Away from Chaos: The Middle East and the Challenge to the West

The Global Stakes in the Fight for the Levant

ON APRIL 11, 2018, the Syrian loyalist army retook the Ghouta outskirts of the capital and then expelled the last jihadists from the adjoining Palestinian camp of Yarmouk on May 21. The push would test the depth and durability of relations first between Syria’s Alawite minority in power in Damascus and the Iranian theocracy in Teheran, and second between two societies: one Arab, the other Persian. The defeat of the Sunni insurrection in all its guises—including ISIS and the rest of the rebels—was announced, despite pockets of resistance remaining in the northeast in the Idlib “deconfliction zone” supervised by Turkish military observers, and in the eastern desert.

The end of the two-month offensive against Ghouta was symbolically marked by an American, British, and French missile strike on the Syrian installations suspected of making chemical munitions—some of which might have been used against the town of Douma on April 7, 2018. The Shiite paramilitaries, whether Iranian, Afghan, Pakistani, or Iraqi, had not engaged in the offensive, and neither had Hezbollah. The Russian forces, typically commanding planes, helicopters, or ballistic missile batteries, deployed their ground troops in combat, a rarity. Their involvement was limited to military police troops that enforced ceasefires as areas were reconquered one by one, and then convoyed the defeated rebels to Idlib. Moscow was careful to man this unit specifically with Russian Sunnis, Chechens, Ingush, or Dagestanis from the northern Caucasus to reassure the rebels transported under their eyes.

The Syrian Insurrection Is Declared Dead: Tribulations for the West

Iraq’s Shiism was highly susceptible to Iranian influence, whether because of the territorial closeness or the prominence of the holy places in Najaf and Karbala for the faithful on both sides of the border. The Alawite minority running Syria, on the other hand, had only a distant relationship with the doctrine and beliefs of Twelver Islam. The connection between Bashar al-Assad’s post-Baathist regime and the Islamic Republic was primarily opportunistic. During the 1980s, Damascus served primarily as the transit point for the flows of material support Teheran provided to its Lebanese Hezbollah client.

The growing power of the “Party of God” provided Iran a potent offensive weapon against the Jewish state. Hezbollah had taken up the anti-Israeli “resistance” role that the PLO had dropped after its expulsion from South Lebanon in 1982. It projected Teheran’s power into the Near East beyond its own Middle Eastern confines and helped make it more resistant to Western threats over its nuclear program. Then Hezbollah, the Lebanese system’s hegemon, shrewdly reconciled itself with the many Christians in the Land of Cedars, with the aim of allying with other minorities in the region to ensure their common survival. They all felt threatened by a Sunni jihadism in full expansion backed by a vast Salafist movement bent on exterminating them.

On May 6, 2018, Lebanese voters went to the polls for the first time since 2009 to elect 128 deputies. Turnout was low at 49 percent compared to 54 percent in 2009. One reason was a very complicated ballot, but distrust of a political class dominated by billionaires shamelessly spreading their money around also ran deep among the public. Widespread disgust with the country’s plutocracy touched a nerve during the campaign and helped Hezbollah with its ally the Amal Movement emerge victorious with the maximum number of Shiite votes. Together with its Christian partners in the Free Patriotic Movement of General Michel Aoun and a few others, Hezbollah would have a narrow majority of seats in parliament. But the Christian opponents in the Lebanese Forces led by Samir Geagea achieved a breakthrough in North Lebanon.

Saad Hariri and his Future Movement, however, lost twelve of thirty-three seats in a significant setback. Hariri had lost credibility after a stay in Saudi Arabia in November 2017, where he had been forced to read a letter on television resigning from the office of prime minister. He later repudiated the resignation, but the damage was done. It was just one more indicator that Levantine Sunnism as a whole was running out of steam after the eradication of ISIS and the collapse of the Syrian rebellion. The Sunni leader of Tripoli and former head of government Najib Mikati ran against Hariri for the prime minister’s post reserved to this sect by the Lebanese constitution. Hariri, though weakened, was reelected on May 24 to a third consecutive term in office to keep Riyadh happy.

Hezbollah did not indulge in triumphalism. The Shiite party was more interested in emphasizing its compliance with a consensual framework of democratic institutions over which it exercised hegemony. In an atmosphere of heightened tensions between Israel and the complex Iranian web, Tel Aviv declared emphatically that it would henceforth equate the victorious Hezbollah with the Lebanese state—a statement with an underlying threat. It meant that, if rockets were launched from Lebanon, the Israeli military would strike Beirut directly, rather than getting bogged down in a ground war in South Lebanon as it had in 2006. And in the barrages that were exchanged on May 9 between the Jewish state and the Qods Force, Hezbollah held its fire. It was instead from Syria that rockets flew toward the Golan.

By engaging on Syrian territory starting in late 2012, Hezbollah’s Shiite fighters saved what was at the time a faltering Bashar al-Assad regime. However, the rolling defeat of the rebellion from 2015 on was increasingly due to the other units joining the fight on the frontline. The Kurdish militias of the “People’s Protection Units” (or YPG) made inroads into ISIS caliphate territory with air support from the Western coalition led by the United States. In Syria’s west, Russian planes flying from the Hmeimim base pounded the rebels, who once defeated were transferred under safe conduct to the “deconfliction zone” in Idlib province. This had been negotiated as part of the Astana agreements concluded in 2017.

While Iran was officially a stakeholder, in practice it was really just the Russian and Turkish militaries coordinating to make the process work as designed. The Russians provided security for the convoys of defeated rebels through areas controlled by loyalist troops until their arrival at the designated drop-off area in the zone. The Turks saw to it that once the fighters were in the deconfliction area they did not reenter the fight against loyalist troops. Some of them had served as auxiliaries to Turkish troops during their incursions into Syria, under the Euphrates Shield operation of 2016–17 and Olive Branch in January–March 2018.

Ghouta, the semi-rural outskirts of Damascus that rebelled in late March 2011, waved the white flag to Bashar al-Assad’s army supported by Russian forces on April 11, 2018. The surrender came the day after a last “alleged” chemical attack (see below). Ghouta’s trials bear symbolic witness to the evolving situation. They allow us to discern the outline of the political and military steps that will be necessary for setting up the transition phase after the all-but-certain defeat of the rebellion. The timing of the last offensive against the enclave coincided roughly with one launched by Turkish troops against the Kurd-dominated Syrian city of Afrin, which fell on March 18, 2018 after fifty-seven days of combat. The combination of these two battles foreshadowed the impending reorganizations and positioning of the different regional actors. They testified to the growing power in the Levant of a Russia and a Turkey linked in a marriage of convenience, but not one without its problems.

Throughout the conflict, Ghouta had loomed as the most pressing threat to Bashar al-Assad’s regime. So close to the capital, the rebels could easily lob shells into it at any time. Long ago a mythical oasis, the suburb was now a poverty belt populated by internal migrants, Palestinian refugees, or members of the lower-middle class chased out of the central city by rising prices during the years of economic liberalization. It was a cauldron of the social problems plaguing Syria generally, making it an ideal receptacle for Salafist preaching, as had recently become the case in the town of Douma (150,000 inhabitants). Here was established one of the rare Levantine strongholds of the ultraconservative Hanbalite school that dominated in Saudi Arabia. In the mid-1990s, its most illustrious preacher, Abdullah Alloush, fled from Syria to Saudi Arabia when he was threatened with imprisonment. There he built contacts and financing networks that would prove invaluable during the civil war for his son Zahran, born in 1971. Jailed on account of his militancy before the Arab Spring, Zahran Alloush was released in the summer of 2011 like many other Islamist activists that would sow division in the ranks of a growing opposition. He then established the main rebel group, the Saudi-leaning Army of Islam, of which he was commander.

