Below is a brief overview of each chapter and its central arguments.

Chapters 1–4

“Revolutionary Islam: Why It’s Necessary”

Chapter 1
This chapter is a condensed version of my more than 400-page academic study of asymmetric warfare and military morale, in which I examine a range of asymmetric conflicts—primarily through the study of insurgencies and irregular warfare—fought between 1982 and 2019 in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. Drawing upon these cases, I seek to demonstrate a direct correlation between Islamic ideology and heightened battlefield morale and, building upon this relationship, develop an argument for the superiority of revolutionary Islamist ideology as a source of combat motivation and, ultimately, battlefield effectiveness.

Chapter 2
Chapter 2, alongside Chapter 7, is among the most distinctive, ambitious, and interesting chapters in the book. In this chapter, I trace and analyze the modern development of Sunni and Shia Islamist movements, with particular emphasis on their interaction, mutual influence, and the ways in which revolutionary ideas have been exchanged, adapted, and incorporated across the two traditions. I then provide a detailed comparative ideological analysis of their respective developments, doctrines, methodologies, and political aspirations. In one subsection, I argue that the relationship between Sunni and Shia Islamism has been far more reciprocal than is often acknowledged, with each movement playing a significant role in influencing the ideological development and evolution of the other. In another, however, I argue that these similarities cannot be attributed to direct ideological borrowing or influence; rather, each developed independently and in relative isolation from the other. At the end, I leave the final judgment to the reader.

Chapter 3
In Chapter 3, I present philosophical, pragmatic-political, and historical arguments for why revolutionary Islamism represents the most suitable form of governance for the countries of the region and, more broadly, for the Islamic world.

Chapter 4
In Chapter 4, I argue that the Iranian experience of revolutionary Islamism fundamentally shifted the global balance of power and challenged the ideological boundaries established during the Cold War. I further argue that this transformation granted Iran an unusually independent position within the international system, owing in large part to the ideological foundations of revolutionary Islam.

Chapters 5–6

Chapters 5 and 6 constitute some of the most complex parts of the book. Drawing from several of my academic studies, as well as related scholarship, I analyze the rise of revolutionary Islam as part of the Muslim world’s broader journey toward political and cultural self-discovery amid the brutality of colonialism. I then examine how the existence of the Israeli regime in Palestine has meant that the region cannot simply be understood as “post-colonial” in the conventional academic sense. Rather, I argue that it represents a still-colonized post-colonial space, in which the destructive effects of historical colonialism not only persist but continue to be reproduced.

I further examine how political concepts that were either borrowed from foreign contexts, incompatible with local conditions, or alien to the region were introduced into the political consciousness of Muslim elites and, in many cases, imposed upon the region through foreign military intervention. Ethnic nationalism is one prominent example of such a political concept. I argue that the introduction of these concepts contributed significantly to the instability and conflicts that continue to affect the region today. At the same time, I examine how the incorporation of incompatible and alien political concepts into indigenous Islamic cultures produced what I describe as a condition of “half-modernity.” Under this condition, indigenous forms of society, politics, and social organization became neither genuinely native—Islamic, in many cases—nor fully modern according to the European conception of modernity. Instead, they became a hybridized and often contradictory product of both, frequently incompatible with the historical, cultural, and social conditions of the region.

After nearly half of the book has examined the origins and rise of political Islam, Chapters 7–10 turn to the question of “What Went Wrong.”

Chapter 7–10

“Revolutionary Islam: What Went Wrong”

Chapter 7 is among the most important chapters in the collection. In it, I examine the ideological and political developments—or, more precisely, deviations—that emerged within Salafi-jihadist thought following the 2003 American invasion of Iraq and the subsequent rise of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. I argue that Zarqawi represented a significant departure from the older Salafi-jihadist tradition by prioritizing the targeting of Shia Muslims over the struggle against American forces, thereby producing what I describe as the “Sunnah of Zarqawi”: the transformation of the anti-American insurgency into a broader Sunni–Shia sectarian conflict.

I subsequently examine public-opinion polling among Iraqi Sunnis throughout the insurgency period to analyze why and how this ideological deviation emerged within the insurgency. I then trace the spillover of this form of thinking into Syria following Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s dispatch of Abu Muhammad al-Jolani to Syria, alongside other associates of Zarqawi. I examine how the sectarian conflict in Syria was initiated, the objectives it was intended to serve, and the extent to which it reflected Zarqawi’s ideological worldview.

Finally, I analyze other newly developing ideological trends within Salafi-jihadism, particularly through an examination of the theories of Abu Musab al-Suri. I argue that al-Suri contributed to the development of a new form of Machiavellian Islamism—“Islam for politics” rather than political Islam—and examine how this ideological transformation contributed to the unfortunate political reality we see across the region today.

Chapter 8

In Chapter 8, I analyze and trace the origins of the Wahhabi movement in Saudi Arabia within the broader context of the Ottoman era. I argue that Wahhabism should not be understood merely as a reaction to modernity but, paradoxically, as a product of modernity itself.

Chapter 9:

Chapter 9 traces the origins and development of contemporary racial and ethnic conflicts in the region. First, I examine the racial and ethnic policies of the late Ottoman period and those implemented by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk during and following the Turkish War of Independence. I trace how Arabs, Turks, and other Muslim communities were initially united under Atatürk’s leadership in opposition to European imperialism, before examining how Atatürk subsequently pursued increasingly nationalist and discriminatory policies in the process of establishing the Turkish Republic. I argue that these policies contributed to the permanent political and ethnic fragmentation of Muslim communities across the region, divisions whose consequences continue to shape regional politics to this day. I then analyze, in the subsequent subsection, how ISIS, as the latest manifestation of Salafi-takfirism, incorporated elements of Arab nationalist discourse, religious literature, sermons, and political attitudes beneath a new Islamist veneer.

Chapter 10

Chapter 10 is devoted exclusively to examining the development of Shia Islamist movements in recent decades. One of its subsections examines the political rationale behind Iran’s intervention in Syria through the lens of neorealist political theory, drawing upon an academic study I conducted in 2021. In addition, it considers the possible theological justifications that the Iranian leadership may have invoked to justify Iran’s intervention and explores how the ideological principles of global Islamism espoused by the Islamic Republic could be reconciled with the political necessity of supporting Syria’s secular Ba’athist regime. Finally, the chapter analyzes the unintended and undesirable consequences of Iran’s intervention in Syria for Islamist movements across the region.

Chapters 11–15

“Revolutionary Islam: What Must Be Done”

Building upon the preceding arguments concerning why revolutionary Islam is necessary for the Muslim world as an alternative governmental structure, Chapters 11–15 turn toward the question of what must be done to make such a project viable and sustainable.

Chapter 11
In Chapter 11, I examine the concept and strategy of “Islamic pragmatism,” explaining the boundaries of political pragmatism and its relationship with, as well as its limitations within, broader Islamic ideological boundaries. I then examine several major revolutions, including those in Egypt, Iran, Russia, and China, in order to identify common patterns of success and failure. By comparing the various strategies adopted by different revolutionary movements, including those that contributed to success and those that contributed to failure, I seek to identify the conditions necessary for revolutionary success and, in turn, to determine what constitutes an acceptable, necessary, and justified relationship between ideological pragmatism and ideological principles.

Chapter 12
Chapter 12 examines the Ottoman Empire and its Islamic institutions and policies as a potential model for a future successful form of Islamic governance. This includes an examination of Ottoman policies toward religious and ethnic minorities, the implementation of Sharia law, and the manner in which Sultan Abdul Hamid II sought to maintain a balance between Islamic ideological governance and political pragmatism.

Chapter 13
Chapter 13 is one of the most comprehensive and analytically developed chapters in the book. I begin by examining the concept of asymmetric warfare and the historical roots of economic underdevelopment in Muslim societies. I then propose a framework for effective economic, cultural, and ideological asymmetric warfare. To develop this framework, I draw on historical insurgencies and the experiences of anti-colonial states, examining the strategies they employed and the lessons they may offer for contemporary political movements. The chapter also includes an extensive academic study of economic sanctions, examining how sanctions function as instruments of political pressure and how they reshape state–society relations.

Chapter 14
Chapter 14 explores the possible forms of future Islamic governance and the conditions necessary to maximize their prospects for survival while remaining within Islamic ideological boundaries. In particular, I examine the extent to which departures from a “pure” Islamic ideology may be permissible, the circumstances under which such departures might be justified, and the limits that should ultimately be placed on political pragmatism.

Chapter 15
Chapter 15 is a primarily philosophical chapter drawing upon the ideas of Leo Tolstoy, Abdullah Azzam, and other thinkers. I argue that the establishment of an Islamic state is not merely a political necessity, nor is it simply a core component of Islamic faith; rather, I argue that, without an Islamic state, Islam itself is deprived of a fundamental dimension of its meaning.

More broadly, I argue that the aspiration and struggle to establish an Islamic state—and ultimately its establishment itself—is what gives meaning to the life of a Muslim. The struggle becomes a “state of meaning,” while those who die in pursuit of this objective become, in my formulation, an eternalization of that meaning.

Supplementary Chapter

The Supplementary Chapter of this book, a major addition to the second edition, examines Iran’s Mosaic Defense strategy—its doctrine of asymmetric warfare in the ongoing Iran–US war—and explores its broader strategic implications. The second part of the chapter, in turn, examines the responses of various Islamist movements to the ongoing Iran–US war, considering how the conflict might affect their future positions, strategies, and political trajectories. A shortened version of this chapter has also been published on my Substack account for readers who would like a preview of its central arguments.

Availability

The book is currently available in the Kindle edition. Because I am currently in Iran and therefore unable to conduct an in-person quality check of the paperback edition, I have decided not to make the paperback available at this time in order to ensure that the published edition meets the desired standard of quality. For the time being, therefore, only the online Kindle edition will be available.

Additionally, as I mentioned previously, friends who purchased the first edition can send me a direct message here, and I will provide them with the second edition free of charge.

I hope you enjoy this collection of research, arguments, and reflections, and I sincerely hope that, through this work, I can contribute something positive to Muslims, to this region, and to our broader cause.

To purchase a copy of the book, click here

The following short essay is excerpted from the Supplementary Chapter of my book, The Iran War: Mosaic Defense and the Future of Political Islam. This Supplementary Chapter was added for the book’s second edition, which is an expanded and revised version of the first edition. The essay solely presents the opening section of the chapter, examining Iran’s Mosaic Defense strategy—its doctrine of asymmetric warfare in the ongoing Iran–US war. The second edition of the book is scheduled for publication by the end of this week, and a link to it is pinned to the top of my Substack profile. Finally, due to the structural limitations of the Substack platform, the citations and bibliography accompanying this chapter could not be included in this excerpt. They remain fully intact in the book chapter.

Introduction

I have added this chapter as an extension to the book for two primary reasons. First, the chapter’s opening section directly addresses the concept of asymmetric warfare—a subject explored throughout the book in its economic, cultural, and ideological dimensions—but here it examines asymmetric warfare in a strictly military sense through an analysis of Iranian strategy during the ongoing US–Iran war. This conflict offers the most compelling practical example of successful asymmetric warfare in recent history, namely, the Mosaic Defense strategy. Because this strategy has been validated so recently and so vividly, it demands close study: any future Islamic resistance movement, or indeed any non‑Islamic movement, could employ it to maximise its chances of survival, whether after having established a state or while still fighting to establish one. To overlook these lessons would be a profound mistake. Should such movements emerge, the insights gathered here will prove indispensable not only for enhancing their endurance but also for strengthening their capacity to impose their will on imperial powers. The second part of the chapter analyses how Islamist movements have responded to the ongoing Iran–US war and considers the trajectories they might follow in light of both the conflict and the shifting global balance of power. In this respect, it directly connects to the spirit of the book by exploring how this war could reshape the evolution of Islamist movements, sectarian dynamics, and the future trajectories of such movements across the region. Moreover, the chapter holds a unique place within the volume: it is the only one composed after the fall of the Assad regime in Syria. As a result, its analysis is the most current—and therefore the most relevant—for readers seeking to understand the region’s rapidly shifting landscape.

Mosaic Defense and Decentralized Warfare

For decades, modern warfare was conceived through the logic of the strategic center of gravity—the conviction that annihilating an adversary’s political or military core could precipitate rapid systemic collapse. The highly personalised regimes of Ṣaddām Ḥusayn’s Iraq, Muʿammar al‑Qadhdhāfī’s Libya, and Bashshār al‑Asad’s Syria, though they collapsed under vastly different circumstances and degrees of foreign intervention, shared a fundamental architectural vulnerability: each concentrated power so singularly in a single figure that the entire political order became acutely susceptible to precision strikes, and the removal of that leader could destabilise the whole structure. The United States, for example, executed a decapitation strike against Ṣaddām before committing ground troops; NATO airstrikes directly targeted al‑Qadhdhāfī; and in the Syrian case the consequences proved even more instantaneous, with al‑Asad’s political system collapsing the moment he fled. Yet Iran’s contemporary strategic architectures, by deliberate design, appeared to be engineered to survive precisely that disappearance of the center.

In a coordinated operation, the United States assassinated a number of Iranian military, political, and diplomatic personnel while simultaneously bombing police stations, Basij checkpoints, and military sites. From a Clausewitzian perspective, these strikes targeted the adversary’s center of gravity (Schwerpunkt) with the expectation of causing disorganization and accelerating collapse; in theory, such an operation should achieve a decisive strategic effect by paralyzing the opponent’s decision-making architecture and rapidly eroding its capacity to resist. Contemporary Western military doctrines describe this approach as a “decapitation” strategy. The idea is to strike the top political and military leadership in order to paralyze decision-making and cause resistance to collapse quickly. This strategy rests on the assumption that power is concentrated in a single, identifiable centre. However, the Iranian case raised deeper questions for deterrence theory. Classical deterrence relies on the threat of punishment against an adversary’s critical assets, but when those assets are deliberately decentralized and resilient, punishment becomes harder to define and impose. The war without a center thus challenges some of the most enduring assumptions of Western strategic thought; concepts such as decisive battle, escalation dominance, and center of gravity, while analytically useful, prove potentially insufficient when confronting systems purposely designed to function without a center.

Rather than triggering collapse, the loss of the decision-making center accelerated the activation of a mechanism of military resilience already embedded in Iranian strategic doctrine. This occurs because the Islamic Republic is fundamentally different from the highly personalised autocracies that have collapsed elsewhere in the region. Unlike those regimes—and even unlike the pre‑1979 monarchy—the Islamic Republic is not organised around a single person; its institutional design prioritises not the fate of any leader but rather the preservation of the system itself. This doctrine, in my view, represents the direct practical implementation of Ayatollah Khomeini’s ideological command that “the preservation of the state [the Islamic Republic] is the ultimate [religious] obligation.” By default, this command implies that preserving the state takes precedence over the preservation of individual life, the state economy, or any other consideration. The entire system must survive. This ideological conviction thus gave birth to the IRGC’s current war strategy: a “war without a center.”

Defining Mosaic Defense

The standard Persian term for Iran’s current asymmetrical military strategy is defāʿ-e mozāʾikī, meaning “mosaic defense.” Within formal discourse, when the emphasis falls on decentralization, the more precise phrase defāʿ-e mozāʾikī-ye ghayr-e motamarkaz (“decentralized mosaic defense”) is employed. This terminology within Iranian military discourse consistently frames the doctrine as fundamentally defensive, oriented toward state survival and territorial integrity. Conversely, Western shorthand expressions such as “mosaic doctrine” or “mosaic command” often imply an offensive posture. This defense strategy arranges the state’s defensive architecture into multiple regional and semi-independent layers rather than concentrating authority in a single chain of command vulnerable to a decapitation strike. Accordingly, the IRGC, the Basīj, regular army units, missile forces, naval assets, and local command structures together constitute a distributed system: if one element is struck, others continue to function; the elimination of senior leaders does not cause the chain to collapse; and even if communications are severed, local units retain both the authority and the capacity to act. Consequently, Iranian military thinking did not conceive of war primarily as a contest of firepower; rather, it treated war as a test of endurance. In this paradigm, the system was constructed with two operational modes: peacetime centralized control under the Supreme Leader, and wartime decentralized operations conducted through pre-delegated authority. Local autonomy thus lay at the very center of the doctrine, as it ensured that conflict could persist from below even when leadership from above had been degraded. Instead of allowing the enemy to isolate a single front and destroy one command structure, Iran aimed to distribute the war across time, geography, and multiple layers of conflict.

The Historical Development of Mosaic Defense

The practice of local military independence, embedded at the core of Mosaic Defense, has deep roots within the IRGC that stretch back to 1979 itself. During the suppression of Kurdish separatist militias in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, IRGC fighters benefited from a decentralized structure that relied, in part, on direct action at the local level. Notably, this feature not only continued to shape the organization throughout the Iran–Iraq War but also endured as a defining characteristic of the IRGC. The primary inspiration for the Mosaic Defense strategy came from the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988), where its foundational logic first took shape. Indeed, that protracted conflict fundamentally reshaped Iranian military thinking by revealing just how vulnerable centralized command structures could be when pitted against superior conventional forces. Over eight years of warfare, Iranian strategists learned that survival hinged not on decisive victories but on endurance, dispersion, and the capacity to absorb shocks over time. The immediate catalyst, however, was the American invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, which resulted in Iran’s encirclement by a far superior military force—an existential threat that endangered the survival of the state to an unprecedented degree. Iranian strategists carefully observed how Ṣaddām Ḥusayn’s highly centralized command structure collapsed merely twenty-six days after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. Once communication between the palace and the generals was severed, Iraqi divisions either ceased fighting or disbanded. Equally significant lessons were drawn from Afghanistan. The Pentagon’s doctrine of “Shock and Awe” achieved rapid military dominance yet ultimately proved unable to pacify a decentralized, population-embedded resistance. The strategic insight proved profound: centralized conventional armies were demolished swiftly, whereas networked, population-embedded insurgencies were effectively indestructible. Iran’s military planners therefore determined that the Islamic Republic had to be architecturally designed to resemble the latter, not the former. As a result, the doctrine presumed that any invading or attacking force would possess far superior conventional technology, air power, and intelligence capabilities. The answer, in Iranian thinking, was not symmetrical confrontation but rather to disrupt the enemy’s advantages, prolong the conflict, and raise the cost of continuing it. Accordingly, in 2005 the IRGC publicly announced the integration of a flexible, layered mosaic defense into its doctrine.

The Operational Function of Mosaic Defense

In 2008, the commander of the IRGC Ground Forces declared “the country has been divided into defensive mosaics.” The mosaic metaphor was deliberately selected: unlike a clock mechanism, in which the removal of a single gear halts the entire machine, a mosaic can lose individual tiles while the overall picture remains intact. The Mosaic Doctrine was not built to win; it was engineered to render defeat impossible. Centralized armies could die, and the IRGC constructed an army that could not. This inversion of conventional military thinking—building for indestructibility rather than battlefield supremacy—marked the doctrine as a genuinely novel contribution to strategic thought. The objective was not necessarily immediate battlefield superiority but rather to make the cost of countering every threat unsustainable over time. For example, if one side could produce low-cost weapons in large quantities while compelling its adversary to spend far more to defend against them, then prolonging the war itself became a mechanism of pressure. Accordingly, Iranian military doctrine placed heavy emphasis on endurance, stockpiles, decentralization, and attrition, premised on the assumption that the stronger opponent would eventually find the price of continued escalation prohibitive.

