers visited Iraq, according to a senior American intelligence official, but large-scale training for 1,000 to 2,000 Mahdi Army fighters took place in Lebanon. A midlevel Mahdi Army commander corroborated the US intelligence in summer 2006, when he conceded that some 300 Mahdi Army fighters were sent to Lebanon, apparently to fight alongside Hezbollah during the July 2006 war. “They are the best-trained fighters in the Mahdi Army,” he added.
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Meanwhile, back in Baghdad, hundreds of armed Shi’a militants marched in
support of Hezbollah during the war with Israel. Heading into weekly Friday prayers, they chanted, “Here we are, ready for your orders, oh Muqtada and Nasrallah…. Woe to you, Israel! We will strike you!”
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The fact that the Iraqi trainees traveled to Lebanon through Syria, US officials added, suggested that at least some Syrian officials were complicit in the training program. Moreover, Syrian officials reportedly attended meetings together with Qods Force chief Qassem Soleimani and Hezbollah’s Imad Mughniyeh to coordinate means of turning up the heat on US forces in Iraq.
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Several months after Mughniyeh’s assassination, a senior Mahdi Army commander in Baghdad—speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of what he was about to reveal—said that Mughniyeh had, in fact, supervised Hezbollah operations in Iraq.
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In Washington, despite a consensus on the destructive role Iran was playing in Iraq in late 2006, debates still raged within the US intelligence community over whether Hezbollah was really on the ground in Iraq and whether the group was training Iraqi militias in Iran or Lebanon or both. Testifying before Congress in November 2006, then–CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden stated, “I’ll admit personally that I have come late to this conclusion, but I have all the zeal of a convert as to the ill effect that the Iranians are having on the situation in Iraq.”
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In early 2007, Iran’s political allies in the Iraqi government actually issued a diplomatic demarche demanding Tehran scale back its support for the Iraqi Shi’a militias, which by then were posing a tremendous security risk in the country. Iraqi officials were being killed in internecine Shi’a violence, possibly the result of Iran’s apparent decision to intensify Shi’a militia activity after Hezbollah’s self-declared victory in its war against Israel. Speaking in January 2007, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah told his group’s satellite television station, al-Manar, that “the American occupation poses a danger to the Iraqi people and to the region.” He was crystal clear on his means of rectifying the situation: “We support the option of a comprehensive Iraqi resistance, with all its aspects, especially the military aspect. We believe that the solution in Iraq begins with adopting the option of armed resistance—jihad against the occupation forces.”
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Some in the Qods Force “sought to replicate [Hezbollah’s self-perceived] victory [against Israel] in Iraq, opening the floodgates” and providing advanced EFPs and other weapons to a range of Shi’a factions.
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By mid-2007, al-Sadr was no longer coy about his organization’s ties to Hezbollah. “We have formal links with Hezbollah, we do exchange ideas and discuss the situation facing Shiites in both countries…. We copy Hezbollah in the way they fight and their tactics, we teach each other and we are getting better through this.”
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In seeking to lead from behind and put an Arab face on its efforts, in 2007 the Islamic Republic sent a master trainer—Ali Moussa Daqduq—to Iran to coordinate the training program and make periodic visits to Iraq. This use of the Hezbollah leader Daqduq would assuage any Iraqi unease about working under seemingly aloof and disdainful Iranian operatives.
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Whereas Daqduq had been informed back in 2005 that he would be traveling to Iran to work with the Qods Force to train Iraqi extremists, he only went to Tehran in May 2006, accompanied by the Hezbollah official in charge of Unit 3800 activities in Iraq, Yusef Hashim. In Tehran,
Daqduq and Hashim met with the commander and deputy commander of Qods Force special external operations, who informed them of plans to monitor and report on progress in Iraq. In the year before British Special Forces captured Daqduq in Basra in late 2007, he made four trips to Iraq. He reported back to the Qods Force on the Special Groups’ use of mortars and rockets, their manufacture and use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and kidnapping operations. His overall instructions were simple: “He was tasked to organize the Special Groups in ways that mirrored how Hezbollah was organized in Lebanon.”
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