In 2013, the Assad regime was losing control of many of Syria’s regions. Zahran Alloush now made himself through force and charisma the leader of a kind of closed-off counter-society with one million members on 116 square miles that adjoined the centers of power. What started out as a refuge for opponents of all stripes wound up transformed into an Islamist citadel. In August 2013, the enclave was the target of a sarin gas attack that had close to 1,400 victims. Western nations failed to agree on a response, leaving the field open to a Russian solution for the (partial) dismantling of the Syrian chemical arsenal.

Financed by Kuwaiti and Saudi Salafist donors, as recounted by Aron Lund in his reference work on Ghouta, “Into the Tunnels” (Century Foundation, December 2016), Zahran Alloush’s enclave was a preview of what awaited the country if the rebellion won. It was administered by a judicial counsel of ulemas that strictly applied sharia. And if the Army of Islam had to yield territory to rival Muslim Brotherhood-inspired or jihadist groups, it mercilessly repressed any dissidence. The disappearance on December 10, 2013 of the lawyer Razan Zaitouneh, an icon of the secular resistance who had established a center for women’s rights in Douma, was a telltale symptom of the repression. After finding refuge in Douma she had established a center for women’s rights.

Torture was routine in the jails in the rebel enclave. Captive Alawites, Christians, and other “heretics” were exhibited in cages to serve as human shields. Zahran Alloush vilified the “Shiite stain” along with democracy. Very longwinded on the Gulf satellite networks and Islamist social networks, the graduate of the University of Medina could hold his own against the most virulent Salafist preachers. However, this did not keep him from collaborating with certain wheeler-dealers linked to the ruling power in a lucrative siege economy. He imported food, then resold it at astronomical markups with the help of corrupt soldiers who controlled the checkpoints or contraband tunnels—just as in Gaza. All the while, as the enclave’s strongman, Alloush maintained a low-key coexistence with the regime.

In June 2015, Alloush went to Turkey and Jordan for talks with Western officials. These meetings resulted in the Army of Islam supporting the United Nations peace process known as Geneva III. Meanwhile, he moderated his comments in English-speaking media to present himself as a “pragmatist.” He swapped the jellaba and combat fatigues for a gray jacket when appearing on the Arab networks as better suited to this new television audience. In Riyadh, at a meeting of the Syrian National Coalition in late 2015, at Saudi urging Alloush was appointed the opposition’s chief negotiator at peace talks slated to begin early the next year on the shores of Lake Geneva. It would be a first for the representative of a group fighting on the ground.

But, on December 25, 2015, after his return to Ghuta, Alloush was—conveniently—killed with a Russian drone of the Syrian army. His exit from the scene led to the enclave fragmenting, with his fighters battling the “Brigades of the Merciful” (Faylaq al-Rahman—“al-Rahman” being one of the ninety-nine names of Allah), a group close to the Muslim Brotherhood and the Turkish-Qatari network, as well as the al-Qaeda offshoot the Al-Nusra Front.

The departed was replaced as negotiator by his younger brother Mohammed Alloush, who lacked his late sibling’s charisma. Still, he incarnated the armed Salafist rebellion, the more so since the Army of Islam did not appear on the UN’s list of terrorist organizations, unlike ISIS and Al-Nusra. The Geneva talks achieved a ceasefire of several weeks that took effect in February 2016, but the young Alloush had little to contribute to the negotiations. He left them in April when the violence resumed. Nevertheless, he took part the following year in the Astana conference that brought the insurgents and the ruling power together, under the joint auspices of Russia, Turkey and, to a lesser degree, Iran.

In July 2017, Alloush announced the establishment of a “deconfliction zone” in Ghouta. Even if its effects were minimal, it showed that his Saudi sponsors were beginning to look for an understanding with Russia. They could see that the reconquest of Aleppo by the regime signaled the rebellion’s certain defeat. Cutting a deal with Moscow that would keep Iranian influence out of post civil-war Syria therefore made sense. In October 2017, King Salman became the first-ever Saudi monarch to visit the Kremlin. The trip marked the start of an unprecedented, broad cooperation, both political and cultural, between two of the largest oil exporters on the planet. Riyadh even considered buying Russian S-400 anti-aircraft missiles, the most advanced in the world. Teheran had been receiving the previous S-300 model since 2016.

Ghouta fell in the first half of April 2018. It set off the repositioning of international, regional, and local actors for the post-war Levant. On the one hand, Russia confirmed its preeminent role on the ground by controlling the evacuation of fighters to Idlib. Less was seen of the foreign Shiite auxiliaries. The symptoms of Syria’s army reconstituting its offensive capabilities after years of floundering multiplied. Bashar al-Assad had himself photographed at the steering wheel of his car on a tour of the reconquered cities. In relaxed attire, he commented on the situation and celebrated the military successes surrounded by soldiers. He was clearly more sure of his power than during his toadying welcome for Vladimir Putin at the Hmeimim base in December.

On the other hand, the enclave’s capitulation had been sped up by an “alleged” chemical attack on the town of Douma on April 7. When it ended, some four thousand of the last die-hards of the Army of Islam agreed to be transferred to the Idlib deconfliction zone, as rival rebel factions had been doing in preceding weeks. This attack, after which some forty victims were identified as having been asphyxiated, was interpreted differently by Moscow and Damascus on one side and Washington, London, and Paris on the other. On April 14, the Western coalition launched a punitive missile strike on Syrian targets. Aside from the broadsides about the precise circumstances of the April 7 attack and the gas used, the sequence of the two events would only reveal its full significance with time—between the Western two-step in August–September 2013 and the projection of diverse powers with axes to grind in the future Levant.

In the summer of 2013, the United States, Britain, and France had proved incapable of punishing the Syrian regime after President Obama had drawn a “red line” against the use of chemical weapons. Also, their calamitous acceptance of the Russian offer to dismantle the Syrian chemical arsenal had put the weakness of the Western position on full display, confirming Moscow’s leading role. Confronted by the same type of provocation (whatever its exact dimensions or real nature), the three Western powers this time could not walk away. Had they done so, they would have taken themselves completely out of future negotiations on the fate of Syria and the Levant. The tripartite strike of April 14, 2018, of which the Russians were given advance warning, was launched at night. It resulted in no casualties and caused only limited material damage, but it made up for the failure in 2013.

The latest generation of ballistic missiles was deployed for the attack, and France made the first-ever launch of naval cruise missiles from one of its frigates on the high seas. The fireworks were part of a quest for a balance of power that would keep Moscow and its allies from gaining the complete upper hand. All this occurred in a context where the planned delivery of the S-300 to Syria and the S-400 to Turkey changed the situation in the regional skies. More than two months earlier, on February 10, 2018, a Syrian S-200 had downed an Israeli air force F-16. It marked the first time that Israel’s absolute air superiority in the skies over the Near East had been challenged.

For President Trump, the tripartite strike was also a matter of reiterating how much “tougher” he was than his “impotent” predecessor Barack Obama. Previously, on April 7, 2017, Trump had ordered a missile launch against the Syrian air force base at Shayrat, which was suspected of dropping chemicals on the town of Khan Shaykhun, killing ninety-two people. The Organization for the Liberation of Shām (previously the al-Nusra Front) had been holding the town at the time.