Organizationally, each of Iran’s 31 provinces received a self-contained IRGC provincial corps—Tehran was allocated two—designed as an independent military entity possessing its own intelligence capabilities, weapons stockpiles, logistics chains, integrated Basīj units, and, critically, pre-delegated authority for contingency operations. The 31 provincial commands operated as distributed nodes; pre-authorized standing directives functioned as doctrinal firmware; the Basīj supplied a network of sensors and guards embedded at the neighborhood level; and the country’s missile and drone arsenal provided the standoff engagement layer. The result was a system that, although technologically inferior to its American counterpart, nonetheless exhibited several defining properties: resilience against the destruction of individual nodes, adaptability in the absence of central coordination, and an operational capacity greater than the sum of its parts. Within this broader framework, the Basīj serves as the layer of mobilisation and internal security, sustaining bases organised at the neighbourhood level. It is not, however, equipped for independent large-scale military operations, as it lacks heavy weapons, integrated command systems, and professional training. Instead, its primary value resides in amplifying the combat power of IRGC formations, maintaining population control, accumulating detailed territorial knowledge, and supplying the human infrastructure essential for sustaining a potential insurgency. With an estimated strength exceeding one million personnel, the Basīj transformed the mosaic from a strictly military edifice into a societal one. Within this paradigm, “defence is ‘socialised’”: the military apparatus becomes interwoven with the civilian fabric of every province, and fighters defend not an abstract geographical boundary but their own homeland, their cities, and their neighbourhoods.

The psychological and operational ramifications of this strategy are equally significant. A conventional force typically suffers a devastating collapse of morale after losing its main base; the mosaic formation, by contrast, transitions seamlessly into autonomous units that sustain their own morale and continue operations independently—functioning, in effect, like insurgencies, but on a far larger scale. More importantly, this mosaic defense doctrine extends beyond Iran’s borders, playing out across the region as a whole—the Axis of Resistance. The network of decentralized, autonomous allied groups scattered throughout the region’s depth has effectively redistributed the confrontation across an expanded operational space. Likewise, the target banks pursued by allied groups are themselves decentralized and scattered across the region, enabling each node of resistance to strike a corresponding node of enemy assets. Consequently, strikes directed at certain Gulf states, many of them carried out by armed groups operating beyond Iran’s borders, should be understood not as mere tactical retaliation but as deliberate efforts to reconfigure the conflict’s geography by scattering pressure points throughout the region. In effect, the entire region became a mosaic of pressure points. The war thus ceased to be a circumscribed bilateral confrontation and evolved instead into a distributed architecture of pressure.

The Fourth Successor and Institutional Continuity

One aspect of this Iranian defence structure is the “fourth successor” protocol: for every important official, military general, and leadership figure, three to seven pre-selected replacements are designated to ensure that the assassination, disappearance, or isolation of any one leader does not result in paralysis. Should the primary replacement prove unable to assume command, a second, third, or fourth successor stands ready; simultaneously, a narrow inner circle is authorized to make critical decisions when communication with the supreme leadership becomes impossible. This arrangement directly mirrored the principle of mosaic defence: the system is forbidden from depending upon any solitary node and was deliberately engineered to continue functioning after a severe shock. Mosaic defence thus transcends mere military tactics to embody a comprehensive theory of survival. It assumes that the enemy can dominate the skies, strike first, and strike decisively; yet it was within this conceptual framework that the “fourth successor” puzzle found its place: the system has to absorb strategic shock, regenerate itself under fire, and convert the passage of time into an instrument of its own defence. By that measure, the death of a leader—even one as central as Ayatollah Khāmene’ī—is never intended to conclude the struggle. The doctrine was constructed to outlast precisely such an event.

The Islamic Republic’s decision-making apparatus demonstrated this resilience in practice, most clearly through the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC). That body brings together a broad cross-section of state elites—military commanders from both the regular army and the IRGC, the key ministers for intelligence, foreign affairs, and the interior, the president, and influential figures such as Alī Lārījānī and Saʿīd Jalīlī. Serving as the central forum for formulating core national security policies, from the nuclear issue to the defence of Iran’s borders, the SNSC reaches decisions through deliberation and consensus, and those decisions are formally ratified by the Supreme Leader. Decision-making thus unfolds through an institutionalised and collegial process rather than through unilateral directives from the top. In this manner, decision-making is decentralized, even democratized, and therefore does not collapse upon the assassination of certain leadership figures. Similarly, the Defence Council—newly constituted under the SNSC after the 12-Day War—comprises IRGC and army commanders alongside intelligence ministry representatives and operates along analogous lines, albeit with a particular focus on national defence. In the Islamic Republic, in short, decision-making and authority do not hinge upon any single person; the system is built to function beyond individuals.

The Revolutionary Guard and the Insurgent Model of Warfare

The IRGC is built in the image of an insurgency, and it is precisely this insurgency‑like structure that enables it to wage an effective form of asymmetrical warfare. The IRGC was formed and evolved from the amalgamation of pre‑1979 revolutionary militias, and several of its earliest commanders acquired their foundational military training in camps run by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), under instructors who had themselves been schooled by Vietnamese guerrillas. That tradition of low‑intensity warfare, in turn, had been instrumental in compelling the American withdrawal from Vietnam, thereby providing a practical workbook for insurgent guerrillas across the globe and giving the IRGC a direct lineage to proven insurgent methods. Under this insurgency‑like model, a strike against the centre simply turns the periphery into the centre; military power does not evaporate—it redistributes itself across the network. Such resilience, however, is by no means unique to Iran. Recent history already offers several examples of politico‑military systems that have continued to function after the elimination of their top leaders and remained resilient against far superior conventional forces: jihadist networks after the death of Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, and Hezbollah, which has sustained its operational capability despite the repeated assassination of its commanders and senior leadership.

Iranian military doctrine shares significant conceptual similarities with the military theories developed by Mao Zedong. During the Japanese invasion of China, Mao posited that a weaker force does not need to achieve a rapid victory over a stronger adversary to ultimately prevail. Instead, it could absorb the initial imbalance, prolong the conflict, weaken the enemy’s logistics and political will, and gradually shift the balance over time. Iran’s doctrine was not a direct imitation of Mao’s model; however, it shared the same core assumption: war is determined not only by the balance of military power at the beginning, but also by time, endurance, adaptability, and the capacity to survive the first shock. This logic shaped many twentieth-century conflicts, including Vietnam, Algeria, and Afghanistan, and it continued to inform analyses of how weaker states and armed groups could endure against militarily superior opponents. At the same time, this approach was shaped not only by external threats, but also by Iran’s internal experience. In the years after the 1979 revolution, the new government confronted violent challenges from armed opposition groups, especially the Mujahedin-e Khalq, whose assassinations and bombings revealed the vulnerability of a leadership-centered order. The Iran-Iraq War reinforced this lesson even further. Eight years of attritional warfare gave the Islamic Republic practical experience not only in mobilization and endurance, but also in governing under the conditions of prolonged war.

The Limitations of Mosaic Defense

For all its effectiveness as an asymmetric strategy for the weaker side, the Mosaic Defense doctrine is not without flaws: it prevents institutional collapse but may simultaneously weaken strategic coherence, controllability, and the ability to de-escalate under certain conditions. A system engineered solely for survival at the expense of controllability—a war without a centre—can remain operationally continuous yet be strategically directionless. For example, one stark consequence of pre‑delegated authority became visible when autonomous units struck Turkey, a NATO member, and Oman—attacks attributable to errors by units that could not be reached directly. In this respect, the operational advantage of decentralisation—continued functioning in the absence of central direction—was simultaneously a doctrinal liability. For that matter, although decentralised military units are “more difficult to find and finish off” and the more disciplined elite formations might be able to sustain the fight without any centralized command structure, other, less experienced units may nevertheless succumb to confusion and disorder. Mosaic Defense can therefore become ungovernable when central command forfeits control. In addition, the very nature of integrated air defense—with its inherent demands for centralized radar coordination, friend-or-foe identification, and engagement control—may at times run counter to the Mosaic Defense’s foundational commitment to decentralization. Lastly, the Mosaic Defense’s distributed strike capacity depends upon pre-positioned stockpiles that cannot be indefinitely replenished under conditions of total air dominance—a weakness that can limit the doctrine during prolonged warfare.

War, Regional Transformation, and the Future of Political Islam

….

Translator Note

This remarkable book, which I have translated, gathers a series of recent sermons that a Shia cleric delivered to his fellow students in Qum during the Iran–US war. In these lectures, the sheikh draws on classical works of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) to explore the meaning of jihad and its relevance both to the present day and to recent Islamic history. Specifically, he delves into the concept of jihad al-akbar—the internal struggle—and places it within a broader framework that connects it to jihad al-asghar, the fight against foreign enemies.

What is particularly striking is that the author opens the book by quoting the Palestinian Islamist martyr Fathi Shaqaqi as a reference point. That a Shia sheikh would quote a Sunni thinker is significant in itself, but that he does so while addressing an audience of Shia students suggests just how deeply Shahid Shaqaqi has shaped Shia Islamist thought.

This translation covers only the first chapter. I will gladly continue with the subsequent chapters if there is a demand for it.

Preface

The door of Jihad has been opened and we are now in a state of Jihad. What is the proper conduct and etiquette of striving, and with what mindful attentiveness should a warrior attune their spirit to Jihad? Whatever this conduct and etiquette may be, and whatever those mindful considerations are, they are secondary to an acquaintance with the true nature of Jihad itself. Now is the time to become familiar with the essence of this desirable truth and to ask: What, in reality, is Jihad?

What you are reading is the text of the lessons explaining the first chapter of the book “Al-Jihad” from Al-Kafi, which were held in the autumn and winter of the year 1403 (Solar Hijri calendar / 2024–2025 CE). In these sessions, the effort has been made to arrive at—albeit general—answers regarding the nature of Jihad, with the aid of the words of the Infallible Imams (peace be upon them).

In the Name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful

The Book of Jihad

Session One

My intention in this first session is to demonstrate the breadth and scope of the concept of Jihad and spiritual striving (Mujahadah) within the literature of the Islamic sciences, and to show which meanings this concept encompasses. The path to understanding these boundaries passes through various books and schools of thought. In this session, we will try to bring our minds closer together in terms of conceptual perception, so that when we proceed to reading the narrations, we may enter the discussion with as close a shared understanding as possible.

These days, the discussion of Jihad has taken on a different hue and fragrance. It differs, for example, from fifteen years ago in a classroom or mosque where a teacher would teach the Book of Jihad. Now, we are faced with Jihad itself and with a genuine enthusiasm for Jihad among the people in a palpable way. If we were asked which of the branches of religion (Furu‘ al-Din) we would like to address if we could only practice one, likely the vast majority of our Ummah would choose Jihad. We would not choose Zakat, prayer, Hajj, or fasting, but rather Jihad. Therefore, the manner of our discussion is also different. We will not have a dry, academic discussion. Rather, the discussion will be existential and layered with practical implications.

Aside from the Al-Aqsa Storm operation, which is the hottest event in the world, the geography of the Islamic Republic and the Axis of Resistance in which we live—in its entirety—has Jihad as its essence and extract. This geography emerged and was born at a point where Jihad was rediscovered.

In the writings of, say, 100 to 150 years ago by Shi‘a and Sunni thinkers, we repeatedly see them envying a time when attention was paid to Jihad, and they identify the abandonment of Jihad as the cause of the Ummah’s decline and ruin.

Regarding the verse “And prepare against them whatever you are able of power...” (Quran 8:60), he states:

“In the days of Islamic civilization’s flourishing, when rulers acted according to the purport of the verse, Islam was triumphant, majestic, unsubdued, powerful, lofty in stature, and radiant, and the reach of its power extended across the earth, holding sway over many regions. ... But today, they have set aside acting upon this noble verse and have inclined toward comfort and amassing wealth. By abandoning this collective obligation (Wajib Kifa’i), they have all shared in the sin of forsaking an obligation; and for this reason, we now suffer from these disarrays.”

“Why should the enemy not covet Islamic lands when there are no weapons factories or munitions depots in them, and what little they do have, they purchase from foreigners?”

The forgetting of Jihad leads to the point where we arrive at the loss of independence which results in annihilation. Jihad had been forgotten. Tsarist Russia, England, Germany, and others easily traversed and marched troops through Islamic lands, and this did not stir anyone’s blood. It is clear, of course, that his critique is not directed at the common people of the region but primarily at the region’s statesmen. For this very reason, you see a large number of books by Arabic-speaking thinkers and researchers on the subject of battle (Qital) and Jihad in the period between 1900 and 1960-1970. Because Jihad was something that was yearned for. It is as if the stage and arena of our region were thirsting for the realization of the truth of Jihad.

A door opened for the people of our region to rediscover Jihad. The people of the region, particularly regarding the issue of Palestine, have experiences. Various nations went to war over the issue of Palestine. Various governments went to war and were defeated. Many Muslim resistance thinkers, such as the martyr Fathi Shaqaqi, in their analyses of the causes of Arab defeat in both the 1948 and 1967 wars, point to the fact that Islamic Jihad was absent from these struggles.

At that time, we witnessed Harb (war). Harb is different from Jihad. Islam does not call every war Jihad. We witnessed Harb with the foreigner in the region, but we did not witness Islamic Jihad. This discovery is being realized anew for the nations of the region with the passage of history and through experiential learning.

I will read some examples for you. A clear example is the martyr Fathi Shaqaqi. He is the founder of the Islamic Jihad Movement. He placed the very solution he believed could save the region upon the movement he founded: “Islamic Jihad!”

He has numerous books. I will read portions from the book “Imam Khomeini: The Only Option.” These are portions where he quotes from Imam Khomeini’s book Wilayat al-Faqih (Governance of the Jurist). He says the goal of the Islamic Ummah is the establishment of an Islamic government. The liberation of Palestine is not the first priority for martyr Fathi Shaqaqi. Although he himself was the originator and pioneer of Islamic resistance in Palestine and considered Israel his main enemy, his first priority is not the liberation of Palestine. Martyr Fathi Shaqaqi says the aspiration of all Islamic movements and currents must be the formation of an Islamic government. He quotes this verbatim from Imam’s Wilayat al-Faqih:

“It is our duty to strive from now on to lay the foundations for a true Islamic state, to propagate, to educate, to create like-minded individuals, to generate a wave of thought so that a social current emerges, and gradually the aware, dutiful, and religious masses become organized in the movement, rise up, and establish an Islamic government.” This is the goal.

Now, what is the path to realizing this aspiration? He says the path is Jihad. He quotes a passage from the book Wilayat al-Faqih. In this passage, Imam speaks about religious gatherings, Friday prayers, and the public welfare activities carried out by Muslims and Islamic groups. After these explanations, he states as follows:

“Islam has provided these gatherings so that religious benefits may be derived from them. So that brotherly sentiments and cooperation among individuals may be strengthened. So that they may achieve greater intellectual growth, find solutions for their problems, and subsequently engage in Jihad and collective endeavor.”

That is, the ultimate purpose of religious gatherings is to bring the people to an awakening and awareness such that they can wage Jihad.

“O children of Islam! Be strong in presenting your proof to the people so that you may triumph over the enemy and all its agencies, military forces, and supporters. Express the realities to the masses and invite them to rise up. Instill the spirit of Jihad among the people of the streets and the bazaar, the workers, farmers, and university students. All will rise for Jihad.”

Therefore, according to the analysis and interpretation of martyr Fathi Shaqaqi, what is the option that Imam has placed on the table for the people of the region? The establishment of an Islamic government. And what is its path? Islamic Jihad. Approximately four months after writing this book, martyr Fathi Shaqaqi establishes the Islamic Jihad Movement—whose military wing we now know as the Saraya al-Quds (Al-Quds Brigades). This becomes the very movement that launches armed uprising against Israel.

Jihad is that very point which martyr Fathi Shaqaqi discovers from the words and proofs of Imam and places on the table. When he writes the book The Centrality of the Palestine Issue ten years later, his entire effort is to argue that until the issue of Palestine is resolved, Islamic lands will not find peace and will not have security. There too, he opens a chapter entitled “The Only Solution: Islamic Jihad.”

Thus, what we know today in our region as the Axis of Resistance—which is gradually transforming the map of the Middle East and creating a new West Asia—is entirely the result of the discovery of Jihad. What is this Jihad that has been able to transform our region in this way?

The Evolution of the Meaning of Jihad in Shi‘a Jurisprudential-Hadith Literature

I will provide you with a report on the literature surrounding the concept of Jihad, particularly in the Shi‘i world, and the history this concept has undergone. The concept of Jihad has a history. The Book of Jihad in Al-Kafi is one of the first and most important books written on this subject. Of course, there were books on Jihad before Al-Kafi, such as The Book of Jihad by Muhammad ibn Hasan al-Saffar al-Qummi, which has not reached us. The Book of Jihad in Al-Kafi is the oldest text that has reached us. One of the characteristics of The Book of Jihad in Al-Kafi is that the concept of Jihad in this book is roughly equivalent to external warfare. Of course, one cannot put an exact equal sign. We see Jihad used with leniency as equivalent to Harb or external war in Al-Kafi. There are two narrations in The Book of Jihad of Al-Kafi where Jihad is used in the sense of Jihad al-Nafs (struggle against the self). One is the narration of Fudayl ibn ‘Iyad from Imam al-Sadiq (peace be upon him), which we will read together, God willing, and the other is the famous narration of the Greater Jihad.

