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The Sinister Genius of Qassem Soleimani
The Iranian commander harnessed both Shiite extremists and Sunni radicals, even as he built a ‘foreign legion’ to project Iran’s power


In 2003, in the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the Iranian regime was ridden with anxiety. President George W. Bush had included Iran in his post-9/11 “axis of evil” in a famous 2002 speech. I interviewed many Iranian officials at the time as a Tehran-based analyst with the International Crisis Group, and I vividly remember their fear that the U.S. might turn next to Tehran.

In those anxious days, Gen. Qassem Soleimani —the powerful commander of Iran’s Quds Force, who was killed this week by a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad—performed an act of unsettling geopolitical genius that still echoes today.

After the U.S. military campaign to topple the Taliban began, Iran detained hundreds of al Qaeda fighters fleeing Afghanistan, including some members of Osama bin Laden’s family and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the future leader of al Qaeda in Iraq. Many Iranians saw these jihadists as a threat—Sunni zealots who hated overwhelmingly Shiite Iran. Yet Soleimani, the architect of the Islamic Republic’s plans for regional dominance, realized that they could also be an asset.

In their book “The Exile,” investigative journalists Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy describe the journey of many al Qaeda members who spent months and even years as “guests” of Iran. Soleimani broke bread with bin Laden’s sons, who affectionately called him Hajji Qassem, Ms. Scott-Clark and Mr. Levy write. He appointed two senior Quds Force officers to “provide the guests with whatever they needed,” including refrigerators, widescreen TVs and an “unlimited budget” to furnish a religious library. Saif al-Adel, a notorious al Qaeda explosives expert, had access to a sports complex in a posh Tehran neighborhood, where he swam laps alongside Western diplomats.

If the U.S.-led Iraq war was intended, in part, to cow Iran by establishing a strong U.S. military presence in Iraq and to create a flourishing Shiite democracy to undermine the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic next door, Iran would do everything it could to ensure that America’s experiment turned into a smoldering failure. Before the war began in March 2003, Soleimani’s Quds Force freed many of the Sunni jihadists that Iran had been holding captive, unleashing them against the U.S.

That August, Zarqawi and his forces conducted three deadly bombings in Iraq—against U.N. headquarters and the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad and a major Shiite shrine in Najaf, a southern Iraqi city holy to Shiites. These blows devastated the U.S.-led war from the beginning. By targeting Shiite shrines and civilians, killing thousands of Iran’s fellow Shiites, Zarqawi helped to radicalize Iraq’s Shiite majority and pushed them closer to Iran—and to Soleimani, who could offer them protection. Just months after the U.S. invasion, the debate in Washington had shifted sharply: Instead of asking how a triumphant U.S. could help Iraq to shape Iran, the question became how an embattled U.S. could stop Iran from shaping Iraq.

Under Soleimani’s command, Iran became the only country in the region capable of harnessing both Shiite extremism and, at times, Sunni radicalism too. His sinister genius in bridging sectarian divides has given Iran an enormous asymmetric advantage over its great Sunni Arab rival in the Gulf, Saudi Arabia. All Shiite extremists are willing to fight for Iran, while most Sunni extremists—including al Qaeda and Islamic State—want to overthrow Saudi Arabia, which they see as a corrupt, impious agent of the West.

Soleimani conceived of using Sunni jihadists to fight the U.S. in much the same way that the U.S. used Sunni jihadists to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Iran’s Shiite theocracy has managed, at times, to cooperate tactically with deadly Sunni extremist groups—including the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Palestinian groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad—against their common foes, the U.S. and Israel, even as Iran has been fighting on the front lines against the Sunni fanatics of Islamic State.

During the Obama administration, Gen. Stanley McChrystal criticized Tehran for providing weapons and training inside Iran to Taliban insurgents targeting U.S. troops. In 2018, Israel’s top general, Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot, said that Iran had increased its funding in the Gaza Strip for Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad to $100 million a year.

Perhaps no American military commander knew Soleimani better than former Gen. David Petraeus, who commanded U.S. troops in Iraq at the height of the war’s fury, much of which was inflicted by Soleimani. Gen. Petraeus considered Soleimani “a combination of CIA director, JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] commander and regional envoy.” Soleimani “has the blood of well over 600 U.S. and coalition soldiers on his hands, and the blood of countless others as well, in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Afghanistan—in each of which he supported, funded, trained, equipped and often directed powerful Shiite militias,” Gen. Petraeus told me this week.