On the menu today: Today’s newsletter does not feature Taylor Swift, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Hunter Biden, or the New York Times’ big scoop about syphilis. Instead, we turn our attention to the Middle East, where some sort of U.S. military action appears imminent. President Biden told reporters he has decided how he will respond to the drone attack by an Iranian-backed militia that killed three U.S. Army reservists and wounded more than 40 others. As of this writing, that response either has not begun, or has not begun in any way that is discernable to the public. The editorial board of the Washington Post argues that the U.S. should not strike Iranian targets within Iranian territory, but should strike at some of the many, many Revolutionary Guard forces scattered around the rest of the Middle East. Today, we’ll examine where those IRGC forces are . . . and where they may be reduced to flaming shrapnel in the not-too-distant future.
A Target-Rich Environment
The editorial board of the Washington Post, this morning:
This does not mean the time has come to strike Iranian assets within Iran — as some, including Republicans eager to brand the president as soft on the Islamic republic, are urging. That would be unprecedented in the long history of U.S.-Iranian conflict and would mark a dramatic escalation without necessarily proving decisive. A better option would be to hit Iran hard, and directly, but outside its own territory, along with going after the proxy militias. This could be done by striking Iran’s Revolutionary Guard forces in Syria, Iraq or Yemen.
The U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, estimates that the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has between 150,000 and 190,000 personnel. The IRGC is composed of ground, naval, and air forces, as well as an internal security militia (the Basij) and an external operations force, the Quds Force.*
The Quds Force is described by the Council on Foreign Relations as the “IRGC’s de facto external affairs branch, and it has developed ties with armed groups in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, and elsewhere, providing them with training, weapons, money, and military advice to project Iran’s power abroad.”
Quds Force translates to Jerusalem Force, and its mission is to “liberate” Muslim land, including Jerusalem. This detail encapsulates the organization’s philosophy succinctly:
Before being killed in a U.S. strike in January 2020, the then-Quds Force commander Major General Qassem Soleimani declared in 2018, “the IRGC has a structure, statutes, rules and regulations, but in reality [it is] an intellectual system” in which every action is sacred. The aim of Soleimani was summarized as: “to create opportunities out of dark crises.”
IRGC Forces in Syria
Believe it or not, Iran has about 570 military sites within the territory of Syria, or at least that was the count as of June 2023. For comparison, Turkey has 125, Russia has 105, and the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS has 30. There are 105 Iranian military sites in the suburbs of Damascus, seven in the city of Damascus itself, and nine in Tartus (also the site of a major Russian naval base). There are plenty in the northwest around the city of Aleppo, and plenty more along the borders with Lebanon.
While Americans don’t hear much about the divisions of the old Syrian Civil War, the Syrian Democratic Forces — that’s the translation of their name, not an assessment of their values or partisan affiliation — still control about a third of the country in the northeast, which is labeled either the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, or Rojava, as the local Kurds call it. The Turkish military also invaded and occupied stretches of land in northern Syria in 2016, 2018, and 2019.
Many Iranian military facilities in Syria are on the regime-backed side of the line against the SDF, on the southern and western side of the Euphrates River.
IRGC Forces in Iraq
In Iraq, the Quds Force has has ties to the Kata’ib Hezbollah, Badr Organization, and Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq militias. Michael Knight, writing at the U.S. Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, offered a portrait of each militia and how it began, back in 2010:
- “Kata’ib Hezbollah was formed in early 2007 as a vehicle through which the IRGC Qods Force could deploy its most experienced operators and its most sensitive equipment.”
- “Asaib Ahl al-Haq emerged between 2006 and 2008 as part of an effort by the IRGC Qods Force to create a popular organization similar to Lebanese [Hezbollah] that would be easier to shape than Moqtada al-Sadr’s uncontrollable Jaysh al-Mahdi movement.”
- “After 2003, Badr became the part of the IRGC Qods Force that was selected to ‘work openly’ within the new Iraq. Badr inserted hundreds of its Iranian-trained operatives into the state security organs (notably the Ministry of Interior intelligence structure and key special forces and Iraqi Army units). As a result, the Special Groups have regularly received tip-offs and targeting guidance from their ‘fellow travelers’ in the Badr movement.”
Yesterday, Kata’ib Hezbollah announced “it will suspend attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq & Syria,” issuing at statement on Telegram declaring, “We will continue to defend our people in Gaza in other ways, and we recommend to the brave Mujahideen of the Free Hezbollah Brigades to passive defense (temporarily), if any American action occurs.”
Yesterday, the Pentagon press secretary, Major General Pat Ryder, said, “We’ve seen those reports. I don’t have a specific comment to provide, other than actions speak louder than words.”