From Afrin to Kirkuk: The “Kurdish Tragedy” Revisited

In August 2016, the Turkish army crossed the Syrian border for the first time in what they called the Euphrates Shield operation. The offensive went after two foes, one cyclical—ISIS—and the other structural: the Kurdish YPG militias supported by the West against the jihadists. The Euphrates Shield operation, launched several weeks after the failed coup against President Erdoğan in July, marked a turning point in Ankara’s posture toward the Syrian conflict. Until then, it had been determined by ideological considerations linked to a neo-Ottomanism championed by former Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, with views along the intellectual line of the Muslim Brotherhood. Supporting the Syrian rebellion to bring a Sunni majority to power in Damascus would thus fit the great enterprise of hijacking the Arab Spring to benefit the Brotherhood. In this, they would have the support of Qatar and Turkey, and the blessings of Barack Obama.

The Syrian Brotherhood would be instrumental as the vector for tilting the Levant toward this ideology. It would dominate the Middle East, shutting out Saudi Arabia on the one hand and Shiite Iran on the other. But General el-Sisi’s proclamation in Cairo, Rached Ghannouchi’s historic compromise with the secular powers in Tunis, and the split between Tripolitania and Cyrenaica in Libya, which reflected the Qatar-Saudi dispute, changed the regional situation to the scheme’s detriment, starting in 2013. At the same time, on Syrian territory, the Shiite auxiliaries entering the arena and Moscow’s growing engagement, followed by the rising power of ISIS, had deepened antagonisms. These developments squeezed the Brotherhood between the jihadist movement and the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

For years, Ankara had turned a blind eye to assorted foreign jihadists crossing the border to join the Al-Nusra Front or the Islamic State. Simultaneously, it allowed trafficking in oil from wells exploited by these organizations. By 2015, this was becoming intolerable. Turkey’s allies and partners in NATO were getting hit on their own soil, from Paris to Brussels and from Nice to Berlin, by terrorists who had moved freely back and forth across the Turkish borders. Security camera footage showing Hayat Boumedienne, the wife of Amedy Coulibaly, the Paris Hypercacher murderer, going through the controls at Istanbul Airport on January 9, 2015, just before her husband carried out the slaughter, spoke volumes. The perpetrators of the November 13 massacres in Paris and the Stade de France had also traveled unimpeded to Europe from Raqqa via Istanbul. There were many other cases like these.

This laxness in border control had an unintended consequence for Ankara: a new military actor would appear on the scene in the form of the Kurdish YPG (“People’s Protection Units”) militias based in the Rojava, the northern Syrian provinces that butted up against the border. The Kurds went after ISIS, for which they got the immediate blessings of the West. Little wonder, for when ISIS took Mosul in June 2014 before Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s proclamation of the caliphate, the Kurds alone had stood their ground and put up a fight against the jihadist surge, while other forces fled in disarray. However, Erdoğan regarded the YPG as a threat to Turkey’s national sovereignty, given its symbiotic ties with the PKK, the Kurdish irredentist party, labeled a terrorist organization both by the United States and the European Union, on Turkey’s side of the border.

Turkish repositioning in response to the changing Syrian equation had domestic, regional, and global reasons. Turkey blamed the failed coup d’état against President Erdoğan on Fethullah Gülen, an exiled preacher living in the United States. When the United States refused to extradite him, relations with Washington turned frosty. On the other hand, a spectacular thaw set in with Moscow. On the ground, this led Ankara to abandon the rebels holding Aleppo, allowing the loyalist Syrian troops to retake the northerly metropolis in December 2016. Meanwhile, the Turkish army, having crossed the border in the Al Bab and Jarabulus sectors—under the Euphrates Shield operation—repulsed ISIS there to the satisfaction of the Western capitals. But then Turkey took advantage of these gains to establish Syrian Arab rebels beholden to it in the space separating the two eastern Kurdish Rojava provinces from Afrin province to the west. This way Turkey blocked the creation of a “Kurdish corridor” in the making, which might have extended all the way to the Mediterranean coast.

In January 2018, with the reconquest of Mosul and Raqqa, the overall military picture had changed drastically. The Islamic State no longer controlled any territory to speak of, except for some desert areas where semi-nomadic tribes protected the fighters who had escaped. However, two thousand American and two hundred French Special Forces personnel were embedded in Syria’s northeast with the Kurdish YPG militias. Their priority objective was tracking down ISIS fugitives and providing early warning of their attacks. European fear of homegrown jihadists still on the run returning to cause mayhem posed a prime security challenge. In this context, the dozens of prisoners originally from France and neighboring countries held by the Kurds were an intelligence bonanza and an ace in the hole for the Kurds. Major figures of the French jihad—Adrien Guihal, Thomas Barnouin, Emilie Koenig—were in Kurdish hands in the spring of 2018.

Ultimately, the presence of American and French military assistance, while the Bashar al-Assad regime, the Russians, and the Shiites were occupied with taking back a growing part of Syrian territory, meant that eradicating ISIS had been a Western success. When French Minister of Foreign Affairs Jean-Yves Le Drian affirmed this in December 2017, he also critcized the Russians for “appropriating” that success. Russia, however, kept observers in Afrin as liaison officers with the YPG. In times past, the historical militant Kurdish movement, tinged with communist ideology at the start, had forged relationships first with the Soviet and then the Russian intelligence services.

When the United States announced that it would set up a thirty-thousand-man border guard unit among the Syrian Democratic Forces (mostly Kurds), Erdoğan went ballistic. On January 15, 2018, he fulminated: “A country [the United States] that we call an ally intends to form a terror army on our borders! What will it target if not Turkey? Our mission is to strangle it before it sees the light of day.” On January 19, the Russian observers left Afrin, and the next day the Turkish Olive Branch offensive rolled into action. As had been the case with the earlier Euphrates Shield operation, the majority of Olive Branch troops were Syrian insurgents of various stripes, equipped and paid by Ankara, most of them transferred from the Idlib deconfliction zone through Turkish territory. They were a ragtag group, from leftovers of the Free Syrian Army to jihadists—who engaged in defiling the corpse of a female Kurdish fighter.

Taken on March 18, Afrin was pillaged in a logic of “ethnic cleansing” in which Arab rebels replaced Kurds. The Turkish flag was raised side by side with the Syrian rebel flag on the province’s highest peak, Mount Barsaya. However, this offensive differed from the earlier one. Then, the fight against ISIS and expelling it from the border area had been the first priority, before the Turks pivoted to attack the Kurdish militias. This time, Turkish troops aimed squarely at the Kurds from the start. By controlling this ground, Turkey dealt a fatal blow to the Kurdish corridor toward the Mediterranean, a prerequisite for an independent state emerging by opportunistically taking advantage of the regional chaos.

The Olive Branch operation could only have rolled into action with the discreet assent of the Russians, rulers of the air space. But it roused Bashar al-Assad into issuing vigorous protests for Ankara’s violating the border and affirming their, as well as the rebels’, sovereignty over Syrian land. The offensive also brought reprimands from Teheran, despite Iran being a party to the Astana process. A convoy of militias loyal to Damascus approaching the area to show solidarity with the Kurds was forced to retreat under fire by the Turkish army and its Arab irregulars. For Moscow, the taking of Afrin proved an embarrassment. Its foreign affairs minister mused publicly that by April 9, control of the conquered region should be returned to the Syrian government. This earned him the following rebuffs by Erdoğan the next day: “When the time comes, we will personally turn it over to the people of Afrin, but this is our business not Mr. Sergei Lavrov’s and we will decide when.” The nationalist Turkish press glorified the military operation as one aimed “against America and Russia.”

