Three Years After Sulaimani’s Assassination, Did Iran’s Overseas Influence Wane?

Qassem Sulaimani was a powerful figure in Iran, serving as the commander of the Quds Force, a division of the Revolutionary Guard responsible for overseas operations.

Sulaimani oversaw the Quds Force’s overseas operations to provide weapons and training to fighters in countries including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen and was also instrumental in developing Iran’s relationships with militias and allied governments, such as Hezbollah and Hamas. In the Arab World Sulaimani is known as the “Coordinator of the Four Capitals (Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and Sanaa).”

On January 3, Sulaimani and the deputy commander of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, were killed in a U.S. airstrike near Baghdad’s International Airport. Some have questioned whether this assassination will affect Iran’s influence in the region. While Iran’s military presence is important to maintaining its influence, the country has also worked to integrate itself into the economic and cultural spheres of the countries with a significant presence, a long-term strategy for preserving its power.

Three years after Sulaimani’s assassination, did Iran’s overseas influence wane? Not really, Iran rather stepped up its support to its foreign proxies.

Syria

Iran’s influence in Syria has been growing in recent years, with Russia giving Iran more leeway in the country after the war in Ukraine and the recent visit of U.S. President Joe Biden to the Middle East, where he sought to initiate a “Middle Eastern NATO” to combat Iranian expansionism.

However, despite ongoing Israeli strikes against Iranian militias in Syria and attempts to disrupt weapons shipments from Iran to Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Iran has continued to entrench itself in Syria, mainly in Damascus outskirts and western Syria.

Omar Abu Laila, the executive director of Deir Ezzor 24 and a security expert, estimates that Iran still has 20,000 missiles in Syria, while the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claims that Iran has stored thousands of missiles in the border area with Lebanon.

For over 25 years, the alliance between Iran and Syria has been strong in various areas such as strategy, politics, economics, and culture.

According to a 2007 analysis by the United States Institute of Peace, this alliance is likely to endure despite changing circumstances due to the shared hostility towards the United States and increasing isolation from the West.

In recent years, Iran has signed several economic agreements with Syria, covering sectors such as agriculture, livestock, industry, oil, communications, electricity, and ports. These agreements have helped alleviate the Syrian regime’s economic difficulties caused by punishing sanctions.

Iraq

Iran has sought to increase its political influence in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, building relationships with numerous Iraqi political parties and paramilitary groups, and working to prevent the emergence of a hostile government and to keep banned Kurdish groups from operating on Iranian soil.

The two countries also share water resources as Iraq depends on Iran for natural gas and other imports, and have long had intertwined religious, cultural, and geographic ties. Iran’s influence can also be seen through its control over the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), an umbrella group containing various factions but largely loyal to Iran. While the PMF gained popularity for fighting the Islamic State (IS) after the group captured Mosul in 2014, the PMF has since come to dominate the military, political, and economic spheres in Iraq.

In an effort to consolidate its hold on the country, Iran has supported pro-Iran parties in the Iraqi parliament and helped to appoint officials close to Iran to high-security positions in the government.

The oil sector in Iraq is also a significant gain for Iran, with the Iraqi Oil Ministry reporting unprecedented oil revenues in 2022, and the country importing a third of its oil needs from Iran. Some analysts believe that Iran benefits from smuggling Iraqi oil to the rest of the world, as the two countries share oil fields and drill from the same reservoirs, making it difficult to distinguish between Iranian and Iraqi oil.

Lebanon

Iran has long supported Hezbollah, the Party of God, in Lebanon with sophisticated weaponry and backing for the party’s domination of Lebanese politics. Hezbollah was founded with Iranian support in 1982 with the goal of fighting Israel, and gained popularity in the region until the Syrian uprising in 2011, when the group lost much of its Sunni support after it intervened in support of President Bashar Assad.

Today, Hezbollah is financially stronger than other parties in Lebanon, and has used its political influence to tighten its grip on government institutions, particularly those that could generate profits for the group, as well as to develop a wide smuggling network for drugs and oil.

In January 2022, Sunni block leader and three-time prime minister Saad Hariri announced that he was stepping down from Lebanese politics, citing the growing Iranian influence in the country as a reason for his withdrawal. This move has further cemented Lebanon as a bastion of Iranian influence on the Mediterranean, as the country faces a financial meltdown.

Yemen

Iran has had relationships with the Houthis, an Iran-backed armed movement in Yemen officially known as Ansar Allah, since the 1980s. However, these ties deepened after Saudi Arabia intervened in Yemen in 2015 due to concerns about the security of its southern borders, leading to a disastrous war. The Houthis have ties with Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and have been inspired by the group’s success in expelling the Israeli army from Lebanon.

In recent years, Iran has increased its support for the Houthis by sending them sophisticated weapons and fuel. In October 2022, the U.S. Navy discovered 70 missile fuel components hidden on a vessel carrying fertilizers from Iran to Yemen, violating a 2014 United Nations embargo that bans the transfer of weapons to the Houthis. Smuggling weapons from Iran to Yemen has long been an issue, despite the embargo.