Hadith of the Greater Jihad:

عَلِيُّ بْنُ إِبْرَاهِيمَ، عَنْ أَبِيهِ، عَنِ النَّوْفَلِيِّ، عَنِ السَّكُونِيِّ، عَنْ أَبِي عَبْدِ اللَّهِ عَلَيْهِ السَّلَامُ قَالَ: «أَنَّ النَّبِيَّ صَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَآلِهِ بَعَثَهُ سَرِيَّةً، فَلَمَّا رَجَعُوا قَالَ: مَرْحَبًا بِقَوْمٍ قَضَوُا الْجِهَادَ الْأَصْغَرَ، وَبَقِيَ عَلَيْهِمُ الْجِهَادُ الْأَكْبَرُ. قِيلَ: يَا رَسُولَ اللَّهِ، صَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَآلِهِ، مَا الْجِهَادُ الْأَكْبَرُ؟ قَالَ: جِهَادُ النَّفْسِ.» (كافي (ط - دار الحديث)؛ ج9؛ ص378)

English translation:
‘Ali ibn Ibrahim, from his father, from al-Nawfali, from al-Sakuni, from Abu ‘Abd Allah (Imam al-Sadiq), peace be upon him, who said: “The Prophet, may God bless him and his family, sent out a military expedition. When they returned, he said: ‘Welcome to a people who have fulfilled the lesser jihad, while the greater jihad yet remains upon them.’ It was said: ‘O Messenger of God, what is the greater jihad?’ He said: ‘The struggle against the self (jihad al-nafs).’” (Al-Kafi, Dar al-Hadith ed., vol. 9, p. 378)

Hadith of Fudayl ibn ‘Iyad:

عَلِيُّ بْنُ إِبْرَاهِيمَ عَنْ أَبِيهِ وَ عَلِيِّ بْنُ مُحَمَّدٍ جَمِيعًا عَنِ الْقَاسِمِ بْنِ مُحَمَّدٍ عَنْ سُلَيْمَانَ دَاوُدَ الْمِنْقَرِيِّ عَنْ فُضَيْلِ بْنِ عِيَاضٍ قَالَ: سَأَلْتُ أَبَا عَبْدِ اللَّهِ عَنْ عِ الْجِهَادِ سُنَّةٌ أَمْ فَرِيضَةٌ فَقَالَ الْجِهَادُ عَلَى أَرْبَعَةِ أَوْجُهٍ فَجِهَادَانِ فَرْضٌ وَ جِهَادٌ سُنَّةٌ لَا يُقَامُ إِلَّا مَعَ الْفَرْضِ فَأَمَّا الْجِهَادُ الَّذِي هُوَ سُنَّةٌ لَا يُقَامُ إِلَّا مَعَ فَرْضٍ فَإِنَّ جِهَادَ الْعَدُوِّ فَرْضٌ عَلَى جَمِيعِ الْأُمَّةِ وَ لَوْ تَرَكُوا الْجِهَادَ لَأَتَاهُمُ الْعَذَابُ وَ هَذَا عَذَابُ الْأُمَّةِ
وَ أَمَّا الْجِهَادُ الَّذِي هُوَ سُنَّةٌ عَلَى الْإِمَامِ وَحْدَهُ أَنْ يَأْتِيَ الْعَدُوَّ مَعَ الْأُمَّةِ فَيُجَاهِدَهُمْ وَ أَمَّا الْجِهَادُ الَّذِي هُوَ فَرْضٌ فَجِهَادُ الرَّجُلِ نَفْسَهُ عَنْ مَعَاصِي اللَّهِ عَزَّ وَ جَلَّ وَ مِنْ أَعْظَمِ الْجِهَادِ وَ هُوَ فَرْضٌ جِهَادُ الَّذِينَ يَلُونَكُمْ مِنَ الْكُفَّارِ وَ أَمَّا الْجِهَادُ الَّذِي هُوَ سُنَّةٌ فَكُلُّ سُنَّةٍ أَقَامَهَا الرَّجُلُ فَجَاهَدَ فِي إِقَامَتِهَا وَ بُلُوغِهَا وَ إِحْيَائِهَا فَالْعَمَلُ وَ السَّعْيُ فِيهَا مِنَ الْأَعْمَالِ الصَّالِحَةِ فَإِنَّ إِحْيَاءَ سُنَّةٍ قَدْ قَالَ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ ص مَنْ سَنَّ سُنَّةً حَسَنَةً فَلَهُ أَجْرُهَا وَ أَجْرَ مَنْ عَمِلَ بِهَا إِلَى يَوْمِ الْقِيَامَةِ مِنْ غَيْرِ أَنْ يَنْقُصَ مِنْ أُجُورِهِمْ شَيْءٌ.» (الكافي (ط - الإسلامية)؛ ج5؛ ص9)

English translation:
‘Ali ibn Ibrahim, from his father, and ‘Ali ibn Muhammad, all together from al-Qasim ibn Muhammad, from Sulayman Dawud al-Minqari, from Fudayl ibn ‘Iyad, who said: I asked Abu ‘Abd Allah (Imam al-Sadiq), peace be upon him, whether jihad is a sunnah (recommended practice) or an obligation (faridah). He said: Jihad is of four kinds.

Two are obligations, and one is a sunnah that is not undertaken except along with an obligation. As for the jihad that is a sunnah not undertaken except with an obligation: indeed, jihad against the enemy is an obligation upon the entire community (ummah); were they to abandon it, punishment would come upon them, and this is a punishment of the community. As for the jihad that is a sunnah upon the Imam alone: that he advance against the enemy with the community and fight them.

As for the jihad that is obligatory: a man’s struggle against his own self to abandon disobedience to God, the Mighty and Majestic; and among the greatest forms of jihad, which is an obligation, is jihad against those disbelievers who press upon you. As for the jihad that is a sunnah: every sunnah that a man upholds and struggles in its establishment, its realization, and its revival — the work and striving in it are among the righteous deeds.

For, regarding the revival of a sunnah, the Messenger of God, peace be upon him, said: ‘Whoever establishes a good sunnah will have its reward and the reward of whoever acts upon it until the Day of Resurrection, without any diminution of their rewards.’” (Al-Kafi, al-Islamiyyah ed., vol. 5, p. 9)

This understanding of Jihad predominates among our jurists until we reach the epistemological and spiritual school of Jabal ‘Amil.

The School of Jabal ‘Amil: An Epistemological and Spiritual Understanding of Jihad

Here, the situation changes, and the jurists’ understanding becomes different. Who belongs to this school? You see this conception of Jihad in Munyat al-Murid and the treatise Wasiyyat al-Nafi‘ah of the Second Martyr (al-Shahid al-Thani), and certainly there are traces of it elsewhere. We see this conception most explicitly in The Book of Jihad in Wasa’il al-Shi‘a. The share of Jihad al-Nafs (struggle against the self) in The Book of Jihad of Wasa’il is no longer just one or two narrations or one or two chapters. Wasa’il has a Book of Jihad. This Book of Jihad has two main sections: Chapters on Jihad against the Enemy and What Pertains to It—meaning the external enemy—which, incidentally, takes up only a small portion of The Book of Jihad in Wasa’il. The majority of The Book of Jihad in Wasa’il consists of the Chapters on Jihad al-Nafs.

In Wasa’il al-Shi‘a, we are faced with two manifestations of a single truth: one is external, which is Jihad against the enemy (Jihad al-‘Aduww); and one is internal, which is Jihad against the self (Jihad al-Nafs). Interestingly, the volume of the section on Jihad al-Nafs is approximately two to three times that of Jihad al-‘Aduww. But what is the significance of this schema?

When the understanding of Jihad is confined to struggle against an external enemy, you cannot be perpetually at war with an external adversary. Sometimes truces and ceasefire agreements are formed. This view treats Jihad as one component of a believer’s life—a part among other parts. This is why jurists formally issue rulings; for example, in Al-Lum‘ah, both the First Martyr and the Second Martyr rule that Jihad is obligatory at least once a year. But what if there were no Jihad at all? What if we were in a situation where there was no war at any border and complete security prevailed? Should we then simply sit at home because there is no war? The schema we witness in Wasa’il tells us that not a moment or a second passes for a believer except that they are at war. Indeed, the believer’s life is synonymous with Jihad. Life equals Jihad.

This schema predates Wasa’il al-Shi‘a and has precedents in the School of Hillah—which is the precursor to the School of Jabal ‘Amil. You can see this understanding in the works of the spiritual authorities (Ahl-i Ma‘rifat) of the city of Hillah. For instance, Sayyid Haydar Amuli states that Jihad takes precedence over all aspects of a believer’s life. The believer finds themself in Jihad before finding themself in prayer, Khums, or fasting. All these branches of religion are manifestations of Jihad. Sayyid Haydar’s statement in Asrar al-Shari‘ah is as follows:

“And if by Jihad we mean the true Jihad mentioned, then Jihad takes precedence over everything, even prayer. For whoever does not wage war against their own self, cannot even manage to perform ablution or pray.”

What does it mean for Jihad to take precedence over all branches of religion? It means the wayfarer (Salik) finds themself in Jihad before finding themself in prayer, Khums, or fasting. Jihad precedes all of religion, even prayer. The very act of a believer rising to pray or going to perform ablution involves a struggle against something. They struggle against laziness and inertia. The mere fact of rising for the dawn prayer is a struggle against something. Or when a person separates Khums from their wealth and submits it to the Imam or his deputy, they are engaged in a struggle against their own self, and so on. Therefore, this schema of Jihad transforms Jihad from a jurisprudential branch (Far‘ Fiqhi) into the very mode of a believer’s existence. The mode of a believer’s existence is Jihad.

“Believer” means “Warrior” (Mujahid), and these two are not distinct or separate at any point. If someone is a believer but not engaged in Jihad, according to Sayyid Haydar, they have not merely missed one jurisprudential obligation; they have missed the prerequisite for the whole—indeed, the whole itself.

The Precedence of Jihad al-Nafs over Jihad al-‘Aduww

….

The Precedent of the “Jihad = Life” Schema in the Heritage of Islamic Mystical Texts

This has a background. In fact, let me put it this way: alongside the Shi‘a scholars, we have a parallel current which, interestingly, is the primary preserver and guardian of this “Jihad = Life” schema. I am referring to the mystics (‘Urafa). The mystics have vigilantly safeguarded this schema and preserved it as a treasure. I will read some examples from the sayings of the mystics for you, starting with the oldest.

Jamal al-Din Abu Ruh Lutf Allah ibn Abi Sa‘id, in the book The States and Sayings of Abu Sa‘id Abi al-Khayr, has opened a chapter entitled: “The Second Chapter on the Varieties of His Spiritual Struggles (Mujahadat).” In this chapter, he aims to describe the spiritual struggles of Shaykh Abu Sa‘id. At the end of the chapter, he says: “The purpose of mentioning this chapter was so that they may know that the degrees of spiritual attainment are the fruits of actions and acts of obedience. And further, whatever actions and obedience you possess, to that same extent are the degrees. And the great ones have said: ‘The contemplative visions (Mushahadat) are the inheritances of spiritual struggles (Mujahadat).’“ This becomes a principle in our mystical books. For instance, in Kashf al-Mahjub, this principle can be traced, and elsewhere—I have previously written a detailed note on this principle. Sa‘di also alludes to it in his famous refrain-poem:

“No one reaps the harvest of contemplation / Unless they first sow the seed of struggle.”

Abu Ruh continues: “If someone sought the lightning-flash of spiritual experience without action, and only afterwards engaged in spiritual discipline, even if the unveiling preceded the discipline, it was not lasting. ... For contemplation is the result of struggle, and ‘And those who strive for Us—We will surely guide them to Our ways’ (Quran 29:69).

He says that even if a person was able to witness certain lights, as long as they do not continue the spiritual struggle completely and perfectly, they will not be able to sustain those very luminous contemplations.

What have we come to do? We have come to encounter a truth. To what has the Messenger of God invited us? He has invited us to the Meeting with God (Liqa’ Allah). Liqa’ means encounter, meeting. This encounter and meeting will not be realized except through spiritual struggle (Mujahadah). That is, contemplation is entirely contingent upon being in this perpetual war. One who is not in this perpetual war, it is as if their eyes and ears become sealed; the door to witnessing the truth is closed to them. “God has set a seal upon their hearts and upon their hearing and upon their eyes” (Quran 2:7). One who abandons Mujahadah draws closer and closer to this state.

Now, what is this Mujahadah that must not be abandoned, and if abandoned, our vision becomes obstructed?

Al-Qushayri says: “And know that the root of spiritual struggle and its foundation is weaning the soul (Fatm al-Nafs) from its familiar habits and compelling it against its desires at all times.” That is, know that the essence of Mujahadah and its cornerstone is restraining the soul from that to which it has become accustomed. In other words, breaking habits. How? By casting the soul into the valley of opposing what it generally wants. This is the abandonment of habit. Of course, abandoning habit is the outward aspect of this act; its inner reality is abandoning habitual ordinariness. That is, in Mujahadah, a person learns not to be ordinary, to always arrange their orientation appropriately in relation to the Truth, to constantly gauge their action and overall disposition against the Truth, and to be perpetually in a state of uprising and transformation as befits the Truth.

This is achieved through “weaning the soul from its familiar habits.” The heart must not attach itself to common conventions and customs. It must continually transcend the conventional; not think in a commonplace manner, but rather possess “thoughtfulness” (Fikrat). Only that which becomes visible by passing beyond conventions is truly witnessing and seeing; otherwise, whatever appears is merely those same conventions and ordinary affairs.

What al-Qushayri says about Mujahadah in his Risalah is not something of the nature of mere action and deed, but rather of the nature of a kind of pain. An action that occurs out of pain, that occurs out of wakefulness. Such is Mujahadah. The warrior (Mujahid) has understood something and is placed in a situation where, despite the intensity of confrontation and the obstacles before them, they cannot remain silent; they must utter the word of justice. They cannot refrain from drawing the sword; they must fight. Mujahadah is an action born of pain and wakefulness. The element of Yaqzah (Awakening) is present in Jihad. What is Yaqzah? It is not merely understanding something; rather, it is that understanding wherein, in the very act of understanding, the person says to themselves, “Then why are you still sitting?”

Khwaja ‘Abd Allah al-Ansari, in Manazil al-Sa’irin, explains Yaqzah as follows:

“Say: I only advise you of one thing: that you rise up for God” (Quran 34:46). It is very interesting that the chapter title is on Yaqzah, yet he brings the verse of Qiyam (rising up) at the beginning of the chapter. Then he explains: “Rising up for God is the awakening (Yaqzah) from the slumber of heedlessness and the arising from the pit of languor.” What is Qiyam? It consists precisely of these two elements: “Yaqzah” meaning awakening and becoming aware, and “al-Nuhud” meaning arising, lifting one’s head from languor to stand upright. This is the meaning of Qiyam li-Allah (rising up for God). That understanding whose outcome is not uprising—meaning it does not generate a surge—does not qualify as Yaqzah. And that arising which is not the product of Yaqzah is not Qiyam li-Allah nor Mujahadah.

‘Abd al-Razzaq al-Kashani, in Istilahat al-Sufiyyah, provides precisely the same definition for “Qiyam li-Allah”: “That is, rising up for God, and it consists of awakening from the sleep of heedlessness and unawareness, and arising from the drowsiness of languor and stagnation—during the journey toward God.”

That awareness and awakening which engages a person’s entire existence—this awareness results in an action for which the person employs all of their being. This is neither the extension of a political agenda nor the extension of a bureaucratic decision or circular. This action follows solely from Yaqzah. A kind of awakening occurs. The door of Mujahadah and Jihad opens only after this awakening. Now those statements of Imam [Khomeini] take on meaning. The statements he makes about the nations of the region or about the Iranian nation itself. He says our nation has been transformed.

The Discovery of Jihad: Discovery of What?

We must ask: To what extent can the depiction of Jihad and Mujahadah presented in hadith collections, jurisprudential works, and mystical texts be used to add detail to the narrations when we read them, and to make their particulars open to interpretation? To what extent can this knowledge explain and help us understand this scene of Jihad in whose presence we now find ourselves? Allow me to advance this question a bit further so we may grasp what a tremendous discovery the rediscovery of Jihad was!

When is it possible for us to enter into war with someone or something? Conventional frameworks of international relations largely explain what occurs on the stage in terms of “interests.” It seems all these wars are over interests. For instance, someone enters a room and says, “I want to steal your books.” I would not go to war with them over four books. Suppose they say, “I want to empty your bank account.” I would not engage in combat over money. So when might I engage in combat? When that theft calls my dignity into question. Or when that impoverishment dishonors me. Interests have meaning. Their meaning determines whether one can wage war over them, should wage war over them, or should not. What are negotiations, treaties, and the like about? They are about interests. Someone says, “I want to take a book.” I say, “Fine. You took this book, pay me such-and-such amount for it.” If I have power, I sit at the negotiating table and extract payment from them. Our negotiations and treaties essentially become this. I do not draw a sword, because my dignity has not been harmed or endangered.

The moment you draw your sword for Islam and your war becomes Jihad is when the blow struck against Islam is a blow struck against your entire dignity. When Islam is merely a part of your life, you do not draw a sword for it. One does not draw a sword for a part of life; rather, it is for the whole of life that a person takes up the sword. Therefore, the discovery of Jihad as the solution to the problem of our region, as the essence of the formation of the Axis of Resistance and the new geography we inhabit, is not the discovery of a jurisprudential branch, but rather the discovery of the totality of Islam and the totality of Islamic life. It was not that this jurisprudential branch was unknown. Islam has become our entire existence, and for it we draw the sword. Islam has become the entire identity of the people of our region, and for it they take up arms and fight. This is what Jihad becomes. Therefore, the discovery of Jihad in our region and the formation of this geography is the very discovery of Islam. When we speak about Jihad, let us bear in mind that we are speaking about an action whose agent is entirely permeated by Islam. The Mujahid is one whose entire being is Islam, and therefore draws the sword for Islam. Islam is all of their status and affairs. We will discuss its details, God willing, in the context of the narrations, and from the next session onward, we will enter into the text of The Book of Jihad of Al-Kafi.

Introduction

The return of Hezbollah to the battlefield and the resumption of attacks on occupied territories after the US and Israeli military aggression against Iran surprised many analysts and political observers (and it can be claimed that even the Zionist regime itself). This was especially the case after the regime, during the fifteen-month period following the 2024 ceasefire, had faced Hezbollah’s complete silence in response to hundreds of aggressions and the assassination of more than 400 members of the group, and had thus become reassured that the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon would not take the initiative. Nevertheless, beyond the causes and factors that have led to Hezbollah’s reconstruction and the restoration of its self-confidence in this recent period, a heated debate has erupted in some Shia elite circles in Lebanon after the Al-Aqsa Flood and particularly after the heavy losses of the 66-day war and the current war: given Lebanon’s and the region’s current coordinates, how far can the resistance be continued, or, assuming it is possible, how far is it expedient to continue? Thus, the question concerns both the issue of capability and the element of expediency.

To better understand the background and factors that have given rise to this question, one must first pay attention to the political, military and economic conditions of the Shia community in Lebanon:

First, in the military sphere, the Shia sect and the resistance have been confronting the Israeli regime from the south for decades, alone, and now after the fall of the Assad regime, they are constantly worried about a surprise attack by the new Syrian government from the eastern borders into the Bekaa Valley.

Second, in the political sphere and in the rear of the front, they are engaged in an all-out political war launched by a coalition of Sunni-Maronite forces aiming to normalise relations with the regime and disarm the resistance.

Third, in the economic sphere, the extensive and targeted destruction by the regime and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of displaced persons have placed unprecedented pressure on the financial resources of the resistance and the Shia community in Lebanon. This is happening while the Lebanese government has accepted almost no responsibility for this situation.

The Emergence of Two Views

These unprecedented pressures, alongside a quasi-consensus – domestic, regional and international – against the resistance and the efforts to reach a compromise with Israel, have caused Hezbollah in particular and the Shia community in Lebanon in general to enter, for the first time, a full-scale war on multiple fronts simultaneously. In response to these new and worrying variables and dynamics, two views and approaches are now observed in the elite circles of the Shia house in Lebanon.

