How Iran Pursues Its Interests Via Proxies and Partners

For more than 15 years, Western diplomatic tussles with Iran focused on its nuclear program and the ballistic missiles that could carry nuclear warheads it might one day produce. Yet by far the most powerful weapon that leaders in Tehran had at their disposal as they extended their influence across the Middle East was a network of foreign militias, built by Major General Qassem Soleimani, the iconic commander killed in Iraq by a U.S. drone strike Jan. 2. Soleimani’s proxy fighters -- from Afghanistan to Yemen -- are likely to remain Iran’s main weapon in an asymmetric fight against the vastly superior conventional weaponry and forces of the U.S. and its allies.

Iran has been funding and arming militant groups abroad since soon after the 1979 Islamic Revolution as the nation’s new fundamentalist Shiite Muslim leaders sought to spread their mission to the rest of the region. The limits of their ability to prevail in open conflict became apparent during the 1980-1988 war that quickly followed with Iraq, from which Soleimani’s Al Quds unit emerged from Iran’s premier military force, the Revolutionary Guard Corp. Though Iran fought Iraq’s better armed, Western-backed forces to a standstill, the economic and human cost was devastating. Iran’s leaders have avoided open warfare since, preferring the deniability and lower casualty rates offered by the use of covert operations and proxy forces.