Five days later, Turkey’s agreeing to Western air strikes on Syria to punish its use of chemical weapons at Douma showed just how complicated the relations between Ankara and Moscow could get. President Erdoğan made no secret of his intention to order another offensive against the YPG in the eastern Rojava provinces, regardless of the presence of American and French troops there. It was in this strained situation that he called the parliamentary and presidential election for June 2018, which had initially been scheduled the following year. Clearly he wanted to capitalize at the polls on the nationalist excitement that the attack on Afrin and its capture had stirred up, to give him a permanent hold on the powers he wanted for fully presidentializing his regime.

This process fit in with the modulation of the Turkish position in the Middle East game since the Arab Spring of 2011. In an interview in Istanbul on May 22, 2018, former prime minister Ahmet Davutoğlu told me that a decisive shift occurred in the summer of 2013. He was referring to the simultaneous arrival of ISIS as a significant force in the Syrian insurrection, Marshal el-Sisi’s proclamation in Egypt that dismissed the Muslim Brotherhood president Morsi, and the failure of the Western coalition to strike Damascus in retaliation for the use of chemical weapons in Ghouta. With that, the vision of “strategic depth” that this erstwhile academic had elaborated since 2001 in his book of the same title became untenable. Davutoğlu had argued that Turkey should project its influence regionally through business dynamism and abandon its military focus on borders difficult to defend for lack of natural barriers (except the mountains straddling the frontier with Iran).

The coup d’état in Egypt knocked the Muslim Brotherhood out of the game as a key player in the future of the uprisings, thus disappointing its supporters in Ankara and Doha. For Bashar al-Assad, according to Davutoğlu, the failure of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt signaled that he, too, could win in the end. It was an impression reinforced both by the inarguable division between ISIS and the other rebels, as well as the West’s reluctance to strike Damascus in September 2013 after the gassing of Ghouta. Therefore, Turkish regional policy, making a virtue of necessity, would gradually return to a more traditional statist idea of defending its border militarily. It translated into a nationalist reaffirmation based on the core values of the Atatürk model. From then on, the Atatürk model would be revived with a more Islamized vocabulary, but with a Kemalist grammar, as spoken by President Erdoğan. This is eloquently shown in the book by Jean-François Pérouse and Nicolas Cheviron: Erdoğan: A New Father for Turkey? (2017).

In the repression following the putsch attempt of July 15, 2016, disciples of Fethüllah Gülen were purged from all positions of power they had conquered in the state apparatus, the media, and universities. It eliminated those Atatürk’s most virulent haters within the Islamist movement and allowed the AKP in power to reappropriate him by substituting in Erdoğan. In May, during the campaign leading up to the 2018 elections, on Istanbul’s walls I could see how the image of the “Father of the Turks” was monopolized by Erdoğan’s election propaganda. It went so far as putting displaying images of both men side by side, with their resemblance enhanced by a few Photoshop tweaks. The incumbent president was re-elected on June 24 in the first round, with 52.5 percent of the vote.

In this situation, the Syrian question was no longer so much one of the rebellion’s victory led by the Muslim Brothers—henceforth inconceivable—but of securing the border. The unity of the Turkish nation-state is a function of Syria’s long-term territorial integrity, I was told at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on May 21, 2018 in Ankara. It involves an imperative: an autonomous Kurdish region in northeast Syria’s Rojava is a threat to Turkey’s sovereignty, and fighting it is the main driver of Turkish policy. This is the starting point for all discussions on whether to keep Bashar al-Assad in power or not, according to the balance of power on the ground and between the big powers.

For the Kurds, the bottom line of the part they played in eradicating ISIS, which let them become a valuable partner of the West, was a bitter one. It put into question their secular ambitions of building a state of forty million Kurdish speakers scattered across southeastern Turkey, northern Syria and Iraq, and northwest Iran. Already at the end of World War I, the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres had provided for creating such as state, but it was annulled under military pressure by the victorious Turkish armies led by Atatürk. The Treaty of Lausanne followed in 1923—with no mention of a Kurdish state. The century-long guerrilla war waged by the Peshmergas “with no allies but their mountains,” as the local saying goes, had been marked by multiple massacres but also an obstinate refusal to give up, as recounted in Gérard Chaliand’s reference work The Kurdish Tragedy, published in 1992. With the turmoil and then the elimination of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, these hopes rekindled, with de facto autonomy for the Iraqi Kurds in Duhok, Erbil, and Sulaymaniyah starting in 1992. A high point came with the formation in 2005 of the quasi-independent Kurdistan Regional Government, based in Erbil.

But fratricidal conflicts, after a bloody phase during the 1990s, had deepened a split between the PDK (Kurdistan Democratic Party) and the UPK (Kurdistan Patriotic Union). The former was dominated by the Barzani family which ruled in the Erbil and Duhok region, and the latter by the Talabani clan based in Sulaymaniyah. These divisions matched up with different regional alliances. The PDK maintained good, mostly commercially based relationships with Turkey. It would seem paradoxical, in retrospect, that during his first years in power in Ankara beginning in 2003, Erdoğan initiated a process of reconciliation with the Kurds as followers of Sunni Islam.

At the same time, the Islamic-conservative AKP sidelined Atatürk-style hypernationalism. Large Turkish capital inflows helped Erbil become a distribution point for merchandise made in Anatolia for the Iraqi and Iranian markets. Both were cut off from international business, the first because of security concerns and the second under the embargo on financial transaction imposed by the American D’Amato-Kennedy Act of 1996. Thanks to this bonanza, Erbil went through a remarkable development on a model inspired by Dubai, if on a different scale. On the other hand, Talabani’s UPK maintained closer relations with Teheran, the PYD in Syrian Rojava, and the Turkish PKK. The opening in November 2013 of a Kurdish oil pipeline linking the Kurdistan oil fields to the Turkish port of Ceyhan brought a financial windfall to the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG). But then the ongoing decline of the price of crude, followed by Baghdad’s refusal, starting in February 2014, to pay Erbil its 17 percent share of Iraq’s oil revenues when the KRG started to export oil directly, provoked an economic crisis. Its consequences still reverberated in 2018, with investments drying up, housing projects deferred, and so on.

The Iraqi army in Mosul collapsed under the ISIS onslaught in June 2014. But Peshmerga fighters (especially the YPG from Rojava), after putting up a fairly robust resistance, set the stage for the Kurds to then repel the jihadists who had advanced to the gates of Kirkuk. This was disputed, de facto annexed ground, whose oil resources were, to Baghdad’s chagrin, extracted and exported. The conflict that this created with the capital reached its height in the summer of 2017, when the tide turned against the Kurds.

While the reconquest of Mosul in July had allowed the central Iraqi government to reassert its authority, backed militarily by the Popular Mobilization units, an in-your-face referendum for Kurdish independence, organized in September on the initiative of Masoud Barzani, the storied president of the KRG, got a 92 percent “for” vote. Russia was alone in supporting the result, obviously because of its interest in tapping Kirkuk’s oil, with the Russian company Rosneft in October set to take a 60 percent interest in the Ceyhan oil pipeline. Baghdad refused to recognize the vote; in fact, it retaliated by prohibiting international flights to and from Erbil airport, which aggravated the economic crisis there. The international community, worried about a new trouble spot emerging, did not endorse this unwelcome polling, turning these triumphal results into a dead letter.

The following October 17, at the funeral in Sulaymaniyah for Jalal Talabani, former president of the Iraq federation and legendary Kurdish nationalist, the UPK’s Peshmergas, which controlled Kirkuk with the PDK, agreed to withdraw from the area. They would be replaced by the Iraqi army and Popular Mobilization units. The withdrawal occurred under combined pressure from Baghdad and Teheran—monitored by Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian commander of the Qods Force. In April 2018, the voters I met in Erbil were getting ready to participate unenthusiastically in the election for choosing representatives for the Majlis, Iraq’s unicameral legislature, when the vast majority of them had voted for independence just a few months before.