The First View: Prioritising the Survival of the Sect

The first view, adopting a realistic and geopolitical approach based on existing realities, considers the survival of the sect above all else. From the perspective of this group, the assumption of the resistance by the Shia house since the 1970s has been primarily related to a real factor: geographical proximity and the decline or decay of Palestinian and leftist alternatives. The Palestinian resistance model gradually lost its ability to fight the regime effectively for several reasons, including mistreatment of the native inhabitants of the south and its transformation into a tool of competition between Arab axes. The Sunni-supporting countries, instead of fighting the Israeli regime, were engaged in a war of influence in Lebanon. The star of the leftist groups also gradually declined with the beginning of the Soviet decline, its involvement in the Afghan war, and the victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. The formation of an organised Shia resistance was indebted to such circumstances.

However, from the very beginning, the founders of the Shia resistance (both Sayyid Musa al-Sadr and the founders of Hezbollah) imagined that the new model of resistance by the southerners would gradually be met with the accompaniment and sympathy of the other sects of Lebanon and the Arab countries, and that the resistance project would expand. Subsequent experiences showed that this vision was very optimistic. Contrary to this vision, over the past decades, the benign currents of other sects inside and outside Lebanon preferred the political project over resistance and relegated armed resistance to conditions that were essentially to be constructed, not found. The malevolent part of these sects went even further and essentially defined their priority as fighting Iran and the newly risen axis of resistance.

The Minority Left Alone

This is how, little by little, the minority was left alone and, willingly or unwillingly, consciously or unconsciously, took on the responsibility of the majority. In this atmosphere, the Shia carried a burden that was fundamentally beyond their slender shoulders. This happened while a significant and effective part of the majority spectrum (especially in the elite and ruling layers) over all these decades itself became part of the machine of weakening and the furnace of hostility towards the resistance. In their view, the story of the Shia over these decades is like the story of the stone giant in the animation “A Story About Movement and Inertia” directed by Cameron Gates, whose efforts to protect the Ummah from the existential threat of Israel were met not with welcome and gratitude but with knives in the back. Whereas everywhere else in the world, the minority conspires with an external party against the internal majority, here in Lebanon the majority (political, not necessarily numerical) has conspired with external parties against the minority (political, not necessarily numerical).

From the perspective of this group, in the current circumstances, leaving the mission of resistance to that same majority and striving to preserve the existence of the sect is the wisest policy to pursue. Because the Shia neither can nor is it expedient to fight alone on behalf of the rest of the Ummah. Of course, this does not mean normalisation. It means accepting bitter realities, ignoring which could lead, beyond the resistance organisation, to the slaughter of the Shia republic. It is drawing attention to a task that is beyond one’s capacity.

In their view, in such circumstances, Hezbollah must show flexibility and transition from the military phase to the political and cultural phase of resistance, and only when the Sunni Arab countries and forces themselves become the vanguard of resistance and fighting the regime should it go to their aid. The Shia sect, as a minority, cannot and should not be the flag-bearer of the resistance movement. The majority does not tolerate this and, naturally, instead of thanking the resistance, it considers such flag-bearing as an identity threat to itself and treats it the same way the townspeople treated the stone giant in “A Story About Movement and Inertia”. Indeed, this is exactly how it has behaved so far. Because for them, intra-religious religious-geopolitical rivalries take priority over fighting the regime.

They believe that Hezbollah’s insistence on resistance after the 66-day war is no longer readable by the logic of power and based on realpolitik calculations, but only through the theology of honour and ideology. This is while, in the current situation, the Shia’s main issue should be to get out of the current state of siege and multidimensional pressure. The costs of resistance must be shared by everyone, or let the flood sweep everyone away together.

The Second View: Resistance as Inherent to Shia Identity

The second view, while rejecting any inherent contradiction between the survival of the sect and the identity of resistance (even in the current circumstances), believes that regardless of the identity and ideological approach and with the same realistic view of the first group, the honour and power of the Shia sect in Lebanon over the past decades has been above all the product of its sincerity towards the Palestinian cause and its self-sacrificing struggle with the Israeli regime. Otherwise, before the 1970s and the entry of the Shia into organised independent resistance (first in the form of the Amal movement and then Hezbollah), the Shia sect of Lebanon had essentially no place in domestic and regional political equations. Consequently, even from a utilitarian and mercantile perspective, abandoning resistance will above all lead to the marginalisation and decline of the Shia sect’s power.

This group goes further and says that in different eras of Shia life, the identity of this sect has been tied to concepts such as justice, anti-oppression, martyrdom-seeking, revolution and resistance; and if the first concept is considered the central signifier of Shia discourse, the other concepts form the backbone of its lifestyle and historical mode of existence. Consequently, the notion of a “non-resistant Shia” falls into the same category as “non-fat oil” or “dry water” – a kind of abstraction and stripping of the very essence of a living being.

The Historical Nature of Resistance in Jabal ‘Amil

Moreover, beyond the religious dimension, resistance has not been an imported political project; rather, as history attests, it has been the inherent nature of the people of Jabal ‘Amil. Therefore, their undertaking of the resistance project is not merely because they are Shia or because of external support, but before and above all because of the nature of resistance inherent in the people living in this region. It is precisely because of this historical and inherited nature that Shia youth, even before the formation of Amal and Hezbollah, formed the backbone of leftist or national resistance groups. Or, decades earlier, they were the vanguard of the fight against French colonialism. Consequently, commitment to the option of resistance is deeply rooted and entrenched among the Shia of Jabal ‘Amil.

It is because of such a situation that, despite the rare affection of the resistance public for the figure of Sayyid Hasan Nasrallah and their complete trust in his measures, the expectation of the Shia in Lebanon from his first speech after the Al-Aqsa Flood was greater than what was delivered; because generally, the popular base at that time imagined above all else a declaration of all-out war by Hezbollah. Not to mention that over the past decades, this characteristic has transformed from a cultural and psychological state into an organisational framework and has created its own intertwined social and economic system, deviation from which and replacing it with another model (even if possible) would require decades of time.

Given such realities, even if Hezbollah were to lay down its arms, it would not be long before a new current or movement emerges from within the Shia sect and the people of the south and undertakes the task of resistance. The only result that would be achieved through such an action would be the closure of Hezbollah’s organisational file and the loss of its popular base.

The Third View: The Consequences of Abandoning Armed Resistance

The proponents of this view believe that those who sincerely worry about the fate of the Shia sect must know that, within the existing domestic and regional alignments, Hezbollah in particular and the Shia sect in general will not be left with a choice between surrendering arms and returning to normal life. Because surrendering arms would directly mean the beginning of systematic and brutal suppression of the Shia sect by other domestic and regional actors. In such a dangerous situation, Hezbollah’s weapon is also a kind of guarantee for protecting the existence of the sect against non-Israeli threats.

Consequently, on the other side of surrendering arms and abandoning the resistance project, there is not peace and normalisation of the Shia community’s situation. Rather, it is a change of front. It is choosing the side of confrontation. It will mean opening the way for certain domestic and regional parties to suppress and massacre the Shia (of the kind of the massacres by the Ayyubids, Mamluks and Ottomans) and to forcibly change the demographics of Lebanon (of the kind of the attempts in Bahrain and Afghanistan, and now gradually in Kuwait and the Emirates). Therefore, even with a realist logic, being annihilated by the regime (assuming it were possible) is, from an identity and value perspective, thousands of times preferable to being annihilated in a domestic and regional sectarian war. It is more honourable, and it will become a cause of historical awakening. This sacrifice will bring about an identity victory whose positive effects will benefit Shiism in the long term. The Shia may go, but the true values of the Shia faith will be established, and it will be remembered as a symbol of steadfastness on principles and sincerity in word and deed.

However, all of this is predicated on assuming a complete defeat of the resistance. This is while the window of opportunity for victory has not yet completely closed. Hezbollah’s significant improvement in field performance, Trump’s failure to impose his demands on Iran and Iran’s quasi-absolute control over the Strait of Hormuz, the concerns of the Turks, Syrians and even the Egyptians and Saudis about the regime’s expansionism in a tomorrow without Hezbollah and Iran, internal differences among Arab countries (such as the differences between the UAE and Saudi Arabia), and the relative alignment of some Christian and Druze parties with the resistance – or at least their fear of a tomorrow without Hezbollah and the possibility of Syria’s re-domination over Lebanon’s destiny – are among the factors that keep alive glimmers of hope for the possibility of reconciling the survival of the sect with the identity of resistance in Lebanon.

This group claims that it is not detached from field realities and understands that the current situation is unprecedentedly dangerous. It is also aware of the ingratitude of the other side. But at the same time, it believes that the solution is not to lay down arms and abandon the resistance, but to strive tirelessly to build victory at any cost.

The Current Consensus Among Shia Elites

Whatever the case, these days, in the elite circles of Lebanon’s Shia community, heated debates are ongoing about the future situation of the sect and reconciling the dichotomy of “expediency of the sect” and “necessity of resistance”. The author’s observations and conversations with proponents of both spectrums indicate, however, that the absolute majority of Shia elites (even from the Amal movement) lean towards and believe in the second/third theory. These days, and up to this stage, there is almost a quasi-consensus among Lebanon’s Shia elites that under the current circumstances, neither is it possible to separate the sect from the resistance, nor does expediency require it.

Nevertheless, field developments and the resistance’s achievements or lack thereof can in the future seriously affect the quantity and quality of the weight of each of the two views. Because, generally, throughout history from the time of Confucius to the present, it is above all the factor of power that has determined the weight of any ideology or belief in the social arena.

Abstract

Since the outbreak of the 2026 Iran–US war and the subsequent Israeli escalation in Lebanon, a recurring question has appeared on social media: did Iran abandon Hezbollah to save itself? This article argues that such speculation misunderstands the ideological, strategic, and reputational foundations of Iran’s regional policy. Drawing on historical precedent (the Iran–Iraq war, the JCPOA period, the 2006 Lebanon war), realist theories of state interest, and an analysis of Iran’s current leverage (particularly the Strait of Hormuz), the article demonstrates that abandoning Hezbollah would be politically irrational, strategically self‑defeating, and inconsistent with Iran’s behaviour over four decades. The article further explains Iran’s rationale for not launching a direct missile war against Israel over Lebanon, situating it within a broader asymmetric strategy that prioritises deterrence through economic and maritime coercion.

Historical Precedent

The Iran–Iraq War and the Birth of Transnational Solidarity

Enemies who suggest Iran might abandon Hezbollah today forget that Iranian support for the Lebanese and Palestinian resistance did not begin yesterday and will not change its face tomorrow. Even during the darkest days of the Iran–Iraq war (1980–88), when Khorramshahr fell and Iraqi forces threatened the Iranian heartland, Tehran dedicated a portion of its scarce military and financial resources to support the nascent resistance in Lebanon and the Palestinian factions. At that time, Iran was fighting for its very existence, yet it did not cut off its allies. The ideological commitment to “exporting the revolution” and defending the oppressed was not a luxury for peacetime; it was a core component of the Islamic Republic’s identity, even under existential threat.

Had Iran been willing to abandon its partners, it would have done so during the eight years of the Iran–Iraq war, when every tank, every dollar, and every fighter was needed at home. Yet it did not. That historical fact alone should caution against any predictions of abandonment today.

Three other critical periods test the abandonment thesis.

The first was 2003, when Iran found itself encircled by US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, with the “axis of evil” rhetoric at its peak. The Americans pressured the Islamic Republic for surrender through diplomatic channels. Some factions within Iran responded to this call, but the state itself—namely, Ayatollah Khamenei and the factions close to him—utterly rejected it. Tehran was vulnerable, yet it did not cut ties with Hezbollah or Hamas to save itself.

The second was the JCPOA period (2015–2018), when Iran had a genuine opportunity to normalise relations with the West in exchange for its pacification. At that time, many predicted that Tehran would “cash in” and distance itself from Hezbollah and other resistance groups to attract foreign investment. That did not happen. Iran continued to fund and arm Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and Iraqi groups, even as it complied with the nuclear deal. Iran made clear that its regional policies were non‑negotiable. If Iran did not abandon its allies when it had the most to gain economically, it will certainly not do so now, when it has the upper hand militarily and economically through its control of global energy chokepoints.

Third, and arguably most important, was the fall of Syria. This created a time of deep crisis and strategic imbalance: Israeli power reached a level of hegemony not seen since 1948, while the United States and its regional client states held unchallenged control. In this setting, Donald Trump offered Iran the removal of sanctions in exchange for normalizing relations with Israel. Yet Iran chose war and continued to support its Lebanese ally. If the Islamic Republic did not abandon Hezbollah under such extreme pressure, it is even less likely to do so now that war has taken place and Iran has gained the upper hand. To abandon Hezbollah at this point would be political suicide, even leaving aside all ideological principles.

Ideological Imperatives: The Revolutionary Covenant

The Islamic Republic was founded on a promise of resistance to imperialism and support for the oppressed. Ayatollah Khomeini’s doctrine of exporting the revolution was not merely rhetorical; it shaped state institutions, from the Quds Force to the state broadcasting apparatus. For a regime whose legitimacy rests partly on its role as the vanguard of the Muslim ummah, such a betrayal would be existential.

Iran’s power in the region is not only military; it is also ideational. The Islamic Republic has successfully projected soft power by demonstrating that it stands by its allies. The Houthis, Iraqi groups, and Palestinian factions did not align with Tehran because of Iranian rhetoric alone; they aligned because they saw that Hezbollah relied on Iran and that this relationship worked. Hezbollah liberated Lebanese territory in 2000, humiliated Israel in 2006, and survived multiple Israeli campaigns. That track record convinced other movements that Iranian support was reliable. For that matter, if Iran were to abandon Hezbollah today, the signal would be received by every current and potential future ally. The Houthis would reconsider their strategic dependence; Iraqi groups would look for alternative ways; new resistance movements would never trust Tehran. Iran’s deterrence through regional alliances would collapse, and its ability to project power asymmetrically would be irreparably damaged. Thus, abandonment would be not only against ideological principles but also politically irrational and counterproductive. States are self‑preserving; they do not commit suicide to save short‑term tactical gains.

Lastly, the support base of the Islamic Republic—the millions who take part in Basij marches, Quds Day rallies, and wartime mobilizations—expects unwavering loyalty to the resistance. For the first time since 1979, Hezbollah flags have appeared on the desks of Iranian state television anchors. Abandoning Hezbollah, therefore, would trigger massive protests among this revolutionary core, delegitimizing the regime in the eyes of its own followers. A political suicide.

Iran’s Strategic Calculus Regarding Hezbollah

Why Iran Did Not Launch a Massive Missile Attack on Israel

During the 2006 Lebanon war, Iran provided Hezbollah with missiles, technical advice, and political backing, but Hezbollah fought alone (with Iranian support) and achieved a strategic victory that reshaped the regional balance. Similarly, in the 2010s, when the Houthis in Yemen faced a brutal Saudi‑led invasion, Iran provided unconditional support but did not bomb Saudi Arabia on the Houthis’ behalf. The relationship has always been one of mutual interdependence: Iran provides resources and political cover, while its allies defend their lands as both sides pursue common interests. That equation, however, has now been changed.

When Israel broke the ceasefire in Lebanon in mid‑2026, Iranian military commanders initially considered a direct missile and drone attack on Israeli territory. According to reports from analysts close to Iranian decision‑makers, the plan was changed only at the last minute. The rationale is enlightening.

Since October 7, 2023, Israel has suffered thousands upon thousands of casualties (and many more wounded) in Gaza and on the northern front. Because of that, the Israeli settler society’s tolerance for casualties has risen to an unprecedented level. What would have triggered a political crisis in the past now barely registers as a headline. Tens of ballistic missiles falling on Israeli soldiers would not, by itself, deter further Israeli aggression in Lebanon; rather, it might harden Israeli resolve and prevent a ceasefire on Hezbollah’s terms. In other words, a direct Iranian attack would have been emotionally satisfying but strategically counterproductive, because what Hezbollah seeks to attain is a permanent ceasefire and the reversal of the post‑2024 equation, not further attacks that would destroy the chance of such a reversal. Adding Iranian missiles to that equation would not shift the underlying dynamic.

Thus, Iran chose a different path: it tied any ceasefire in Lebanon to its own conditions in the broader war, and it maintained its most powerful asymmetric weapon—the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

Not only in Lebanon, but also during the active bombing of Iran, Iran’s most effective countermeasure was not its missile attacks on Tel Aviv or Dubai, nor even its strikes on US bases, but the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. It was precisely the closure of the strait that made the Trump administration nervous and prompted Washington to push for a ceasefire. In asymmetric warfare, the weaker party always seeks to exploit the stronger party’s vulnerabilities. The Strait of Hormuz is Iran’s “nuclear weapon” in economic terms. When Israel attacked Lebanon in violation of the ceasefire, Iran did not respond with missile barrages. Instead, it broke the ceasefire by maintaining the closure of the strait, thereby rendering meaningless any Israeli attempt to separate the fronts. It hit where the enemy could not absorb. Additionally, in this way, Iran continued to suffer no bombs on its soil, yet it retained its primary lever. As a result, Trump pressured Israel to halt its attacks on Beirut. To say that Iran never ended the war, but that the US did, is not inaccurate. Iran simply shifted its battlefield.

Hezbollah’s New Role

Hezbollah’s intervention was aimed not only at supporting Iran but also at ending the post‑2024 equation, under which Israel could attack Lebanon at will. Hezbollah seeks a permanent, long‑term ceasefire of the post‑2006 type, where deterrence is mutual. Given the high tolerance of the Israeli army for casualties today, inflicting even heavy losses would not create that equation. Instead, forcing the United States to compel Israel to accept a ceasefire becomes the decisive path. Indeed, Trump’s recent comments have made clear that the US is the ultimate decision‑maker in Israeli policy. If Washington decides, Israel will stop. Thus, defeating US will—not merely killing Israeli soldiers—becomes the most important task for securing a durable ceasefire. Iran’s pressure on the US through the Strait of Hormuz is therefore more effective than any direct missile attack on Israel.

Under the current strategy, Iran maintains leverage through the Strait of Hormuz to pressure the United States into submission. Simultaneously, Hezbollah seeks to hold its defensive lines in southern Lebanon. Should that prove untenable, Hezb aims to establish a new equation: southern Lebanon in exchange for northern Israel. If Israel attacks and occupies southern Lebanon, Hezbollah will strike northern Israel with the objective of forcibly displacing Israeli settlers. In this manner, the economic leverage Iran wields against the United States and the military leverage Hezbollah holds against Israel function in mutual reinforcement.

Dismantling the “Reformist Coup” Narrative

Social media has been filled with claims of a “reformist coup” or a “Zarif‑Rouhani axis” selling out Hezbollah. These claims are analytically empty. Iranian decision‑making is not the product of one man or one faction. As Ali Jezzini rightly argued, the most accurate description of Iran’s political decision‑making process is that of a group of stakeholders representing different institutions—the IRGC, the Foreign Ministry, the Supreme Leader’s office, the judiciary, and the parliament—who come to a shared agreement based on perceived state interests. No single man can decide the foreign policy of the state, no single organization holds veto power, and no one man can “sell out Hezbollah” or decide to support it alone.

