Killing of senior IRGC commander in Syria reveals scope of Tehran’s meddling in regional crises
The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps confirmed on Monday, January 19th that one of its senior commanders, Mohammad Ali Allah-dadi was killed following an Israeli helicopter attack in the Qoneytare region. Prior to this, Lebanese Hezbollah had confirmed on Sunday, January 18th that a commander and five members of this group were killed in an attack by Israeli helicopter gunships in the Golan Heights. Among them was Jihad Moghniya, son of former Hezbollah operations commander Imad Moghniya.
Although the Iranian regime’s widespread meddling in regional countries, especially in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon have formed one of the pillars of this regime’s survival strategy, this meddling has escalated to an unprecedented level in the past three years, following the Syrian people’s uprising against Bashar al-Assad and last summer’s ouster of the Iran proxy government of Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq.
Senior IRGC commanders in Iraq and Syria
A new and significant development in this regard is the death of three IRGC Quds Force brigadier generals and other senior commanders in the past month. Brigadier general is the second highest rank in the Iranian military, after the 14 division commanders currently serving. The confirmed presence of multiple brigadier generals in Iraq and Syria helps to illustrate the extent to which Iran is commanding and participating in the fighting.
On December 28th the Iranian regime reported that brigadier general Hamid Taghavi, one of the highest ranking Quds Force commanders and a member of Quds Force head Qassem Suleimani’s staff, was killed in Samarra.
Mehdi Norouzi, a senior Quds Force commander in charge of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s security and a senior commander of plainclothes forces during the 2009 uprising in Iran, was killed on Saturday, January 10th in Samarra.
This makes Brigadier General Mohammad Ali Allah-dadi the third senior IRGC commander to be confirmed killed in the past month in IRGC forces’ clashes in the region.
On December 26, the National Council of Resistance of Iran revealed that the number of IRGC members in Iraq has passed the 7,000 mark. This is an unprecedented number of Quds Force boots on the ground in Iraq and it demonstrates that despite the back-breaking economic crises they are faced with, the mullahs are most worried about their regional strategy crumbling, and about the immediate impact of this on its domestic rule. This explains the continuously increasing trend of direct interference in the region.
In addition to images showing Qassem Suleimani’s direct presence on the battlefield in Iraq, the death of three brigadier generals in such a short period shows that this regime has not only entered the fight in unprecedented numbers, but also has dispatched its highest ranking military commanders, especially senior Quds Force generals.
Presence does not equal strength
Recent remarks made by Ali Shamkhani, secretary of the Supreme Security Council (the uppermost national security decision-making apparatus in Iran) at the funeral ceremony for Taghavi described very vividly the regime’s crises of status in relation to its regional strategies: “Those spreading rumors these days are raising this question: ‘what does Samarra have anything to do with Hamid Taghavi, and why are we involved in Iraq and Syria at all?’ The answer is very clear. If the blood of Taghavis aren’t shed in Samarra, we must have our blood shed in Sistan and Azerbaijan provinces, and the cities of Shiraz and Isfahan. Taghavi and ‘Taghavis’ are shedding their blood today before our blood is shed in Tehran, and we must first defend and bleed in Samarra.”
The mullahs’ regime is in full gear with some of its highest ranking officials directly involved along with thousands of troops in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. The dimensions of the regime’s interference are much larger than the West realizes. In a defensive reaction out of concern about the trend of events in the region, fearing that their three-decade long investments are going down the drain and that their regional strategy is completely falling apart, the mullahs are continuously increasing their meddling in the broader Middle East. Indeed, the regime’s very life and survival relies on the creation and continuation of the current crisis. Therefore there is no viable solution to that crisis that does not involve evicting this regime from the region, especially from Syria and Iraq.