Already weakened in Iraq, the Kurds also had to fend off attacks by Turkish troops in northern Syria. With the grand reorganization of the Levant getting under way after the demise of the ISIS caliphate and the coming defeat of the Syrian rebellion, they now faced a situation not all that different from the one they experienced in the Ottoman empire after World War I. Then, the Kurds’ national aspirations had been acknowledged by the Treaty of Sèvres, only be dashed under military pressure from Atatürk. That failure had been formalized in the Lausanne Treaty. Now, a century later, a similar set of exceptional openings offered the Kurds the prospect of achieving their ambition. These consisted, first, of the collapse of Saddam’s Iraq, the key role they had played in checking ISIS in 2014, and then their destroying it in Raqqa in 2017. But once again, they overestimated their strength when they staged the September referendum. The states making up the region, Iran, Iraq, and Turkey, overcame their mutual antagonisms to block the Kurds’ independence project, each seeing it as an existential threat. Like Atatürk in the 1920s, Erdoğan had brought military pressure to bear with the Euphrates Shield and Olive Branch operations.

And the great powers, from Moscow to Washington to Europe, were not prepared to send their soldiers to die for a notional Kurdish state, even if they were grateful for services rendered against ISIS. This reluctance crystallized in President Trump’s announced intention in late March 2018 to bring U.S. soldiers home from Syria. By then, United States production of oil and gas from shale was booming, once again making it self-sufficient in, and even exporting, hydrocarbons. It therefore made less sense by the day for the White House to intervene with boots on the ground in the chaotic Middle East. The enormous expenditures in lives and treasure on the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq since the start of the twenty-first century with mixed results had left their mark.

Like his predecessor Barack Obama, and despite diverging assessments, the forty-fifth American president delegated to the regional players the responsibility for maintaining or modifying the local balances. Obama had wanted to engage in the consolidation of the Muslim Brotherhood supported by Qatar and Turkey, and in the reintegration of Iran in the international scene, seeing the outlines of a new world order asserting itself in the Arab Spring. But, far from following through with Obama’s plans, Donald Trump placed no trust in these innovative partnerships. He regressed to the fundamentals of American policy, with multiple symbolic gestures in favor of his traditional allies and snubbing for erstwhile adversaries to which his predecessor had been prepared to extend his hand.

Thus, in May 2017, Trump reinstated the anti-terrorist pact with a Saudi Arabia now absolved of the 9/11 attacks. And, on May 14, 2018, he ordered the American embassy in Israel moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem—six days after having pulled out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) treaty of Vienna with Iran.

Iranian Hegemony or Empire with Feet of Clay?

In Vienna on July 14, 2015, the five permanent UN Security Council members plus Germany (the so-called “P5 + 1”) and the European Union signed the JCPOA with Iran with regards to its nuclear programs. Teheran gave up uranium enrichment for military purposes for fifteen years, as duly verified by the International Atomic Energy Agency. In return, the economic sanctions linked to its nuclear program and imposed by the UN, the United States, and the European Union would be lifted. The JCPOA was principally the fruit of President Obama’s willingness to have Iran rejoin the community of nations. He was convinced that by not treating Iran as a pariah but holding it to account for its actions, a way could be found out of the Syrian morass, given the important backing Iran provided to Damascus. Instead of a disruptive power, Iran would thus become a stabilizing element in the Persian Gulf, lowering the tensions there. That would also lower the price of hydrocarbons, whose daily exports from the region satisfied one-fourth of the world’s consumption.

It was largely for the sake of concluding this treaty that the United States refrained from air strikes in September 2013 after the chemical weapons attack on Ghouta despite Washington having drawn that “red line.” And, in fact, in November 2013, the “P5 + 1” and Teheran concluded an interim agreement coinciding with the “moderate” Hassan Rouhani’s election to succeed the provocateur Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. When the final act was signed in July 2015, Europe was suffering the full brunt of ISIS violence, with the slaughter in Paris at Charlie Hebdo and the Hypercacher supermarket in January, as well as at the Bataclan in November—a year to the day before the Nice massacre on France’s National Day of 2016. Confronting the jihadist danger, Washington, like Brussels, sought common ground with Iran and Russia in spite of their differences. And Moscow, which had been all for the JCPOA, seeing it as beneficial for its Iranian ally, in the wake of the treaty signing based its airplanes in September 2015 in Syria at the Hmeimim base in the name of the war against terror. This would be a decisive factor in how the civil war ended.

Raqqa finally fell on October 13, 2017, putting an end to the Islamic State and the ISIS caliphate and significantly reducing the jihadist threat against the West. Four days earlier, President Trump had announced that he would not recertify the JCPOA as required by the United States Congress. In May 2017, during his first overseas trip, he had once again declared Iran to be a terrorist power, falling in line with the vision of his Saudi hosts. On January 12, 2018, he reactivated one of his campaign pledges to “tear up” the JCPOA. Calling it “the worst deal ever negotiated” and likely to lead to a “nuclear holocaust,” Trump gave his reluctant partners of the “P5 + 1” 120 days to levy new sanctions against Iran.

On May 8, just as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo arrived in Pyongyang to lay the groundwork for an unexpected meeting between the American and North Korean leaders, Trump announced that he would withdraw from the treaty. He called it “a horrible one-sided deal that should never, ever have been made…. It is clear to me that with the rotten structure of the current agreement, nothing will prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.” Consequently, a wide-ranging set of sanctions to prevent doing business with the Islamic Republic was reimposed. The United States also barred investments from exploiting its hydrocarbons, ordered the closing of air connections opened by European airline companies, and Boeing and Airbus canceled contracts for hundreds of airliners. In fact, it called into question billions of dollars in commitments made after the JCPOA was signed on July 14, 2015.

On the Iranian side, the election of Hassan Rouhani on June 14, 2013 and the perilous situation into which the national economy had been plunged by the sanctions regime had created the opening for concluding the Vienna accord. The former nuclear negotiator from 2003 to 2005 under the Khatami presidency took center stage again after eight years of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad was notorious as much for his nonstop broadsides against the West as his threats directed at Israel, which he wanted to see “wiped off the map.” He also accelerated military programs that were, in his own words, aimed squarely at the Jewish state.

Ahmadinejad’s hardline approach had been protested in 2013 by voters, with Ali Khamenei’s approval, after he had driven the country’s isolation to a point where the survival of the Islamic Republic itself was at risk. However, the balance of power in Iran remained complex and changeable. For one, a president categorized as a reformer had to answer to the Supreme Leader, who was guided by the doctrine of wilayat al-faqih (government by the Islamic jurist). He also had to offset the power of the Revolutionary Guards, who were intervening decisively in Syria on the side of Bashar al-Assad, and in Iraq against ISIS while supporting the Popular Mobilization units.

This political equilibrium was made even more fragile by the death on January 8, 2017 of Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani. One of Iran’s wealthiest individuals, having cornered the export of pistachios and invested heavily in Dubai, Rafsanjani had also had Khomeini’s ear. He was elected president in 1989, serving until 1997. He sanded smooth most of the regime’s “ideological” rough edges and backed off from the strategy of “exporting revolution” to neighboring countries. Instead, he advocated practical policies resting on the power of a country with sixty-two million people (risen to eighty million by 2020). For Rafsanjani, attachment to the Shiite identity meant establishing a network of regional alliances to strengthen the defenses of Iranian territory in a fortress mentality; this task took precedence over any doctrinal considerations. The outer ramparts of the Islamic Republic besieged by its Western enemies ran through where the Shiites and Alawites of the Near and Middle East lived—with Lebanese Hezbollah manning the forward outpost on Israel’s border.