When it comes to foreign policy, a realist lens is most useful: states are “blank slates” in the sense that internal factional struggles do not ultimately determine outcomes. Instead, the necessities of state survival and interest, as interpreted by a consensus of state officials, guide foreign policy. Abandoning Lebanon would be against Iranian interest, against its ideological principles, and against its soft power. No single faction, whether “reformist” or “principlist,” could push such a policy through.

The interdependence between Iran and Hezbollah is now structural. If Hezbollah were to be destroyed, Iran would lose its primary forward deterrent, its most capable regional partner, and a significant portion of its soft power. Conversely, if Iran were to fall, Hezbollah would lose its supporter and its strategic depth. The two are bound together. Therefore, the best strategy for both is to achieve deterrence for peace, and that deterrence is currently being achieved through the Strait of Hormuz leverage, not through missile exchanges with an enemy that has absorbed hits since 2023 and become only more violent.

Conclusion: Patience, Not Panic

The current situation demands patience. War is run by cold calculations, not emotions; by deterrence and equations, not revenge. Premature judgment based on short‑term tactical pauses or a lack of visible Iranian missile launches is foolish. Iran has not abandoned Hezbollah; it has integrated Hezbollah’s fate into its own strategic calculations more deeply than ever before.

We must remember: from 1982/1985 until today, Iran’s role has been indirect involvement and unconditional back‑door assistance. That has not changed. What has changed is that Hezbollah has now come to Iran’s aid, and Iran has reciprocated by tying a Lebanese ceasefire to its own negotiations. This is not abandonment; it is a new level of mutual commitment.

The war is far from over. The Strait of Hormuz remains under Iranian pressure. The United States is being forced to choose between economic stability and Israeli military adventures. And Hezbollah continues to fight for a new equation in Lebanon. Those who speak of a reformist coup or Iranian betrayal would do well to study the past forty years of Iranian behaviour under pressure. Iran has never abandoned its allies when it mattered most. It will not start now.

Abstract

As the conflict between Iran and the United States enters a new phase, strategic planners in Washington and Tel Aviv are reportedly considering ground operations against Iranian territory. This article analyzes the possible scenarios for such an operation, evaluates the strategic logic—or lack thereof—underpinning each, and examines why any attempt at territorial occupation would likely result in catastrophic losses for invading forces. Furthermore, it explores the propaganda dimension of such an operation, offering a framework for understanding how media narratives may be deployed and how to immunize oneself against them. The analysis concludes that while the United States possesses the conventional military capacity to capture certain Iranian islands, the subsequent stabilization phase would transform those territories into death traps, making any such operation strategically irrational unless executed as a brief, symbolic raid designed for domestic media consumption rather than military achievement.

Part I: The Strategic Context—Why Ground Operations Are Now Being Considered

The Failure of the War’s Original Objectives

The United States and Israel entered the current conflict with ambitious objectives: the overthrow of the Islamic Republic and the destruction of Iran’s defense infrastructure. These goals, articulated openly by senior officials in both governments, were predicated on a fundamental miscalculation. That victory has not materialized. The Islamic Republic has not collapsed. Its defense infrastructure remains operational. Its capacity to project power across the region has been demonstrated rather than diminished. The resistance axis, far from crumbling, has been galvanized.

Faced with this reality, US and Israeli strategists are now searching for alternative pathways to declare success. Having failed to achieve their primary objectives, they are considering secondary operations that might, through media manipulation, be presented as victories to domestic audiences. Among these options is a ground operation against Iranian territory—specifically, the islands in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.

In this context, a ground operation serves not military logic but political necessity. It offers the possibility of a dramatic media moment: American flags raised over Iranian territory, headlines proclaiming conquest, a president declaring mission accomplished. This is the victory that cannot be achieved on the battlefield but might be manufactured in the news cycle. However, the gap between media victory and military reality is where the trap awaits. What can be captured quickly cannot necessarily be held safely. And what cannot be held safely becomes, for the invading force, a graveyard.

Part II: Potential Scenarios—Assessing the Targets

The Range of Possible Targets

Any US or Israeli ground operation against Iranian territory would likely target one or more of the following locations, each presenting distinct challenges and strategic calculations:

Chabahar Port: Located on Iran’s southeastern coast near the Pakistani border, Chabahar represents a potential entry point. However, any operation here would require either direct naval assault from the Arabian Sea—leaving ships exposed to Iranian anti-ship missiles—or coordination with Pakistan, a deeply unreliable partner for such an endeavor. The logistical complexity and extreme vulnerability make this scenario among the least likely.

Kharg Island: As Iran’s primary oil export terminal, Kharg holds obvious strategic value. Yet its location deep within the Persian Gulf presents insurmountable challenges. Naval approach would require traversing the entire Gulf under constant threat. Aerial assault via parachute deployment is theoretically possible but would leave forces isolated and dependent entirely on air support. The scenario sometimes discussed—launching from Saudi, Kuwaiti, or Bahraini territory—would require those Gulf states to commit national suicide by hosting an invasion force, an act that would make their energy infrastructure immediate and legitimate targets. This is therefore highly unlikely.

Kish and Qeshm Islands: These populated islands, with significant civilian infrastructure, present the most complex capture scenario. Beyond the naval vulnerability shared by all Persian Gulf targets, any operation here would face the added difficulty of urban warfare within dense population centers. The presence of civilians would complicate military operations for the invader while providing ample cover for asymmetric resistance. Occupation would be nearly impossible to sustain.

Abu Musa and the Greater and Lesser Tunbs: These three islands, located at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz, represent the most likely targets. Their proximity to the strait gives them strategic significance. Their location close to the UAE offers potential staging areas. Crucially, they are the only Iranian territories subject to territorial disputes—the UAE maintains claims on Abu Musa and the Tunbs—providing a thin veneer of political justification. These islands are less populated than Kish or Qeshm, reducing the immediate complications of civilian presence. Their distance from the Iranian mainland, while significant, remains within range of Iranian missile and drone systems.

Given the constraints outlined above, the most plausible scenario for a US ground operation would be a parachute assault (or launched from the UAE) on Abu Musa and the two Tunb islands. This approach offers several advantages: if launched from the UAE, it does not require naval forces to enter the Persian Gulf, it avoids reliance on Gulf state cooperation (except the UAE), and it can be executed with the element of surprise.

It must be noted, however, that none of the mentioned scenarios can be ruled out. US forces might invade all the islands simultaneously, or they might limit their operation to Abu Musa alone, or they might choose not to invade at all. Alternative combinations and entirely different targets remain possible. Only time will reveal which course, if any, is ultimately chosen.

Part III: The Asymmetric Doctrine—Why Capture Is Not Victory

Understanding Asymmetric Warfare

To understand why a US ground operation against Iranian islands would end in catastrophe, one must first understand the fundamental nature of asymmetric warfare. This conflict is not conventional. It will not be won by holding territory or defending lines. The weaker party in an asymmetric conflict does not seek to prevent the stronger party from capturing ground; it seeks to prevent the stronger party from stabilizing and holding that ground.

This distinction is critical. In conventional warfare, victory is measured in territory captured and held. In asymmetric warfare, the weaker party’s advantage lies precisely in what happens after capture. The moment the stronger party occupies territory, it becomes vulnerable. It is exposed. Its supply lines become targets. Its forces become stationary, predictable, and encircled.

This is not speculation; it is the operational doctrine of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Iranian armed forces. It is the logic that has guided Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and the Houthis in Yemen. It is the logic that defeated the United States in Somalia, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan—not through conventional battles but through the grinding, inescapable reality that occupation cannot be sustained against a population and a military that refuse to accept it.

The Three Stages of Invasion

If the United States were to launch a ground operation against Abu Musa and the Tunbs, the operation would unfold in three stages. Understanding each stage reveals where the trap lies.

Stage One: Capture. This stage, relatively speaking, would be the easiest for American forces. Their conventional military superiority would allow them to overcome Iranian defensive positions, especially if the element of surprise is achieved. The primary challenges would be bypassing Iranian air defenses in the case of parachute deployment, avoiding anti-ship missiles if naval forces are used, and managing the initial meter-to-meter fight with stationed Iranian troops. On Abu Musa and the Tunbs, where civilian infrastructure is minimal, this stage is feasible. American forces have the capability to capture these islands.

Stage Two: Stabilization. This is where the operation begins to unravel. Stabilization requires establishing defensive positions, securing supply lines, organizing command and control, and preparing for the inevitable counterattack. It is during this stage that the asymmetry of the conflict becomes lethal. The islands are within range of Iranian shores. Besides that, from the Iranian mainland—indeed from the depth of Iranian territory—thousands of drones and hundreds of cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and other conventional weapons can be launched. Real-time surveillance, gathered by drones that the United States cannot reliably disrupt, will provide targeting data with precision. American forces on the islands will have no meaningful cover. They will have no reliable means of intercepting the incoming projectiles. They will be, to use the vernacular, chickens waiting to be slaughtered.

Stage Three: Withdrawal or Entrapment. If stabilization cannot be achieved—and it cannot, given the firepower Iran can bring to bear—the operation must either withdraw or accept entrapment. Withdrawal, however, is nearly impossible once forces are committed. Every ship sent to evacuate troops becomes a target. Every aircraft attempting extraction is subject to guaranteed hit. The Iranians may even withdraw their own forces from the islands to create space for targeting logistics, turning the captured territory into a kill box. Safe evacuation is a fantasy; the only question is how many casualties will be sustained before the attempt is abandoned.

It is worth noting that such an operation would be marginally more feasible in Yemen, where the state is divided, territory is contested, and Yemeni surveillance and missile capabilities are less concentrated. Even there, however, the risks would be immense. But in Iran, where the state holds all territory and can coordinate operations from anywhere, the islands would become what they have always been: traps waiting to be sprung.

For those monitoring the situation, it is worth noting the timing patterns that have emerged in this conflict. Significant operations are often timed to coincide with periods when markets are closed. Late Friday, or the end of the week by American time and date, offers strategic advantages: oil markets are closed over the weekend, limiting immediate economic disruption and giving the attacking power a window to control the narrative before markets react. The United States has consistently gone hardest during these periods. Any Iranian response, or any US operation, should be understood within this temporal framework. A US invasion might happen this weekend.

Part IV: The Propaganda Dimension: How to Immunize Against Propaganda

The Enemy’s Media Strategy

Given the impossibility of stabilization and the extreme danger of entrapment, why would the United States risk such an operation? The answer lies not in military logic but in media warfare.

A ground operation, however brief, offers the possibility of a media moment. The capture stage, brief as it may be, can be filmed, photographed, and broadcast. The images can be deployed to manufacture the appearance of success. This is the propaganda playbook. It has been used before. It will be used again. The enemy will emphasize the capture, not the aftermath. It will declare victory before the battle has truly begun.

Consider the example of Hamas. Against Israel, Hamas never had the capacity to hold defensive lines against the Israeli air force and Merkava tanks. It did not try. Its strategy was to allow Israeli forces to capture territory and then to ambush them, to make occupation unsustainable through attrition, to transform Israeli military gains into strategic liabilities. This is the same doctrine that guides the IRGC. It is the doctrine that has defeated superior conventional forces repeatedly across the region.

When enemy media celebrates the capture of territory, it is celebrating the beginning of the operation, not the end. The judgment of victory or defeat must be deferred until the operation is complete—until the stabilization phase has succeeded or failed, until the withdrawal has been accomplished or has become a rout.

In the event of a ground operation, the enemy’s propaganda apparatus will activate immediately. The narrative will be controlled, selective, and designed to create the impression of success. To immunize oneself against this propaganda, several principles must be kept in mind:

1. First, recognize that capture is not victory. The ability to seize territory, especially against limited defensive forces, proves nothing about the outcome of the operation. The real test comes after capture, during stabilization.

2. Second, understand the asymmetric doctrine. The weaker party’s advantages manifest after the enemy has committed its forces, not before. When the enemy celebrates capture, it is celebrating its entry into the trap.

3. Third, defer judgment. As the Persian saying goes, “We count the chickens only at the end of the fall season.” The outcome cannot be known until the operation is complete. Premature conclusions serve only the enemy’s propaganda purposes.

4. Fourth, recognize the desperation behind the operation. The United States is considering this option not because it is militarily sound but because it has failed to achieve its primary objectives.

For those who understand asymmetric warfare, this outcome is predictable. For those who understand the enemy’s propaganda methods, the narrative manipulation is transparent. Even assuming the enemy risks a ground invasion and is successful—which, in fact, might not happen, as Iran could hold the line and the operation could fail in the first stage—the capture stage is not the end of the operation; it is the beginning. The chickens must be counted only at the end of the fall season.

The trap is set. The question is whether the enemy will walk into it.

Part I: Before the War—An Inevitable Gradual Death

The Long Siege and the Inevitable Collapse

For years, a chorus of analysts confidently proclaimed the Islamic Republic’s impending demise. The economy, they rightfully argued, was bleeding beyond repair under the weight of crushing sanctions. State legitimacy, they insisted, was being corroded from within by the very corruption those sanctions spawned. The oil and gas refineries—the nation’s economic lifeblood—were slowly bleeding out, starved of foreign investment and destined to grind to a halt within years. This was not mere speculation; it was presented as cold, calculable certainty. It was doomed to happen.

Likewise, years before the recent revolts, I predicted the inevitable collapse of Iran under sanctions within a three-to-five-year window, just as I predicted the collapse and fall of Syria due to sanctions one to two years before it began unfolding. Sanctions, corruption, and the steady erosion of state legitimacy in both countries were deliberately combined with another weapon: the unleashing of US- and Israeli-backed insurgencies, targeted assassinations, and constant strikes. This is the Western playbook for regime change—a tactic refined over decades and successfully deployed across multiple nations.

The Perception of Weakness That Became a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy—For the Enemy

In the months before the war, a cascade of catastrophes seemed to confirm the worst predictions. Syria had fallen. The Iranian currency was in freefall. Assassinations of Iranian officials and nuclear scientists had become routine. The cumulative effect was a widespread perception—among the Iranian population but, more critically, among foreign powers—that the Islamic Republic was a dying animal, too weak to defend itself, too fractured to retaliate.

This perception had tangible, violent consequences. Rioters in previous uprisings genuinely believed that “we can finish off the Islamic Republic this time.” They attacked police stations and state institutions not as symbolic acts of protest but as the opening salvos of what they chanted was “this is the final battle, Pahlavi will return.” This was not rhetoric. My conversations with some rioters and those close to them revealed a sincere conviction: the Islamic Republic was breathing its last breaths, and this time they would close its case forever. Even in taxi rides and family gatherings that I personally witnessed, average people spoke with eerie certainty: “They [Clerics] know they are falling. They are stealing money to live in Russia.” There was an immediate, visceral feeling that the Islamic Republic’s fall was not just possible but imminent.

This same perception of terminal weakness prompted the Americans and Israelis to launch this war. What scholars like John Mearsheimer call a “miscalculation” by the US administration was, in fact, a catastrophic misreading of the enemy’s nature. Unlike Kissinger, unlike Bush and Obama—leaders who understood that the Islamic Republic was forged through popular will, baptized in the blood of half a million martyrs, and therefore nearly impossible to topple through foreign invasion—the Trump administration and Israel convinced themselves that Iran had been weakened enough. Sanctions and the fall of Syria, they believed, had created a window for an easy, fast war.

This perception radiated outward. Gulf governments, the Turkish regime, and other US client states all absorbed the same conclusion: Iran was finished. It even penetrated opposition parties in Lebanon. The UAE’s aggressive posture, Israel’s relentless attacks on Lebanon—these were direct consequences of a shared belief that our front was “one strike away” and incapable of fighting back. Israel expanded its operations into Lebanon precisely because it believed the resistance had been broken. Thus, this war can only be understood through the perception of weakness that external actors projected onto the Islamic Republic. They saw what they wanted to see: a state on its deathbed.

The Internalization of Weakness: When Authority Evaporates

This perception was not merely external. It seeped inward, poisoning Iranian politics and security from within. State authority—the invisible glue that holds any government together—had been fundamentally undermined. The symptoms were everywhere.

Corrupt economic agents operated with impunity. Insurgents in Balochistan and the Kurdish regions grew bolder, sensing the state’s grip weakening. Even the average teenager in Tehran no longer respected the police. The riots revealed the depth of the crisis: protesters fought police officers, killed them, and walked away. The police had become symbolic—a costume of authority rather than its embodiment. The ultimate danger was the erosion of state legitimacy beyond repair. Sanctions and the corruption they caused did what no foreign army could: they turned the people against their own government. As Machiavelli understood, the masses are shortsighted. When they cannot afford food, they do not see sanctions; they see the face of the official standing before them. When they witness corruption, they do not blame American imperialism; they blame the Islamic Republic. Sanctions destroy societies not through direct impact but through this alchemy—turning external pressure into internal resentment, transforming the victim into the villain.

The same dynamic played out in Syria. And in both countries, the result was the same: a slow, agonizing erosion of the bond between state and society.

The Chains of Stagnation: No War, No Surrender

Perhaps the most severe problem chaining the Islamic Republic was not external pressure but internal paralysis: a stagnation in politics, economy, and military affairs. A lack of direction captured in the phrase “no war, no surrender.” This was official state policy under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He had witnessed the horror of the Iran-Iraq war—eight years of grinding, unimaginable destruction—and never wanted to repeat it. He was war-weary, a pragmatist walking a tightrope between resistance and restraint. He would not normalize with Israel, would not surrender, but also would not fight. Balance was his strategy.

This balance worked during the 1990s and early 2000s, when the world was different, when allies were strong, when sanctions were manageable. But when the sanctions hit hardest, when regional allies fell one by one—Syria, Hezbollah under unprecedented pressure, the axis of resistance bleeding from a thousand cuts—this balance became a death sentence. The tightrope snapped. For that matter, a profound hopelessness infiltrated not only the average citizen but the core supporters of the Islamic Republic. The resistance was not fighting. The state was not acting. It was drifting, waiting for a death that everyone had begun to accept as inevitable.

This hopelessness, humiliation, and anger were unleashed after the martyrdom of the leadership. Now that there is no moderating force to restrain the armed forces, the paralysis is breaking. The hopelessness is transforming—against all odds, against all predictions—into hope. A sense of direction is emerging. A future that seemed foreclosed is suddenly, shockingly, possible again.

Part II: How This War Changed the Equation—Reviving the Nation, Allies, and Revolutionary Spirit

The Restoration of Power: When the Sleeping Giant Woke

The most immediate consequence of this war has been the restoration of the Islamic Republic’s power—not gradually, not tentatively, but in a blinding, undeniable eruption. Legitimacy in the eyes of its people. Authority in the hands of its state. Power projected both within its borders and across the region.

Domestic authority and external power are not separate things; they are two sides of the same coin. A state that cannot project strength abroad cannot command respect at home. A state that appears weak internationally will find its police disobeyed, its laws flouted, its enemies emboldened. The Islamic Republic had been trapped in this vicious cycle for years. Even Ayatollah Khamenei acknowledged this problem in one of his recent speeches: “We cannot claim to stand up against the international bullies while remaining silent and complicit against the domestic bullies”—referring to financially corrupt agents within the Islamic Republic.