Our Noah Rothman writes, “One of the better-known of Iran’s cat’s-paws in the Middle East is attempting to weasel its way out of the consequences that tend to accompany the killing of American soldiers by declaring victory and retreating.” Looking at Biden’s slow pace of decision-making and preference to avoid military strikes, Noah wonders if this is Kata’ib Hezbollah trying to talk its way off a Pentagon target list. “Given Biden’s obvious distaste for punitive — much less preemptive — strikes against America’s adversaries, maybe Kataib Hezbollah thinks that he can lulled into a false sense of security. It’s insane, but it’s not exactly crazy.”
The Islamic Resistance in Iraq claimed credit for the attack on U.S. forces in Jordan, but that statement is less significant than it appears at first glance. As the Foundation for Defense of Democracies notes, the term “‘Islamic Resistance’ is a euphemism used by Iranian-backed groups to refer to each other, including groups outside of Iraq, such as Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hamas.” Knight, now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, notes, “The Telegram brand that emerged in October 2023 is not a group per se, but rather a generic name used to denote unity among Iran-backed armed groups and deemphasize their individual identities during attacks spurred by the Gaza crisis.”
IRGC Forces in Yemen
The Houthis who are attacking international shipping and U.S. Naval vessels in the Red Sea are a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Earlier this month, Semafor reported:
Commanders and advisors from Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are on the ground in Yemen and playing a direct role in Houthi rebel attacks on commercial traffic in the Red Sea.
The IRGC has stationed missile and drone trainers and operators in Yemen, as well as personnel providing tactical intelligence support to the Houthis, U.S. and Middle East officials told Semafor. The IRGC, through its overseas Qods Force, has also overseen the transfer to the Houthis of the attack drones, cruise missiles, and medium-range ballistic missiles used in a string of strikes on Red Sea and Israeli targets in recent weeks, these officials said. . . .
The IRGC’s overall presence inside Yemen is overseen by Gen. Abdul Reza Shahlai, a Tehran-based commander whom the Trump administration attempted to assassinate in a 2020 drone strike inside Yemen, U.S. and Mideast officials said. American intelligence believes Shahlai is deeply involved in Tehran’s overseas terrorist operations through his role as the Qods Force’s deputy commander.
This includes a role in overseeing an unsuccessful 2011 Iranian plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s then-ambassador to the U.S., Adel al-Jubeir, at a Washington, D.C. restaurant. Shahlai, who’s been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department, also helped oversee IRGC attacks against U.S. military personnel in Iraq over the past two decades. The Department of Justice offered $15 million in 2019 for information related to the commander’s operations and networks.
Dr. Eliot Cohen, the Arleigh Burke chair in strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and a former counselor at the U.S. State Department, characterized the Iranian control over the Houthis at a CSIS event earlier this month:
My view with the Houthis is, those people do not manufacture radars. They do not manufacture missiles. They do not have targeting information. They get all this from the Iranians. And they are — and there are IRGC people — Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps — operatives on the ground training them. The IRGC is in Syria. They are absolutely in Lebanon. My view is, if you want to prevent the outbreak of a war, you make it very clear to the Iranians that if their proxies cause war like that, they are going to be the ones who pay. And so actually I’ve felt for some time that we’ve been all too hesitant in responding to the Houthis, and not just in terms of going after Houthis who are shooting off these missiles, but going after Iranians.
Whether or not the U.S. should strike IRGC targets within Iranian territory, there is an abundance of legitimate and potentially high-value IRGC targets outside of Iranian territory.
*The U.S. intelligence community spells it “Qods” Force. Because the intel community is often encountering a foreign name before the global media, they sometimes work with different transliteration. Within the U.S. intelligence community, the leader of al-Qaeda was often referred to as “Usama bin Laden” or “UBL” rather than the Osama bin Laden or OBL found in mainstream use.
ADDENDUM: Our Michael Brendan Dougherty, while recognizing the need to respond to attacks on U.S. forces, argues that the killing of three U.S. Army Reservists in a far-off corner of Jordan with insufficient air defense ought to raise tough and serious questions about why those troops were there, and how many U.S. troops ought to be stationed in far-off, isolated corners of the Middle East in the name of a continuing mission against an ISIS threat that has largely passed:
The United States must strike back at those who attacked us. But we must do so aware that we have other soldiers sitting deep and poorly defended among hostiles. There is no virtue in stubbornly sticking around. If their missions are unauthorized, and unproductive, these troops should be evacuated rather than left to sit out as local targets or to be used as easy steps up the escalation ladder for our enemies.
The Biden administration and the Pentagon need to come out and clear the air with the American people — explain where we have troops in the Middle East and why they are needed there, and then defend them adequately. If they feel that the justifications offered by their spokespeople won’t fly with the American public, there’s another option: Bring those troops home and out of harm’s way.