For the pragmatists, Ahmadinejad’s brinkmanship only produced international economic sanctions that negatively affected the Iranian population, stoking its hostility toward the regime. This hostility was on display in the repeated—and repressed—demonstrations against Ahmadinejad’s reelection in 2009, and the uprisings against the high cost of living and massive unemployment in December 2017 and January 2018. The earlier protests—nicknamed the “green wave” after the color of the clothing or headbands the protesters wore—shared an atmosphere reminiscent of the Arab Spring and the “color revolutions” in some former Soviet states. In the regime’s eyes, the demonstrations were all equally detestable, as they called into question its legitimacy and way of governing, and they were harshly put down. But this failed to deter the more than a million people who took to the streets. Subsequently, the controversial but reelected president was forced to increase subsidies to strengthen client relationships with the working classes. This deepened the budget deficits, and Supreme Leader Khamenei saw to it that Ahmadinejad was gradually sidelined.

The uprisings of 2017–2018 were different: they were leaderless, they aggregated scattered discontents and they brought out thousands of protesters in many provincial villages where expressions of political dissidence were rare. Among Hassan Rouhani’s opponents, those in the holy city of Mashhad, formerly close to his predecessor Ahmadinejad, tried to use the protests against him. They accused him of giving up Iran’s nuclear program under the JCPOA framework without getting anything in return for the people. Meanwhile, the president expressed understanding for their economic demands, but left it to the commander of the Revolutionary Guards, General Mohammad Ali Jafari, to restore order. Jafari did so, declaring on January 3, 2018 that the fitna (the Koranic term for religious sedition that breaks the unity of believers and imperils Islam) was over. Once again, this showed that the regime military corps remained the repressive authority of last resort for the ruling power.

These events received wide coverage in the American press and encouragement for the protesters. A week later, Donald Trump chose that moment to announce the United States would withdraw from the JCPOA in May unless it was renegotiated. To some observers, it appeared as though the move had been timed to worsen the deteriorating economic situation bringing people into the street. After all, this was the effect the White House hoped to leverage by reviving the sanctions. In preparation, Iran had suspended all foreign exchange transactions within its borders to prevent capital flight. Still, during the first half of 2018, the Iranian rial lost half its value. The prohibition on acquiring foreign currency affected the middle class directly. Already deprived of travel to the United States due to the “Muslim ban” decreed by President Trump in January 2017, Iranian citizens were left with scant options for leaving the country.

Although the ideological side of the recurring clashes with the West would be downplayed going forward, supporting Hezbollah and Iran’s clients throughout the region still made a big dent in the state’s budget. The armed support for the Syrian regime has been estimated, in the absence of reliable sources, as costing Iran between six and fifteen billion U.S. dollars annually. The financial drain deprived the population of benefiting from foreign investment and fully enjoying the fruits of oil and gas exports. A principal goal of the JCPOA had been for Iran to get out from under this situation. By redefining Teheran’s relations with its neighbors and the international community, the agreement was supposed to derive direct economic benefits and indirect social gains. In return for renouncing its nuclear weapons program for fifteen years, as duly verified by AIEA inspectors, international sanctions would be relaxed and Iran would have the chance to gradually rebuild trust with the Western powers in the P5 + 1.

But the Islamic Republic had yet another iron in its foreign policy fire that gave it some additional breathing room. Since the war against Iraq in 1980, Iran had projected the Revolutionary Guards and especially the Qods Force for special forces operations, mainly in Mesopotamia and the Levant. The president did not wield this weapon. They were under the command of General Qasem Soleimani, the first high-ranking officer in Iran to acquire notoriety and popularity in a state apparatus in which the great names on everyone’s lips, especially after 1979, were those of either the Supreme Leader or the ayatollahs.

Two factors combined to create this situation. In domestic politics, the outrageous privileges of the turbaned religious men, the akhound (“priests”), were ridiculed by most members of the middle class and a good part of the general public for their greed, corruption, and power-grubbing. This circumstance favored the emergence of a military leader to serve as an alternative and to act as defender of Iranian nationalism, especially if he had the ideological traits associated with the Revolutionary Guards. In April 2018, near a mausoleum, a mummy was excavated that rumor had it belonged to Reza Shah, the Persian Cossack Brigade general who founded the Pahlavi dynasty and modernized Iran. The oppositional, monarchist, offshore satellite TV channel Manato (“You and Me”), today the country’s most popular, some years before had broadcast a serial extolling this authoritarian, anticlerical emperor who reigned from 1925 to 1941. During the winter 2017–2018 demonstrations, the responses to shouts of “Long live Reza Shah” were enthusiastic, and were quickly broken up by the police and the basij (the Iranian Popular Mobilization Forces). It is not a stretch to believe that some circles would emphatically welcome a new general—bearded or not—to save Iran.

Such longing for a saber to confront the turbans made General Soleimani a favorite, all the more since he also incarnated the ethos of the Islamic Republic. For the lowest social levels, these qualities blended with the distributionist capacity of the Revolutionary Guards. They headed powerful, rich foundations (bonyan) that owned harbors, airports, factories, businesses, airlines, and shipping companies. Consequently, the Revolutionary Guards’ military-industrial complex could sustain with all sorts of subsidies a large, easily mobilized working-class clientele. The Guards’ security infrastructure also managed the major supply routes that slipped under the radar of the international monitors. These crossed the borders with Iraq, but especially with the Kurdish Regional Government and with Turkey. This let Iran circumvent the sanctions after they were reimposed by President Trump on May 8, 2018, and were vital for resupplying the populace of Iran.

Qasem Soleimani earned his military spurs by an uninterrupted run of victories against the takfiri. This Arab word demonizes Iran’s Sunni adversaries as fanatics. Takfir means “excommunication” and is also the epithet the Salafists and jihadis hurl at the “heretical” (rafidha) Shiites, other apostates, and supposed unbelievers. The pejorative use of the term by Teheran resulted in a solidarity between a host of the minorities, from Christians to Yazidis, persecuted by ISIS. It helped nourish a strong global suspicion that the Sunni world, by fanning the flames of violence, had been radicalized.

The Islamic Republic had come a fairly long way since the first decades of its existence, when it overused an ideological-religious vocabulary to stigmatize its enemies. Back then, it called them “corrupters on earth,” condemned Salman Rushdie to death, and applied capital punishment in the name of the Holy Scriptures. Its principals today, as well as their allies, by a semantic reversal, posed as quintessential victims of global terrorism—symbolized by ISIS—just like the Western populations. On April 16 and 19, 2018, I moderated debates in Arabic in Baghdad on the different phases of jihadism (essentially covering the material in the first part of this book) in a mostly Shiite setting, in which the notion of a strong “cousinhood” with Iran resonated with the audience. Here I found a much more attentive, informed, and receptive audience than in Sunni circles in Mosul three days later. At the Baghdad session, I received as a token of appreciation an encyclopedia of jihad terrorism in the Arabic language, three fat volumes exclusively about Sunni ideologues and activists.

In projecting the image of defender against the takfiri, General Soleimani reassured both the devout Shiites that formed the regime’s working class clientele and the middle class. In private, members of the middle class readily displayed their agnosticism, if not atheism, and nursed the same dread of ISIS and its ilk as their European counterparts. The bazaars in the Iranian pilgrimage places since 2015 have sold souvenirs of crockery and cloth bearing Soleimani’s image. And in a survey of half a million internet users on Iranian New Year (Nowruz) whose results were posted on March 21, 2018 by the moderate conservative Khabaronline website, 37.3 percent voted him as the most-liked person. (Soleimani had been up against the chief negotiator with the West, Minister of Foreign Affairs Mohammad Javad Zarif [29.9 percent], and the recently deceased local singer Morteza Pashaei [18.2 percent], a composer of treacly, sentimental ditties compatible with the Islamic Republic ideology.)