This war broke the cycle.

For years, the urge to retaliate against Israeli strikes remained suppressed. The martyrdom of Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, the fall of Syria—each blow landed without answer. Iranian sites in Syria were bombed with impunity, scientists assassinated, and allies steadily weakened. Meanwhile, the pressure of sanctions grew more intense by the day: the currency collapsed, hopelessness became pervasive, and corruption—along with deep-seated resentment toward the ruling state—swelled into a monstrous and unrelenting force. The pressure built like magma beneath a dormant volcano.

When the war came, the volcano erupted. The massive vengeance that everyone—especially the support base of the Islamic Republic—had been waiting for was finally unleashed. And what the world saw stunned it. The suppressed power the Islamic Republic held was far beyond what any analyst had imagined. The state appeared strong internationally and domestically in ways that defied every model, every prediction, every confident proclamation of its imminent death. This restoration of power is now birthing the restoration of authority. And authority brings with it the capacity to act—including the capacity to finally, effectively pursue anti-corruption measures.

Why was the Islamic Republic unable to enforce its will against corruption before? Because it lacked authority. Because it feared that threatening the interests of powerful men would trigger state collapse. Because it was governing not from strength but from fear. This war has ended that dynamic. The sense of authority is returning, and with it, the state’s capacity to be what it must be: the Leviathan, the monopolizer of violence, the final arbiter of order. Even IRGC officers with financial interests abroad could have shaken the state’s foundations if their interests were threatened. That threat is now neutralized. The war has ended the era of fear, and that can be the beginning of a new era—the rising phoenix from the ashes.

The Heroic Symbol: Martyrdom That Proved the Shield

Most importantly, the death of Khamenei and the sacrifices of Iranian policymakers have revived the legitimacy of the resistance and the Islamic Republic. For years, accusations had festered: the leadership was dragging Iran into war while keeping itself safe. They were liabilities, not shields.

The war has proven otherwise.

The leadership has proven, through blood, that they are a shield for the people—not a burden, not a liability, but the line of defense against annihilation. The Iranian people, profoundly influenced by symbolism, have found their hero figure once again. Deep in the national unconscious, the archetype of the resistant martyr, the self-sacrificing defender, has been reawakened. This symbol of heroism, the self-sacrificial lamb, will boost the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic to an unprecedented degree, comparable only to the 1980s, when officials themselves stood on the frontlines and the people saw that they honored their word. For the mere reason that blood speaks louder than words—as Ayatollah Motahari said—the blood of a martyr is the revival of the revolution.

The Restoration of Revolutionary Spirit: From Expediency to Action

Another consequence of this war has been the restoration of the revolutionary spirit—that animating force that had been eroded under years of sanctions, suppressed under the dead weight of “expediency,” chained by the fear of collapse. The fear of collapse had paralyzed the Islamic Republic, preventing it from acting as it must. Every decision was filtered through the question: will this accelerate our fall? The result was stagnation, inaction, the slow death of the spirit. This war has burned away that fear. The revolutionary spirit—the spirit of global struggle against tyrants, the spirit of “we can do it” as Imam Khomeini declared—has been revived. The sense of power, of taking fate into one’s own hands, has resurrected something that many had thought dead.

This Iranian restoration of power, or at least the perception of it, is also restoring Hezbollah. Many had doubted the Iranian alliance with Hezbollah during the 2024 war. Those doubts decreased Hezbollah’s legitimacy and authority within Lebanon. This war is reversing that damage.

The New Strategic Leverage: Control of the Strait and the Sanctions Game

On the political and economic level, the transformation is unprecedented. While the decline and collapse of Iran was deemed inevitable under sanctions, Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz after the war has fundamentally altered the equation. The massive revenue generated through tolls on passing ships—already being collected—provides not only income but, more importantly, leverage. If the Islamic Republic keeps the Strait of Hormuz closed and imposes its will during post-war negotiations, deterrence for Iran and Lebanon will be achieved for decades to come.

The message to the world is simple: lift the sanctions and negotiate in good faith, or another oil field will be hit. If you do not lift the sanctions completely, then no ships will pass through the Strait of Hormuz, and the global economy will collapse. If ships can pass, we will collect tolls from them and use that money to rebuild our economy—an amount that would be a game changer for Iran. The Americans were negotiating with a dead body before the war, but now they stand facing two choices. If I suffer under sanctions and economic pressure, then everyone in the world will suffer. If I am bombed, then not only you, but all your client states will be bombed as well. Bread for none, or bread for all; security for none, or security for all. This is not bluster; it is the logic of a new balance of power—economic revival by the barrel of a gun.

Even internationally, China has noticed this changing balance of power. Where before China saw a sinking ship—where potential foreign investments would be gambling on a losing horse—it now sees a formidable power: stable, strong, and capable of ensuring that capital investments will be secured for decades to come. China would not have risked such investments before the war, precisely because of the perception of weakness it shared with the Americans. That perception has been shattered.

The Acceleration of American Decline: Liberation by War

Lastly, this war has not only revived the Islamic Republic and its allies but has accelerated the decline of American hegemony—especially its dominance in the region, if not globally.

The lack of a sense of security among US client states and the erosion of their trust in American and Israeli power is arguably the most decisive factor. These Persian Gulf states have arrived at a sincere conclusion: US bases will not protect them against their adversaries. The history is clear: the US saved them against Nasser, Gaddafi, Saddam, Bashar, and Iran—until very recently. But now, they see that the protector cannot even protect itself. This is without even considering American client states from East Asia to the heart of Africa, or how this changing balance of power will accelerate the decline of US dollar hegemony—the petrodollar system that will be beyond repair for the American empire. But that is another subject.

Indeed, some Gulf officials have already declared that they will not invest in American markets and will even withdraw their capital in the coming period. This shift in perception of American reliability will, without a doubt, affect the petrodollar hegemony, US influence within the region, and makes the liberation of Palestine a near possibility.

Iran, therefore, did not attack the Gulf states; it liberated them from American occupation. If they come to this conclusion—if they see that their interests are not with the declining empire but with the rising resistance—they will try to gain their independence rather than continue hostility.

Conclusion: War as Blessing

War is a blessing, as Imam Khomeini declared forty-six years ago. What was intended as a knockout blow has become a resurrection. What was meant to be the Islamic Republic’s death sentence has become its rebirth. The perception of weakness that drove enemies to miscalculate has been replaced by a reality of power that will shape the region for decades to come.

Perhaps even Assad might have survived if he had opened a Golan front—if he had used every means available to him, however fragile those means might have been. But that is a question for another analysis.

Introduction

In the summer of 2014, Israel found itself facing a Hamas that bore little resemblance to the organization it had confronted just five years earlier. As the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) pushed into Gaza during Operation Protective Edge, veteran soldiers encountered a transformed adversary—one equipped with sophisticated weaponry, employing complex tactics, and demonstrating a level of battlefield organization that seemed borrowed directly from Lebanon’s Hezbollah. This evolution, painstakingly built over years of training, technology transfer, and strategic learning, presented Israel with not only immediate tactical challenges but also profound long-term strategic questions about the future of conflict along its borders.

Tactical Evolution: The New Face of Hamas

The Hamas that emerged in 2014 was fundamentally different from the force of 2009. Soldiers who had fought in both conflicts noted the striking transformation. “This is not the Hamas of 2009,” veterans reported, describing a far more organized force that had adopted the distinctive tactics and weapons that characterized Hezbollah’s fierce urban warfare against Israel in the 2006 Lebanon War.

This evolution manifested in several concrete ways. Hamas’s armed wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, achieved several operational “firsts” during the conflict: seaborne attacks against Israeli targets, the deployment of a drone into Israeli airspace, and sustained face-to-face urban combat with IDF forces. In the Shejaiya neighborhood, site of some of the heaviest fighting, the distance between Israeli and Hamas fighters reportedly shrank to “zero,” creating a brutal close-quarters battle for which Israeli forces had to rapidly adapt.

The human toll of these improved capabilities was immediately apparent. In just the first four days of the ground invasion, Israel lost 28 soldiers—more than three times the total combat deaths during the entire three-week ground operation of the 2009 war, which had claimed 10 Israeli soldier lives. Four more would die in the days that followed.

The Hezbollah Playbook: Weapons and Tactics

At the heart of Hamas’s enhanced capabilities was the systematic employment of anti-tank missiles, a weapon system that had proven devastating during the 2006 Lebanon War. In that conflict, anti-tank missiles had been responsible for destroying 50 of 52 Israeli tanks that were hit. Now, Gaza was seeing similar weaponry deployed with alarming effectiveness.

Among the most significant additions to Hamas’s arsenal were Russian-made Kornet and Concourse anti-tank missiles, sophisticated weapons that likely reached Gaza through a complex supply chain running from Syria to Hezbollah and finally to Hamas. In a particularly devastating attack on July 20, 2014, Hamas fighters used such a missile to strike an armored personnel carrier in Shejaiya, killing at least six soldiers. A seventh was missing and presumed dead. Hamas official Musheer al-Masri boasted to the Christian Science Monitor about these capabilities, claiming that Al-Qassam’s Kornet rockets had struck IDF vehicles and vowing that “Gaza will be a big grave for the Israeli soldiers.” Such rhetoric was real enough to concern Israeli commanders.

The tactical employment of these weapons showed a sophistication beyond mere acquisition. An Israeli officer told Haaretz newspaper, describing the Shejaiya fighting: “I’ve been to Shejaiya before, but I’ve never seen it—or Hamas—like this before. Their equipment and tactics are just like Hezbollah. Missile traps and IEDs everywhere—and they stay and fight instead of melting away like in the past.”

This willingness to stand and fight, rather than employing the hit-and-run tactics of previous conflicts, represented a significant psychological and operational shift. It suggested that Hamas fighters had developed both the tactical training and the organizational confidence to engage Israeli forces directly, even if briefly, before withdrawing through their extensive tunnel network.

Beyond Weaponry: The Investment in Training

Acquiring sophisticated weaponry represented only half the equation. Both Hezbollah and Hamas understood that effective employment required intensive training.

The contrast in training levels was stark. An Israeli soldier who fought in the 2006 Lebanon war noted that IDF anti-tank units typically entered battle having conducted very few live missile firings. By contrast, he estimated that Hezbollah fighters might have as many as 20 such opportunities to refine their skills before combat. “I personally saw a Kornet fired at a bulldozer cockpit from 4 kilometers away. That’s expert marksmanship—you can only do that with lots of training,” he recalled, adding that Hamas was “showing the same marksmanship with anti-tank missiles.”

This marksmanship capability transformed the battlefield calculus for Israeli forces. Vehicles that might have operated with relative impunity in previous conflicts now faced credible threats from stand-off distances, forcing changes in tactics and force protection measures.

Gaza analyst Adnan Abu Amr provided a window into Hamas’s learning process. At a training camp earlier in 2014, he observed fighters not only honing their physical battle skills but also engaged in systematic study of other militant groups’ tactics. Their curriculum included Hezbollah’s methods, Al Qaeda’s approaches, and even the Haganah—the pre-state Jewish paramilitary organization from which the IDF itself had evolved. This intellectual approach to warfare, treating military history and adversary tactics as subjects for serious study, reflected a professionalization of Hamas’s fighting force.

A senior Israeli military intelligence source confirmed that Hamas had expanded its tactical repertoire to include RPG-29 anti-tank weapons, improvised explosive devices, and systematic booby-trapping of tunnel entrances and homes—all techniques previously associated with Hezbollah’s playbook.

The Tunnel Network: A Strategic Asset

Perhaps no single capability better illustrated Hamas’s learning from Hezbollah—and its adaptation of that learning to local conditions—than the tunnel network beneath Gaza. While Hezbollah had constructed an estimated 1,000 facilities by the time of the 2006 war, Gaza’s geography offered Hamas a significant advantage: the relative ease of digging in Gaza’s sandy soil compared to Lebanon’s rocky terrain.

Major General Yaakov Amidror (res.), who headed Israel’s National Security Council from 2011 to 2013, observed that the tunnel network represented “a very good example of something we met in 2006 but was adopted and became much more sophisticated and enhanced by Hamas.” The tunnels served multiple functions: they provided shelter from Israeli surveillance and airstrikes, enabled surprise attacks behind Israeli lines, and offered escape routes that allowed fighters to engage and then disappear.

This network fundamentally complicated Israeli military operations. Even when IDF forces gained control of surface areas, they could not assume that the territory was cleared of threats. Fighters could emerge from hidden entrances to attack from what should have been secured rear areas, undermining the traditional military assumption that once ground was taken, it could be held.

The Long Arc of Hezbollah-Hamas Cooperation

If Israel was surprised by the extent of Hamas’s evolved capabilities, it was not surprised by the intent. The relationship between Hamas and Hezbollah, often mediated through their shared ally Iran, had deep historical roots that long predated the 2014 conflict.

Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute who has written extensively about both organizations, notes that “this type of technological innovation, this type of learning between Hamas and Hezbollah goes far back.” The relationship has evolved through several distinct phases, each building on the last.

1992: A Foundational Moment. The deportation of more than 400 Hamas operatives by Israel to southern Lebanon proved, in retrospect, to be a transformative event. During their exile, these operatives received intensive training from Hezbollah in militant tactics, creating a cadre of experienced fighters who would eventually return to Gaza and the West Bank, bringing their newly acquired knowledge with them.

The 1990s and Second Intifada. During the 1990s and the second intifada that began in 2000, Hamas launched numerous suicide bombings that killed hundreds of Israelis. While these attacks drew primarily on methods developed in Gaza and the West Bank, the organizational and operational links with Hezbollah continued to strengthen.

2006: Open Acknowledgment. After Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, the organization declared openly that its fighters had traveled to Lebanon for training and had brought back funding from Hezbollah. Later that year, the deputy head of Israel’s Shin Bet internal security agency acknowledged that experts were making trips to Gaza specifically to introduce Hezbollah’s fighting strategies as a model for Hamas.

2007: The Iranian Connection. Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin issued a rare on-the-record briefing warning that Hamas’s dispatching of dozens of operatives to Iran represented “a strategic danger, more than any weapons smuggled into Gaza.” This assessment recognized that human capital—trained fighters who could themselves train others and build organizations—posed a greater long-term threat than any individual shipment of weapons.

2011: Institutionalized Cooperation. Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon went further, claiming that Hezbollah maintained a dedicated unit, designated Unit 1800, specifically to train Palestinian groups. According to Yaalon, this unit would even send operatives into Gaza to conduct training directly. Hamas denied these claims, and Hezbollah’s extreme secrecy about such activities made independent verification difficult. However, the pattern of capability transfer suggested that some form of institutionalized cooperation existed.

Randa Slim, an adjunct research fellow at the New America Foundation who was working on a book about Hezbollah, described Hezbollah’s role as extending beyond direct training to serving as an intermediary for Iranian role. “Hezbollah is the trainer par excellence for the IRGC [Iran’s Revolutionary Guards] for Arab resistance groups, as well as for Arab Iranian proxies,” including Alawite militias, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. This positioning made Hezbollah the critical node in a regional network of militant training and capability development.

The Syrian Rift and Its Limits

The narrative of deepening Hezbollah-Hamas cooperation was complicated by a significant political rupture in 2012. When the Syrian uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began, some Hamas members publicly opposed the Assad’s suppression of the rebellion.

Hamas’s leadership, based in Damascus for years, was compelled to leave Syria. Funding reportedly decreased, and public displays of unity gave way to mutual recrimination. For observers watching the relationship, it appeared that the axis might be fracturing along sectarian lines, with Sunni Hamas unable to maintain its alliance with Shia Hezbollah and Iran in the face of Syria’s sectarian conflict.

However, the 2014 conflict revealed that this rupture had not been as complete as it appeared. In the months preceding the Gaza war, there had been increasing signs of rapprochement, including a series of meetings between Hamas and Hezbollah officials in Lebanon. The capabilities displayed during Operation Protective Edge suggested that whatever political tensions existed at the leadership level, military-technical cooperation had either continued throughout the rift or had been rapidly restored.

Randa Slim offered a nuanced assessment of the relationship’s durability: “There was a dent but not a deadly blow. At least there is a grander narrative or mission of fighting against Israel that still provides enough glue and enables the relationship to be healed over time.” This analysis suggests that for both Hezbollah and Hamas, despite their differences over Syria, the shared commitment to armed struggle against Israel functioned as a powerful unifying force capable of overcoming even serious political disagreements.

The Strategic Equation: Three Levels of Challenge

Hamas’s enhanced capabilities presented Israel with challenges operating on distinct levels, each with implications extending far beyond the borders of Gaza.

The Regional Proliferation Challenge. One challenge concerned preventing Hamas from either rebuilding its capabilities in Gaza after the conflict or creating a similar threat in the West Bank. The West Bank’s geography—its dusty hills overlooking Israel’s main airport and largest cities—made the prospect of tunnel networks or anti-tank missile capabilities there particularly alarming. If Hamas could replicate its Gaza model in the West Bank, Israel would face a threat far closer to its population centers and critical infrastructure, with much less strategic depth for defense.

The Deterrence Challenge. Perhaps most consequential challenge involved Israel’s ability to discourage Hezbollah itself from employing similar tactics in a future conflict. As Daniel Nisman, president of the Levantine Group, a Tel Aviv-based geopolitical risk consultancy, explained: “It’s widely assumed in Israel that Hezbollah is carefully watching what’s going on in the Gaza Strip. The more effective Israel can be against Hamas, the more Hezbollah will be deterred” from adopting such tactics.

This created a complex dynamic. Hezbollah, far more powerful than Hamas with an estimated arsenal of over 100,000 rockets and missiles, posed a qualitatively different threat. If Israel appeared unable to effectively counter Hamas’s more limited capabilities, Hezbollah might calculate that its own far-superior arsenal and similarly sophisticated tactics would prove equally difficult to defeat. Conversely, demonstrating the ability to neutralize Hamas’s Hezbollah-style tactics might send a deterrent message to the more powerful adversary.

Conclusion: The New Reality of Asymmetric Conflict

The 2014 Gaza conflict illustrated how military knowledge and capability can diffuse across borders and between non-state actors, fundamentally reshaping the battlefield for conventional forces. Hamas’s evolution from a “bunch of people with guns” to an organized fighting force employing sophisticated combined-arms tactics did not occur in isolation. It was the product of decades of relationship-building, training, technology transfer, and organizational learning—much of it facilitated by Hezbollah and its Iranian patrons.

The Syrian civil war had temporarily disrupted these relationships, but not destroyed them. The shared commitment to armed struggle against Israel, reinforced by ideological conviction and strategic interest, provided sufficient “glue” to hold the axis together even amid serious political disagreements.

