Suleimani strike not the military game-changer America wanted
A year after killing top general, Pentagon still regards Iran as potent foe in Middle East
Iran s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (front) leading a prayer over the caskets of Qassem Suleimani and Iraqi paramilitary chief Abu Mahdi Al Muhandis at Tehran University in the Iranian capital. AFP
Army cadets attend a funeral ceremony for Qassem Suleimani, shown in posters, and his comrades at the Enqelab-e-Eslami (Islamic Revolution) square in Tehran. AP
Mourners gather to pay homage to top Iranian military commander Qassem Suleimani, after he was killed in a US strike in Baghdad, in the capital Tehran. AFP
Alireza Tivasolii, A Qom seminary graduate and commander of the Fatemiyoun Brigade killed in Syria, with Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Revolutionary Guards’ Qods Force (File)
Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iran’s clerical establishment has used religious organizations to expand its clout abroad.
Key among them is the Al-Mustafa International University, a network of religious seminaries based in the Shi’ite holy city of Qom that has branches in some 50 countries.
The university claims to teach Shi’ite Muslim theology, Islamic science, and Iran’s national language, Persian, to tens of thousands of foreign students across Asia, Europe, Africa, and South America.
In a
statement on December 9, the university said it promoted peace, friendship, and brotherhood among nations and slammed the U.S. decision as hegemonic. High-Value Individuals
Ali Alfoneh, a senior fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington who has closely monitored IRGC activity in Syria, said that, according to his database from January 2012 to December 2020, 3,059 Iranian and allied foreign fighters were killed in combat in Syria.
Alfoneh says of those, only three were students or graduates of the Al-Mustafa International University known as Jamiat al-Mostafa University in Iran. This indicates that Jamiat al-Mostafa has never served as the primary recruitment ground for the IRGC s war effort in Syria, he says.
Habib Chaab, an Iranian opposition leader in exile in Sweden, was lured by a female Iranian agent to Istanbul. There he was abducted, drugged, and driven in a van more than 1,000 miles east across Turkey and smuggled into Iran, in a complex operation orchestrated by Iranian intelligence.
He is the latest in a string of at least three high-profile Iranian dissidents who returned to the region from the United States or Europe, only to be abducted beyond Iran’s borders, spirited back into the country, and put on state TV to confess to “crimes.”
Why We Wrote This
Political leadership requires theater. Especially when deterrence is the aim, that can include show trials, and spectacles to engineer social compliance have been a factor in Iran since antiquity.