Beyond the soothing, if not trivial, appearances of this hit parade in the country of the mullahs, Qasem Soleimani in reality constructed a formidable persona embodying the continuity of two decades of projecting Iranian political-military power. While the ISIS caliphate was being eliminated in the fall of 2017 and the Syrian rebellion was on its last legs, he built a regional hegemony by proxy. It was primarily to undermine it that Donald Trump torpedoed the JCPOA on May 8, 2018 as the great reorganization of the Middle East got under way. He hoped that reimposing the sanctions would choke Iran or lead to regime change in Teheran by keeping it from capitalizing on its gains.

This policy was reminiscent of the doctrine that the neocons tried to apply to the Middle East after 2001. John Bolton, national security adviser from April 9, 2018 until he was fired on September 10, 2019, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo subscribed to it. At a speech to the Heritage Foundation think tank on May 21, 2018, Pompeo presented a list of a dozen demands addressed to the Iranian power that amounted to demanding its surrender. In his speech, Pompeo attacked the major general by name, saying, “Iran advanced its march across the Middle East during the JCPOA. Qasem Suleimani has been playing with house money that has become blood money. Wealth created by the West has fueled his campaigns.” It remains to be seen if its global objectives will be achieved. Or will it end up simply weakening the camp of President Rouhani?

The Washington establishment regarded the head of the Qods Force as embodying the principal adversary of the United States and its allies in the Middle East. They view his methods as expressing in a profound way why they call it a “murderous regime.” These perspectives are eloquently rendered in the biographical sketch of the general published under the byline of Dexter Filkins in September 2013 in the New Yorker. Filkins’s reporting on ten years of American bellicosity in the Middle East earned him the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. His long article titled “The Shadow Commander” depicts Soleimani as the “Iranian operator who reshaped the Middle East.” This piece appeared on the day Hezbollah forces coordinated by Soleimani took back the Syrian rebel village of al-Qusayr. From then on, he was tagged as the one “who directed Assad’s war in Syria.” Filkins’s article relied especially on interviews with the chief American policymakers in the region since the turn of the century, as well as leading Kurdish and Iraqi figures who acted as brokers between the “shadow commander” in Teheran and his counterparts in Washington. It drew heavily on sources in Persian, pulled together by the researcher Ali Alfoneh for the conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank for his book Iran Unveiled (2013).

Qasem Soleimani was born in 1957 in a village near Kerman in Iran’s southeast. Rostam, the mythical hero who held Iran together against multiple enemies, is said to have come from there. He is the central character in the Book of Kings (Shah Nameh), the national epic written by Ferdowsi around the year 1000. Until his killing by a U.S. drone strike in January 2020, Soleimani was identified alongside the hero in popular propaganda describing him as the “new Rostam.” This is the case both on websites close to the regime and even for reporters on the Persian language broadcasts of the Voice of America radio…. He was born into a family of poor farmers whose debts to the government he had to work off from an early age. It is said that his social hatred for the Shah’s oppressive power dated from that experience. In 1979, Soleimani joined the Revolutionary Guards after attending sermons by a cleric close to the future Supreme Leader Khamenei. The Guards’ logo speaks eloquently of its ambitions: an arm brandishing an AK-47 forms the Arabic word la, meaning “no,” in the sense of rejecting an unjust order. It is also the first word in the double confession of the Muslim faith: “There is no true god but God and Mohammed is the Messenger of God.” This logo rests on the date 1357 written in Persian numbers; in the Hegira calendar, this corresponds to 1979, the year the Islamic Republic was founded, bringing with it the messianic promise of the new world the Revolutionary Guards would spread around the globe topping off the coat of arms. Beneath it, and parallel to the automatic rifle, is written the beginning of Verse 60 of the Koran, from the Al Anfal (The Booty) sura: “And make ready your strength to the utmost of your power.” The continuation of this text, “to strike terror into the enemies of Allah and your enemies,” is the standard reference used by all Islamist movements to justify their violence as “legitimate terror” (see chapter 8 for the rationale given by Sheikh al-Qaradawi, among others, for suicide attacks).

Qasem Soleimani had his baptism by fire against the Kurdish separatist insurrection in northwestern Iran. Then, during the war with Iraq from 1980 to 1988, he distinguished himself by his bravery leading his men in the field. He deplored the massive losses in their ranks, caused by the tactic of sending waves of young recruits through enemy minefields to clear avenues of attack by letting themselves get blown up. Soleimani made first contacts with the leaders of the Iraqi Kurds rebelling against Saddam, as well as with the Badr militia recruited from among returned Iraqi prisoners. These contacts would pay off later when they moved into positions of power after the American invasion of 2003. This demonstrated Soleimani’s ability to anticipate geopolitical developments.

His official biography states that in the 1990s Soleimani was posted to his native province of Kerman. He eradicated the heroin trade fed by opium cultivated on the other side of the Afghan border, regularly denouncing the resulting drug addiction and clandestine immigration and fighting them as scourges. He became head of the Qods Force sometime in late 1997—the exact date remains secret, as befits his future role as “shadow commander” of the Islamic Republic’s foreign operations. In 1999, under the presidency of the “liberal” Mohammad Khatami, Soleimani was a signatory to a letter addressed to the president by the generals of the Revolutionary Guards. It warned him to crush the student revolt or else the Guards would intervene directly. When the president complied, it showed who was really in charge.

The “blessed double raid” on 9/11, followed by the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003, opened a pivotal period in Qasem Soleimani’s career when he dealt with his American counterparts practically on an equal footing. During this first decade of the century, the interests of Iran and the United States converged on two major fronts: the fight against al-Qaeda and the elimination of Saddam Hussein. In both cases, initial collaboration quickly gave way to renewed confrontation. It highlighted a deep, persistent distrust between the two adversaries and their inability to institutionalize their relations, however conflictual. During the last four months of 2001, a team of Soleimani’s agents swapped reams of intelligence with their colleagues in the United States led by Ambassador Ryan Crocker, a top American Middle East hand. The information they shared made it possible to locate or neutralize bin Laden’s operators as well as Taliban battalions. This auspicious period came to an abrupt end when George W. Bush, in his January 2002 State of the Union Address included Iran in the “Axis of Evil” (see chapter 3). Any feeling of betrayal they might have had in Teheran did not prevent a resumption of contacts between the same individuals following the American invasion of Iraq.

“Setting up an Iraq Governing Council (the provisional executive installed by the occupier) essentially resulted from negotiations between Teheran and Washington,” Ambassador Crocker, who was in charge of the talks, confided to the New Yorker. But this cooperation would not last long either, as the Sunni uprising that al-Zarqawi had played a major role in instigating was paralleled by attacks on American interests by various Shiite militias close to the Qods Force. Meanwhile, large-scale intersectarian massacres became commonplace. “Bloodying” the American army was intended to trap it in the Mesopotamian quagmire and help protect the Iran of the aggressive Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

On being elected president in June 2005, Ahmadinejad had relaunched Iran’s nuclear program to keep the country from becoming the third domino the American neocons wanted to topple in their “regime change” framework, after the Afghanistan of the Taliban and the Iraq of Saddam Hussein. On the ground, Qasem Soleimani was the efficient instrument for implementing this policy, which would lead to the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq in 2011. This last episode—a campaign promise by Barack Obama—could not have been accomplished had the government of Nouri al-Maliki not been constituted in December 2010. The Qods Force commander must be seen as having had a hand in it, if the Iraqi Shiite and Kurdish leaders involved in the operation are to be believed.