For Israel, this new reality meant that future conflicts, whether in Gaza, Lebanon, or elsewhere, would likely involve adversaries with growing capabilities and increasing tactical sophistication. The days when non-state militants could be easily dismissed as unprofessional fighters were receding into history. In their place had emerged a new generation of adversaries, schooled in the tactics of the region’s most effective militant organizations and equipped with weapons that had once been the exclusive preserve of state armies.

The 2014 war offered a glimpse of this emerging battlefield. The question it left unanswered was whether conventional militaries, designed and equipped for conventional warfare, could adapt quickly enough to meet this challenge—and at what cost.

• This article is written by Abu Dhar al-Bosni (lokiloptr154668 on X) and does not necessarily reflect the views of A.E.P. (the owner of the website), nor does it necessarily represent an agreement with these perspectives.

On October 8, 2025, the military media wing of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades released a statement bearing a simple but profound message: “Gaza will never forget those who supported her.” This public homage was not a diplomatic gesture. It was a deliberate declaration of ideological and strategic kinship. To understand its full weight, one must examine a seemingly obscure detail from April 2024—a warning issued by Qassam’s spokesman, Abu Obeida, regarding the fate of Israeli captives in Gaza. That warning, when traced to its roots, reveals the depth of Hamas’s intellectual debt to the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon.

The Ron Arad Precedent: A Strategy of Strategic Ambiguity

On April 22, 2024, Abu Obeida addressed the families of Israeli captives and the occupation’s leadership with a chilling message. He reminded them that soldiers Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul had been in Hamas’s custody for a decade, alongside “civilians” Hisham al-Sayed and Avera Mengistu. Then he delivered the core of his warning: “The scenario of ‘Ron Arad’ is the most likely scenario to be realized with your sons in Gaza.”

Ron Arad was an Israeli Air Force navigator whose plane was shot down over Lebanon in 1986. He was captured by Hezbollah forces under the command of the late Fuad Shukr. Since his capture, Arad has never been seen again. He is officially classified as “missing in action,” his fate unknown, his body never returned, his case a festering wound in Israeli national consciousness for nearly four decades. Abu Obeida’s meaning was unmistakable: the Israeli captives in Gaza may face the same fate. They may disappear from history, held in complete isolation, their condition unknown, their return impossible—for decades if necessary. This is not a threat of immediate execution; it is a threat of strategic erasure, of removing the most valuable bargaining chips from the board entirely rather than surrendering them under unfavorable terms.

What makes this threat significant is not its content alone, but its source. From the dozens of Israeli MIAs in history—some held by the Syrian Arab Army, some by Ahmad Jibril’s PFLP-General Command, some even by the Amal Movement—Abu Obeida chose specifically to invoke Ron Arad. He chose the one held by Hezbollah. He chose the one whose case was managed by Fuad Shukr, whose portrait now hangs alongside Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah’s in the martyrs’ galleries of the Resistance Axis.

Abu Obeida, it must be understood, is not merely a spokesman. According to Israeli intelligence sources—claims that Qassam has never denied—he has personally trained the entire 500-strong media office of the Al-Qassam Brigades over many years. Every statement, every video, every psychological operation bearing Qassam’s logo bears his imprint. The invocation of Ron Arad, therefore, represents not a casual reference but a doctrinal lesson transmitted from commander to cadre.

The Ideological Synthesis: Honoring the Martyrs of the Axis

This intellectual inheritance explains the behavior of Qassam’s media office throughout the Tufan al-Aqsa battle. Throughout the conflict, the office has consistently honored figures beyond Gaza’s borders:

• Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah leader.

• Sayyed Hashem Safieddine, Nasrallah’s designated successor, also martyred in Israeli strikes

• Sardar Haj Ramadan, the Iranian commander overseeing the Syrian-Iraqi supply corridor

• Sardar Zahedi, the senior IRGC commander assassinated in Damascus

• Haytham Ali Tabatabai, the Lebanese Resistance figure whose role remains shrouded in operational secrecy

These honors are not ritual gestures. It was, as Sayyid Hassan declared, “the battle of the entire Ummah”—a battle in which Shia fighters from Lebanon, Iranian advisors, and Sunni resistance fighters in Palestine stood on the same trench.

Against the Sectarian Poison

This reality must serve as an answer—a definitive, documented, publicly displayed answer—to any fool who would cite out-of-context quotations from a university thesis written by a young man in 2009 to slander Abu Obeida as “anti-Shia” or “Nasibi.”

The term “Nasibi” in classical Shiism refers to one who harbors active hatred against the Ahl al-Bayt and their followers. It is a grave accusation, implying sectarian enmity so deep that it precludes unity even in the face of a common enemy. To apply such a label to the man who trained 500 media operatives to honor Nasrallah, to invoke Ron Arad, to study the history of the Lebanese Resistance as a template for Palestinian struggle—this is not merely inaccurate. It is a form of internal sabotage, a gift to the enemy who seeks to divide the Resistance Axis along sectarian lines.

The sectarian poison is administered by two types of vectors: the “Shia Rydro” who cannot tolerate Sunni resistance fighters as genuine brothers, and the “Sunni Xumas” who cannot acknowledge the centrality of Hezbollah and Iran to the survival of Gaza. Both serve the same purpose. Both are refuted by the same evidence.

Conclusion: The Battle of the Entire Ummah

Abu Obeida’s invocation of Ron Arad was, in essence, a declaration of method. It said: we have studied you. We have learned from those who fought you for eighteen years in Lebanon, who expelled you from the south, who made your occupation a bleeding wound. We have taken their lessons, adapted their tactics, and applied them in Gaza. And if you force us to, we will follow their example to its final conclusion. We have never been alone. Those who fight beside us—Shia, Sunni, Lebanese, Iranian, Palestinian—are not allies of convenience. They are brothers in a single trench, fighting a single battle, for a single Ummah.

Gaza will never forget those who supported her. And those who seek to divide the supporters from the supported will find themselves refuted by the very words and deeds of the men they slander.

• This article is written by Abu Dhar al-Bosni (lokiloptr154668 on X) and does not necessarily reflect the views of A.E.P. (the owner of the website), nor does it necessarily represent an agreement with these perspectives.

The Ramadan Base

The Ramadan Base was the only overseas base of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) during the Holy Defense period, commanded by Mohammad Baqer Zolqadr. Its mission was to carry out guerrilla and irregular operations on Iraqi soil in cooperation with Iraqi Kurdish opposition forces. The base served as the central hub for a multinational force that brought together Iraqi Kurds, Iraqi Shias, Pakistani Shias, and Afghan Shias under a single command structure, all united by the goal of striking the Ba’athist regime from within its own territory.

To carry out their guerrilla operations, these forces had to traverse kilometers of mountainous terrain on foot, climbing up and down rugged peaks just to reach their target points before they could even begin their missions.

Why the Northwest Became the Front

Following the blockade of the southern front and the Iranian military’s inability to defeat the Iraqi Army after the costly Karbala 4 and 5 operations in 1987, Tehran fundamentally altered its operational strategy. The decision was made to pursue the war in the northwest, abandoning the stagnant southern theater where both sides had ground each other into bloody stalemate.

The progress achieved by the Ramadan Base and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in the northwest, coupled with the promise of further victories, proved decisive in this strategic calculation. However, changing the strategy from south to northwest was deeply unpopular among commanders and warriors who had become accustomed to fighting in the south and viewed that front as the war’s primary theater.

The reasons for fighting on the western and northwestern fronts extended beyond purely military considerations. According to Mohsen Rezaei, the commander-in-chief of the IRGC, the objectives included securing access to northern Iraq’s oil fields, threatening its northern road networks, and targeting the economic infrastructure of Kirkuk. This northwest strategy was implemented by the IRGC as a comprehensive approach to pressuring the Ba’athist regime from an unexpected direction.

This strategic orientation continued until April 1988, with several operations carried out in the northwest. The sub-regions of Ezgeleh, Marivan, Baneh, Sardasht, and Piranshahr constituted the main zones of engagement. Iran’s military operations in this region were framed within the context of an internal war waged through foreign-affiliated groups, with operating units consisting mostly of non-classical, guerrilla, and irregular forces rather than conventional military formations.

Iraqi Kurds: The 6th Special Division and the Kurdish Alliance

The 6th Special Division of the Revolutionary Guards, comprised of Iraqi Kurds, was commanded by Sadegh Mahmoudi. These Kurdish fighters formed the core of Iran’s strategy to open a northern front, leveraging their intimate knowledge of the terrain, their kinship networks across the border, and their existing organizational structures from years of struggle against Baghdad.

The conclusion of a strategic pact with the Patriotic Union of Iraqi Kurdistan, led by Jalal Talabani, and the Kurdistan Democratic Party, led by the Barzani family, as well as cooperation with other opposition groups in northern Iraq, made it possible for Iran to open a new front against the Iraqi army. The year 1985 was consumed by consultations and preparations, with a few limited operations carried out. By 1986, when Iran had decided to deploy all its available capacity to determine the war’s fate, the Ramadan Base was assigned responsibility for larger operations under the name “Conquest,” executed in the autumn of that year.

Operation Fateh 1: The Kirkuk Raid

Operation Fateh 1, targeting the Kirkuk oil refinery, stands as the first and most important in the series of Fatah operations. The operation was carried out in cooperation with the forces of the Patriotic Union of Iraqi Kurdistan. A combined force of 300 Iranian fighters and 2,000 Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga attacked the Kirkuk oil base and its facilities, successfully destroying a part of the Kirkuk refinery, Iraqi military bases, and MeK positions at a depth of 180 kilometers inside enemy territory.

To execute this operation, the Ramadan Forward Base was established as a sub-base in the Yaghsmar area of Iraq’s Sulaimaniyah province. This forward installation was tasked with transporting ammunition and equipment into Iraqi territory. Medical aid and supplies were also transported to meet the needs of civilians living in liberated areas under Patriotic Union control. In exchange for Iran’s support, the PUK organized its 2,000 Peshmerga fighters specifically for this operation.

Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the Supreme Commander of the War, later reflected on the operation’s significance: “Gentlemen who wanted to get acquainted with the Kirkuk region must have studied the place, where it was called Steely Peaks a long time ago, and in fact, if it was in the hands of efficient forces, it should be called Steel Peaks. The Iraqis had established about 20 military bases there, in addition to placing significant precautionary forces there. Now, the Steely Peaks fell quickly without a single one of Iranian troops being martyred.”

This operation proved to Iranian commanders that with popular support and the assistance of Iraqi opposition groups, crossing front lines and operating behind enemy lines deep inside Iraq could inflict severe damage on the Ba’athist regime.

The Zafar Operations

Operation Zafar was carried out in continuation of the Fatah operations by the Ramadan Base, again in cooperation with Iraqi Kurdish forces. Seven such operations were conducted on Iraqi soil until March 1988. In addition to executing the irregular Conquest and Victory operations, which brought valuable successes and experience to the IRGC, the Kurdish forces also played a supporting role in major conventional operations in the northwest, including Karbala 10, Bayt al-Maqdis 2, Valfajr 10, and Nasr 8.

The Kurdish counter-revolutionary group PJAK, which had long taken refuge deep inside Iraqi territory from Iran’s northwestern borders, found its position shaken by the Ramadan Base’s activities and was forced to relocate. With opposition groups against the Ba’ath regime declaring their readiness for armed struggle, the need for an organization capable of coordinating with these groups through military channels became increasingly apparent.

Iraqi Shias: The 9th Badr Division

The 9th Badr Division, comprised solely of Iraqi Shias, operated under the joint command of Martyr General Esmail Daqaighi and General Mohammad Reza Naqdi. These fighters represented the Shia opposition to Saddam Hussein’s regime, many of whom had been expelled from Iraq or were descendants of Iranian families who had been forcibly displaced.

Culturally, racially, and religiously, Iraq was a fragmented country during Saddam Hussein’s rule, containing two powerful divergent forces: the Shias and the Kurds. These two communities provided the ground for popular, partisan, and religious opposition, which intensified as the war progressed. The expulsion of many Shias and Iranians living in Iraq, the suppression of political opponents, and mounting economic and psychological pressures on Iraqi society increased popular dissatisfaction with the regime.

As the war eroded and prolonged, and popular protests emerged, nuclei of resistance and opposition to the Ba’ath regime formed. Imam Khomeini’s messages to the Iraqi people and army further cultivated the ground for opposition, calling on the suffering Iraqi people to begin a new movement to overthrow the Ba’ath regime from within their own country.

Groups, parties, and organizations inside Iraq were already engaged in secret struggle against the Ba’ath regime. Many had declared their readiness for cooperation as early as 1983, and the Islamic Republic assigned the Ramadan Base responsibility for supporting them.

The Badr Division served as the organized military wing of the Iraqi Shia opposition, receiving training, equipment, and operational direction from the IRGC. These forces participated in numerous operations under the Ramadan Base’s command, bringing their knowledge of Iraqi society and their motivation to liberate their homeland from Ba’athist rule.

After assessing the socio-political situation in Iraq, the Ramadan Base had identified four decisive forces active in the struggle against the Ba’ath regime: tribes, organized Shia groups, Muslim parties and militias, and regime opponents. Among these, the organized Shia groups like those constituting the Badr Division proved among the most effective partners.

Afghan Shias: The Abuzar Brigade

The Abuzar Brigade, comprised of Afghan Shias, was commanded by General Mohammad Reza Hakim Javadi. These fighters came from Afghanistan’s Hazara and other Shia communities, bringing with them their own experiences of conflict and displacement.

The Abuzar Brigade played a crucial role in the Fateh operations, particularly in the assault on the Kirkuk oil facilities. Rafsanjani’s account of the operation includes a telling detail about their sacrifice: “Now, the Steely Peaks fell quickly without a single one of Iranian troops being martyred, and only a few Afghan Abuzar members were martyred.” Their sacrifice was acknowledged at the highest levels of Iran’s war command, yet their story remains one of the lesser-known chapters of the conflict.

The Abuzar Brigade participated in the full range of the Ramadan Base’s activities, from the long mountain marches required to reach target positions to the direct assaults on Iraqi military installations. As forces with experience of fighting in their own country’s conflicts, they brought valuable skills in mountain warfare and irregular operations to the IRGC’s multinational force.

Pakistani Shias: The Zafar Brigade

The Zafar Brigade, comprised of Pakistani Shias, was commanded by Mohammad Moghaddam. These fighters represented Pakistan’s significant Shia minority, many of whom were motivated by religious solidarity with Iran’s Islamic Revolution and opposition to what they perceived as the persecution of Shia communities under Ba’athist rule.

The Zafar Brigade, formally designated as the 75th Zafar Brigade of the Ramadan Base, operated under Moghaddam’s command throughout the northwest campaign. Their participation in the Zafar operations, which continued until March 1988, formed part of the sustained irregular warfare campaign that the Ramadan Base waged against Iraqi positions.

While less documented than the Iraqi Kurdish or Shia forces, the Pakistani contingent represented the broadening of Iran’s revolutionary appeal beyond the Arab and Persian worlds into the South Asian Shia communities, a model that would later be replicated in other conflicts.

The Airborne Brigade

In addition to the foreign fighter contingents, the Ramadan Base also included the Airborne Brigade, commanded by Mohsen Shafaq. These elite Iranian forces provided specialized capabilities for the base’s operations, including the ability to insert forces behind enemy lines and conduct rapid strikes against high-value targets.

The Airborne Brigade worked alongside the foreign fighter contingents, providing leadership, specialized skills, and coordination with the broader IRGC command structure. Their presence ensured that the multinational force operated according to IRGC doctrine and maintained connection to Iran’s overall war strategy.

The Command Structure

The forces of the Ramadan Base were drawn from various nationalities, mostly elite fighters who had experience fighting in Kurdistan and other regional conflicts. The command structure included:

• Mohammad Baqer Zolqadr: Commander of the Ramadan Base

• Shahid Jafar Jangarvi: Deputy Commander of the Base

• Mohammad Rahimi (Jafari): Head of Base Intelligence

• Iraj Masjedi: Chief of Staff of the Base

• Mohammad Moghaddam: Commander of the 75th Zafar Brigade

• Ali Shadmani: Head of Base Operations

• Jafar Jahroutizadeh: Commander of the Special Martyrdom Unit (inghimasis and suicide bombers)

A number of commanders from the Hamzeh Sayyed al-Shuhada Base, who had accumulated extensive experience in irregular warfare through their campaigns against counter-revolutionary forces in Iranian Kurdish areas between 1979 and 1981, were transferred to the Ramadan Base to apply their expertise.

The Strategic Consequences & Legacy of the Ramadan Base

From April 1987 to April 1988, the Islamic Republic carried out several operations in the northwest that successfully liberated the cities of Halabja, Kharmal, Seyyed Sadegh, and Shaneh Dari, subsequently handing them over to Iraqi Kurdish control. These territorial gains represented a significant expansion of Iranian influence inside Iraq and demonstrated the effectiveness of the foreign fighter model.

Despite these tactical successes, the strategic reorientation carried a significant cost. The shift to the northwest provided Iraq with an opportunity to take independent military action, and for the first time in the eight-year war, Iraq was able to seize the initiative. Instead of merely responding to Iranian actions, Iraqi forces launched an operation to recapture Al-Faw, successfully removing it from Iranian grasp.

The Ramadan Base represented a remarkable experiment in multinational coalition warfare, bringing together Iraqi Kurds, Iraqi Shias, Pakistani Shias, and Afghan Shias under Iranian command to fight a common enemy. The base’s operations demonstrated the effectiveness of guerrilla and irregular warfare in striking deep behind enemy lines and inflicting damage far out of proportion to the size of the forces involved.

The model developed at the Ramadan Base—forging alliances with local opposition groups, training and equipping foreign fighters, and conducting sustained irregular warfare campaigns—would later be replicated in other theaters, from Lebanon to Syria to Iraq itself in the post-2003 period. The commanders who cut their teeth in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan would go on to shape the IRGC’s approach to asymmetric warfare for decades to come.

• This article is written by Abu Dhar al-Bosni (lokiloptr154668 on X) and does not necessarily reflect the views of A.E.P. (the owner of the website), nor does it necessarily represent an agreement with these perspectives.

The current leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is not a product of conventional military institutions. Its origins lie in the fusion of Islamist ideology and guerrilla warfare experience that predates the 1979 Iranian Revolution itself. Understanding this genealogy is essential to comprehending the doctrinal foundations of Iran’s military strategy today.

The Three Founding Cohorts

The men who would shape the IRGC’s trajectory emerged from three distinct but overlapping revolutionary experiences.

First, there is the “Mansouroun” faction within the Mojahedin of the Islamic Revolution group. Mohsen Rezaei, Gholam Ali Rashid, Ali Shamkhani, Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, and Hossein Nejat all cut their teeth in this organization—a pre-revolutionary movement that combined Islamic ideology with armed struggle against the Shah’s regime. These were not soldiers in any conventional sense; they were revolutionaries who understood that asymmetric means were the only path to confronting a superior state apparatus.