When the American GIs pulled out of Iraq, in effect Washington paradoxically turned over that country’s future to Teheran in a kind of joint-control arrangement in which the United States acted as the junior partner. No doubt the perception of Iran as all-powerful was at the root of Prime Minister al-Maliki’s Shiite hubris. We saw earlier how he alienated the Sunni population and how this helped clear the way for ISIS inroads, leading to their conquering Mosul in June 2014 and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaiming the caliphate. Such are the limits of a strategy of manipulating political actors by the men in “the shadows,” as incarnated by the Qods Force. Iran had to reinvest massively in the Popular Mobilization Units after Ayatollah al-Sistani’s call to arms of June 13, 2014. And Qasem Soleimani had to personally set foot on the Iraq battlefield to contain the ISIS surge. While he generaled the counteroffensive on the ground, the United States bombed the jihadists from the air. It was the latest in the series of improbable plot twists in the Iranian-American collaboration in Mesopotamia.

This interaction once more would come up short in neighboring Syria. In Iraq, a majority Shiite population had a bias toward “cousinhood” with Iran, which found uncounted numbers of supporters there. But the decisive intervention by the Qods Force, starting in the second half of 2012, for saving the regime of Bashar al-Assad from collapse played out in a totally different context. In the Iranian vision, Damascus and Beirut—through Hezbollah—constituted, as we noted earlier, the Islamic Republic’s forward line of defense on the border with Israel. The Shiite party’s ability to incarnate the “resistance” against the Jewish state, after the PLO’s eclipse in the mid-1980s, was a trump card for Teheran. It helped greatly in mobilizing support for itself in a massively Sunni world that was as leery of Persia as it was of the Shiites. But the direct involvement of Qasem Soleimani’s men and of Hezbollah on Syrian territory, and their decisive role in turning the tide against the rebels, later changed for the worse how Iran and its allies stacked up in global Sunni opinion.

As we saw earlier, the Arab media in the Gulf raged against Hezbollah when it took the village of al-Qusayr in the summer of 2013, whereas, in 2006, they had sung hosannas to its “heroic” role in the Thirty-Three-Day War against Israel. However, the priority on fighting ISIS while it constituted a major threat for Europe, with terrorist acts on European soil crescendoing between 2015 and 2017, had lowered the intensity of the confrontation between a Moscow-Teheran axis supporting Damascus and the NATO members that initially supported the rebellion. But with the destruction of the Islamic State caliphate in 2017, first in July when Mosul was seized, then in October following the fall of Raqqa, the two antagonistic blocs resumed their face-off for determining Syria’s future.

The key issue was no longer so much the continuity of the Bashar al-Assad regime, as it was already confirmed—even if in a whisper—in the name of political realism and by the trend in the military situation. Instead, it was what role Iran would play in it. This problem crystallized with the American withdrawal from the JCPOA on May 8, 2018. It was followed the next day by hostilities between Israel and Qods Force elements deployed on Syrian territory. However, this decision put the ball into Russia’s court, which had positioned itself as the principal actor in the field throughout the conflict and therefore now found itself in the hot seat.

From “Russia’s Moment” to Putin’s Dilemma with His Regional Allies

For Vladimir Putin, the main actor in Syria, Russia’s involvement is the linchpin of his foreign policy and the key to restoring the country’s great power status on the international scene after the USSR’s disappearance. Even when the annexation of Crimea in March 2014 created a major diplomatic crisis that ended with Russia’s isolation and condemnation by UN General Assembly Resolution 68/262 (with Israel abstaining), it did not deter him. We saw already how the Kremlin walked away with a strategic victory in the summer of 2013 by convincing the United States, the United Kingdom, and France to refrain from any strike against Bashar al-Assad’s regime in the wake of the Ghouta sarin gas attacks. The Western nations even acquiesced in collaborating with him in the destruction of most of the Syrian chemical weapons stockpile.

This operation, which saved the Syrian president, as explained to me by Yevgeny Primakov in 2014, had strengthened Moscow’s hand, and would be followed up with an explicit increase in military power. It stood in stark contrast to the American deployment in Iraq, extremely costly both in money and lives, or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that had sounded the death knell of the USSR. This time, Russia devised an effective political economy tailored to its intervention. On the ground, it took the shape of a bargain-basement infantry under Iranian command. In addition to a core complement of one to two thousand Qods Force troops, some ten thousand irregulars of mainly Arab, Afghan, or Pakistani Shiites, each of them paid an estimated eight hundred U.S. dollars monthly, gradually joined the fight in Syrian territory, starting in the second half of 2012—along with Hezbollah.

From September 30, 2015 on, the thirty-plus Sukhoi fighter planes based at Hmeimim became the offensive’s crown jewel, the game changer of the conflict. The Russian pilots and hardware also cost much less than their American, or even British or French, equivalents. Russian tactics of bombing the rebel zones, unconstrained by public opinion or human rights organizations, were effective in wresting territory from rebel control. As Russia intervened, their forces benefited from a dual godsend: the signing of the JCPOA at Vienna in July 2015, which (temporarily) lowered tensions between the West and Iran, and the global export of jihadist violence during this period. It diverted the world’s attention and let the Russians argue that they were participating in the global war on terror, which got them a pass when they set up their air base in Syria.

2018 saw ISIS wiped out as a territorial entity and the United States under Donald Trump take a newly aggressive stance resting on a strengthened alliance with Israel and the Saudi bloc. The American withdrawal from the JCPOA on May 8 underscored that. Taken together, these developments changed the terms of the regional equation. They forced Russia into a complex juggling act to keep its lead role in the Syrian affair. In effect, Vladimir Putin had build a system of links to four partners—Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran—which, however, were hostile to each other to varying degrees. And even their relationships with the Kremlin were subject to all sorts of uncertainties.

Diplomatic relations with Israel had been cut because of the Six-Day War from June 1967 to October 1991, two months before the fall of the USSR. After this era of the cold shoulder during which the Soviets sponsored the PLO, the thaw set in with startling speed when Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000. The one-million-strong, Russian-speaking immigrant minority in Israel that makes up 20 percent of the population proved to be particularly influential. Their Knesset representatives were key supporters of Benjamin Netanyahu, who made the flamboyant, Moldavia-born Avigdor Lieberman his minister of defense (until the latter would become his chief critic and deprive him from his capacity to lead the Israeli government after the 2019 Knesset elections). Trade between the two countries increased exponentially in multiple categories, from twelve million U.S. dollars in 1991 to 2.5 billion U.S. dollars in 2017, especially in high-tech goods and weaponry. Thanks to Israeli engineers, who frequently were USSR émigrés, the Russian drone industry was “revived,” according to Igor Delanoe, author of the painstakingly documented book Russia: the Stakes in the Return to the Middle East (2016).

In 2016 and 2017, the Israeli prime minister traveled at least seven times—officially—to Russia, where the Jewish community still plays an outsized role among the economic and political elites. From May 9, 2017, after meeting with Vladimir Putin in Moscow, Netanyahu let it be known that their talks focused on the need to keep Iran from filling the vacuum left by the eradication of ISIS with a “radical Shiite Islamic terror.” This was just when the Western coalition’s offensive against ISIS was kicking off. He pressed the Kremlin to keep Iran from gaining permanent facilities in the country, recalling that the control of the Golan Heights (unilaterally annexed by Israel in 1981 and just forty kilometers from Damascus) was a nonnegotiable security issue for the Jewish state.