Second, there is the “Lebanon alumni” cohort. Hossein Hamedani, Yahya Rahim Safavi, Hassan Bagheri, Mostafa Chamran, Mohammad Montazeri, Ahmad Vahidi, Ali Akbar Mohtashamipur, Hossein Dehghan, Ebrahim Hemmat, and Ahmad Motevaselian all began their revolutionary careers in the late 1970s or early 1980s in Lebanon. Some trained with Fatah before the Iranian Revolution, absorbing the lessons of Palestinian guerrilla warfare against Israel. Others, after the 1982 Zionist invasion, became the trainers and founders of Hezbollah, exporting the revolutionary model outward even as Iran itself was still consolidating its own revolution. This cohort embodied the principle that Iran’s defense begins beyond its borders.

Third, there is the “Ramadan Headquarters” group—commanders who forged their reputations in the suppression of the Kurdish rebellion in northwestern Iran during the early 1980s, and simultaneously established intimate working relationships with Iraqi Kurdish factions hostile to Saddam Hussein, namely those of Masoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani. Named after the IRGC’s forward-operating base in Kurdistan during the Iran-Iraq War, the Ramadan Headquarters managed Iran’s relations with Iraqi opposition groups, both Arab and Kurdish. This cohort includes Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, Mohammad Reza Naghdi, Esmail Qaani, Iraj Masjedi (later Iran’s ambassador to Baghdad and chief of staff of the Quds Force), and the most famous of them all, Qasem Soleimani. Of Soleimani, Talabani himself would later remark that he “knew Iraq better than us Kurds, and maybe better than the [Arab] Iraqis themselves.” This was not hyperbole; it was a testament to the deep, immersive intelligence work that became the hallmark of the Quds Force.

The Guerrilla Economy of Sanctioned Warfare

The sanctions imposed by the United States after 1979 did not merely constrict Iran’s economy; they fundamentally reshaped its military doctrine. By systematically crippling the Artesh (Iran’s regular army)—stripping it of any meaningful air force, navy, or air defense capability—the sanctions forced Iran to abandon any pretense of conventional parity with its adversaries. In this vacuum, the IRGC stepped into the forefront, managing what can only be described as a “guerrilla economy” of military expenditure: maximizing enemy casualties at minimum cost, and creating a deterrence paradigm based not on matching capabilities, but on inflicting unacceptable pain.

This doctrine was forged in the crucible of the Iran-Iraq War. The “War of the Cities”—Saddam Hussein’s relentless bombardment of Iranian urban centers—was a traumatic national experience. The Islamic Republic’s military doctrine has ever since been obsessed with ensuring that such a catastrophe never repeats. A conventional air force or air defense system sufficient to guarantee this would require resources Iran, in its isolation, could never amass. So the IRGC innovated asymmetrically.

The result was Iran’s indigenous drone and missile program: a homegrown, mass-producible arsenal capable of wreaking havoc on any enemy that dares wreak havoc on Iran. This created the desired “balance of terror,” imposing on the opponent a destruction commensurate with what it seeks to inflict. The 12-Day War between Iran and the Zionist regime in June 2025 demonstrated this doctrine’s maturity: Iran could strike directly, massively, and sustain the exchange without resorting to nuclear weapons.

From Human Waves to Forward Defense

The human waves of young Basij volunteers that crashed against Iraqi positions from 1980 to 1988 succeeded in liberating Iranian soil, but they could not conquer Basra. Operations Karbala-4 and Karbala-5 in 1986-87 remain bloody monuments to the limits of sacrificial infantry against fortified, conventionally-equipped defenses. Iran lost half a million martyrs in that imposed war of “Holy Defense.” The post-war military doctrine absorbed this lesson with existential clarity: if a ground war of that scale ever again consumes Iranian territory, the Islamic Republic itself would not survive.

Surrounded by a sea of hostile Sunni Arab states—the very states that had bankrolled Saddam’s war machine throughout the 1980s—Iran’s military leadership understood that the front line must be pushed outward. The strategic maxim became: “It’s better to fight our wars in Lebanon than to have to fight them in Tehran.”

Thus was born the doctrine of forward defense through exported mobilization. The Basij model—a popular mobilization militia rooted in ideological commitment and local communities—was replicated across the region. In Lebanon, it became Hezbollah. In Iraq, it became the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF). In Yemen, it became Ansar Allah. In Palestine, it became the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

The Three Pillars of the Basiji Resilience

For this model to succeed, the IRGC identified three essential characteristics that any allied force must possess:

1. A strong Islamist ideology, providing transcendent motivation beyond material gain.

2. Deep roots in the local population, ensuring organic integration and sustainability.

3. A guerrilla mentality, retained even after achieving state-like power (as seen in Yemen and Iraq).

These three elements generate sufficient asabiyya—group solidarity in the classical Ibn Khaldunian sense—to immunize these movements against the corrupting influences that normally destroy revolutionary organizations. Bribes fail. Co-option fails. The exercise of state power does not transform them into conventional, brittle armies. They remain, at their core, guerrilla movements that happen to govern.

The Asymmetric Society

When Imam Khomeini insisted on creating the IRGC in 1979 as a parallel military structure independent of the Shah’s army, his distrust extended beyond the old regime’s officer corps. He distrusted the very concept of a regular army as the sole guarantor of revolutionary survival. The Venezuelan experience of 2026—a reference point for the contemporary reader—proves him prescient. A parallel, ideological, religious, guerrilla-minded military structure is a Great Wall against any enemy’s attempts at hostile takeover from within or without.

But there is a deeper dimension to this doctrine, one that transcends military organization and enters the realm of civilizational psychology. In December 2025, Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani visited Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut, just three days after the Zionist pager attacks had sent shockwaves through Lebanon. Nasrallah told him: “If this had happened to any other society, it would’ve lost all hope and stopped fighting. Our society keeps fighting because of its faith in Imam Hussein.”

This is the final, perhaps most crucial, pillar of asymmetric warfare: the need for an “asymmetric society.” A society that operates outside the modern and post-modern globally accepted systems of belief and philosophy. A society that collectively believes in Imam Hussein, that explicitly rejects the materialist worldview that governs the international order. Such a society cannot be bribed, cannot be corrupted, cannot be made to surrender by symmetrical means. It is a collective of millions of “Basijis of the spirit”—armed or unarmed, they constitute a human terrain that conventional militaries cannot pacify.

The societies of South Lebanon, Gaza, and Yemen are such asymmetrical societies. They have absorbed defeats that would shatter any conventional state—the loss of leaders, the destruction of territory, the killing of tens of thousands—and they continue. They are the contemporary embodiment of the Prophet’s community at the Battle of Uhud: wounded, but not broken; defeated tactically, but not surrendered strategically.

For the Axis of Resistance, the ultimate defeat would not be the loss of territory or even the assassination of leadership. It would be the loss of this spiritual asymmetry—the adoption of the materialist “symmetry” of the modern world. As long as that faith endures, the war continues. And as long as that faith endures, the IRGC’s foundational doctrine—born in the guerrilla struggles of the 1970s, baptized in the blood of the 1980s, and matured in the regional fires since—remains validated.

• This article is written by Abu Dhar al-Bosni (lokiloptr154668 on X) and does not necessarily reflect the views of A.E.P. (the owner of the website), nor does it necessarily represent an agreement with these perspectives.

The biography of Abu Ali al-Hakim reveals a figure whose strategic portfolio places him at the very core of Ansarallah’s resilience and operational success. As a veteran of the Believing Youth movement founded by the martyr Hussein al-Houthi, al-Hakim embodies the ideological foundation of the group while exercising a uniquely pragmatic skill set. His primary role as chief of military intelligence for tribal affairs leverages a critical understanding that in Yemen—a nation whose social fabric is arguably more deeply tribal than any other in the Arab world—victory is secured not just on the battlefield but through complex social negotiation. In this, he demonstrates a quality reminiscent of Haj Qasem Soleimani’s prowess in Iraq: the masterful ability to navigate tribal allegiances, convincing Sunni chiefs to resist Emirati and Saudi coercion and thereby fracturing the coalition of his enemies.

Concurrently, al-Hakim holds a second, equally critical responsibility: the security of the al-Houthi family and the Iranian military advisors who travel to Yemen. This dual role—part diplomat, part chief of security—directly echoes the legendary function of Haj Imad Mughniyeh within Hezbollah, who was simultaneously a strategic planner and the guarantor of security for both Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah and Iranian officials in Lebanon. This combination of roles indicates a profound level of trust and a rare blend of subtle political intellect and meticulous operational caution.

His impact is measured by his enemies’ reactions. Designated by the U.S. in 2014 for his leading role in the liberation of Sana’a, al-Hakim is widely believed to have led the operation that culminated in the death of the defected former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, in 2017. Furthermore, Saudi and Emirati accounts have consistently cited his name in relation to intelligence operations that enabled successful long-range strikes against critical targets in Riyadh and the Abu Dhabi International Airport in 2022. Perhaps most significantly, he is thought to be the strategic mind behind the 2022 initiative to “train 10,000 troops for naval operations in the Red Sea,” a plan that presciently laid the groundwork for the impactful blockade enacted in support of Gaza post-2023.

If assessments from adversarial sources are accurate, Abu Ali al-Hakim possesses a composite of skills—deep tribal intelligence, high-level security acumen, and visionary strategic planning—that is exceptionally unique. This places him within a very small cohort of military-political commanders—alongside figures like Sinwar, Deif, Mughniyeh, Soleimani, Badreddine, Muhandis, and Haqqani—who have fundamentally shaped the modern landscape of asymmetric resistance.

May Allah (swt) protect this mujahid qa’id, guide his hands, and misguide those of his enemies.

• This article is written by Abu Dhar al-Bosni (lokiloptr154668 on X) and does not necessarily reflect the views of A.E.P. (the owner of the website), nor does it necessarily represent an agreement with these perspectives.

Introduction: The Assassination That Never Was

The failed assassination attempt on Major General Mohammed Abdul Karim al-Ghamari, Chief of Staff of Yemen’s Armed Forces, in August 2025 represents more than merely another operational setback for Israeli intelligence. It reveals a fundamental strategic blindness at the heart of Israel’s targeting apparatus when operating against Yemen’s Ansarallah movement. Unlike the methodical, precise strikes against Hezbollah leadership in 2024-2025—which followed a predictable pattern of warning, strike, and confirmation—the operations against Ansarallah commanders have been characterized by confusion, misidentification, and public equivocation. Israeli media themselves expressed uncertainty about whether the target was al-Ghamari, Interior Minister Abdul Karim al-Houthi, or the defense minister, while official Israeli military channels remained conspicuously silent. This operational disarray stands in stark contrast to Israel’s previously demonstrated capabilities against other regional actors and suggests a significant intelligence degradation when confronting Yemen’s unique security architecture.

1. The Intelligence Failure: Operational Security Asymmetries

1.1 Comparative Case: Lebanon vs. Yemen Targeting Campaigns

Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah in 2024-2025 demonstrated methodical precision in high-value targeting. The process consistently followed a recognizable pattern: initial warning messages from Arabic-language spokesperson Avichay Adraee instructing civilians to evacuate specific buildings, followed by official Israeli military confirmation of striking specific senior figures (such as Hajj Safieddine), and culminating in Hezbollah’s martyrdom announcement the following day. This predictable rhythm, while devastating to Hezbollah’s leadership structure, indicated Israeli intelligence had achieved significant penetration and predictability regarding Hezbollah’s movements and security protocols.

In Yemen, however, Israel faces a dramatically different challenge reminiscent of its intelligence failures during the 2006 Lebanon War. Then-Mossad director Meir Dagan reportedly admitted to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that despite intensive efforts, intelligence agencies could not locate either Hassan Nasrallah or Imad Mughniyeh in the war’s final days—a startling admission given both leaders were reportedly conversing casually under a tree in Beirut’s southern suburbs rather than in fortified bunkers. Contemporary Yemen operations show similar characteristics of intelligence blindness, with conflicting reports about targets, confusion between leadership figures, and an inability to verify operations successfully. This suggests Ansarallah has implemented exceptional operational security measures that effectively deny Israel the intelligence superiority it enjoys against other regional actors.

1.2 The Psychological Dimension of Uncertainty

The intelligence failure transcends operational effectiveness and enters the psychological dimension of conflict. Israel’s precise targeting against Hezbollah served not only to eliminate key figures but also to demonstrate intelligence dominance, thereby undermining morale among remaining personnel and supporters. The confusion and uncertainty surrounding operations in Yemen produce the opposite effect—bolstering Ansarallah’s image as an unpredictable and resilient force while potentially damaging confidence in Israeli intelligence agencies. This psychological aspect creates strategic effects disproportionate to the tactical outcomes of individual operations, potentially influencing decision-making calculations throughout the region.

2. Ansarallah’s Revolutionary Leadership: Unconventional Fusion

2.1 Diverse Backgrounds, Unified Purpose

Ansarallah’s leadership structure embodies a strategic synthesis of disparate military traditions that would appear contradictory to external observers accustomed to conventional military organizations. The movement seamlessly integrates two distinct leadership profiles:

Table: Ansarallah’s Leadership Diversity

This fusion creates a hybrid military doctrine that combines the discipline and organizational structure of conventional military forces with the flexibility, innovation, and commitment of revolutionary resistance movements. The cooperation between figures resembling “Gamal Abdel Nasser” and “Mohammed Deif”—as referenced in the original analysis—represents a strategic innovation that enables Ansarallah to operate effectively across both conventional and irregular battlefields. The same dynamics exist and in fact flourished in Iran by the joint collaboration between the Iranian Army and the IRGC.

2.2 Beyond Militia Designations

Western analysts frequently dismiss Ansarallah as a mere “militia” or “rebel group,” categories that fail to capture the movement’s complex character as the standing army of a pan-national Yemeni revolution . This conceptual limitation impedes accurate assessment of their capabilities, resilience, and potential evolution. Ansarallah has demonstrated state-like military capacities including missile development, drone warfare, naval targeting, and strategic coordination with regional allies—capabilities far exceeding typical non-state actor profiles. Their continued power despite extensive bombing campaigns and international pressure suggests institutional depth and popular support that transcends conventional militia models.

3. The IRGC-Quds Force Model: Advisors Not Commanders

3.1 The “More Native Than Natives” Doctrine

The presence of IRGC-Quds Force generals within resistance movements follows a consistent pattern established over decades—what Palestinian Islamic Jihad Secretary-General Dr. Ziad Nakhala described as becoming “more Palestinian than the Palestinians themselves” through years of close cooperation. This approach emphasizes deep cultural immersion, ideological alignment, and unconditional support rather than external command structures. The examples are historical and widespread:

• Haj Ahmad Motavaselian in Lebanon (1982)

• Mohammad Reza Naghdi in Bosnia (1995)

• Bagher Zolghadr in Sudan

• Gholamreza Baghbani in Afghanistan

• Hamid Taghavi in Iraq

• Hossein Hamedani in Syria

• Mohammad Reza Zahedi in Syria (2023-24)

• Abbas Nilforoushan in Lebanon (2023-24)

This pattern continues undoubtedly in Yemen with sanctioned Quds Force generals like Abdolreza Shahlaei (Haj Yusef) and Mohammad Reza Fallahzadeh (Abu Baqer) providing advisory support.

3.2 The Soleimani Doctrine: Counseling Not Commanding

The late Qasem Soleimani’s own description of his role during the 2006 Lebanon War establishes the definitive model for Quds Force engagement: He emphasized that Hezbollah devised its own strategy from start to finish, while his role was primarily to provide counseling support, facilitate communication with Iranian leadership, and ensure Hezbollah received requested resources without operational strings attached . This advisory rather than command role creates a fundamentally different dynamic than typical state-proxy relationships, fostering greater initiative, adaptation, and local ownership of military operations while still achieving strategic coordination within the broader Axis of Resistance.

4. Regional Context and Strategic Implications

4.1 Yemen’s Strategic Value in the Regional Balance

Yemen’s Ansarallah represents perhaps the most resilient element within Iran’s axis following recent conflicts. Despite over a year and a half of military action by the US, Western allies, and Israel, the Houthis continue to hold power in Yemen and maintain military capabilities including missile and drone attacks against shipping in the Red Sea. Their geographic position enables them to threaten critical maritime chokepoints, while their demonstrated ability to strike Israeli territory provides them with strategic relevance beyond their immediate theater.

The group’s continued resilience despite extensive military pressure and isolation suggests significant internal cohesion and adaptive capacity. Reports indicate possible military equipment transfers from China and Russia to the Houthis in exchange for safe passage through the Red Sea, highlighting how the group has become enmeshed in broader geopolitical competition beyond the Iran-Israel rivalry.

5. Theoretical Framework: Understanding Revolutionary Resilience

5.1 The Hybrid Resistance Model

Ansarallah exemplifies an emerging hybrid resistance model that combines characteristics of state and non-state actors, conventional and irregular warfare, traditional military structures and revolutionary mobilization. This model presents unique challenges to conventional military powers accustomed to fighting either traditional state armies or non-state insurgents, but rarely both simultaneously embodied in a single actor.

The model’s effectiveness derives from its adaptive flexibility—the ability to shift between conventional positional defense and irregular guerrilla tactics as circumstances dictate. This flexibility is enhanced by the diverse backgrounds within its leadership, which encompass both professional military training and revolutionary resistance experience, creating a synthesis that leverages the strengths of both traditions while mitigating their respective limitations.

5.2 Networked Resistance vs. Hierarchical State Militaries

The contrast between Israel’s hierarchical military-intelligence apparatus and Ansarallah’s networked resistance structure illustrates a broader structural asymmetry in contemporary conflict. Traditional state militaries excel at gathering intelligence on fixed installations, regular patterns, and hierarchical organizations but struggle against networked, decentralized, and adaptive non-state actors that effectively blend into civilian populations and maintain exceptional operational security.

This structural advantage enables resistant movements to withstand tremendous military pressure despite significant material and technological disadvantages—a phenomenon demonstrated in conflicts from Vietnam to Afghanistan and now potentially in Yemen. Israel’s intelligence failures against Ansarallah reflect not merely operational shortcomings but a fundamental challenge to state-centric intelligence methodologies when confronting networked resistance movements.

Conclusion: Strategic Implications and Future Trajectories

The strategic synthesis within Ansarallah’s leadership between conventional military professionalism and revolutionary resistance experience creates a hybrid model that complicates traditional categorization and response frameworks. Meanwhile, the IRGC-Quds Force’s advisory model—emphasizing cultural immersion, ideological alignment, and resource facilitation without operational control—has proven more effective than traditional command relationships in fostering resilient proxy forces.

Looking forward, several trajectories seem plausible:

1. Continued Intelligence Adaptation: Israel will likely invest significant resources in improving intelligence collection against Yemeni targets, potentially employing new technologies and methodologies to overcome current limitations.

2. Strategic Reassessment: The United States and regional actors may reassess their approach to Yemen given Ansarallah’s resilience and the potential counterproductive effects of military pressure without political engagement.

3. Regional Diffusion: The successful model of resistance demonstrated by Ansarallah may influence other actors within Iran’s Axis of Resistance, potentially leading to emulation of their organizational and security practices.

The confusion surrounding a single failed assassination attempt thus opens a window into broader regional transformations, highlighting the need for more nuanced analytical frameworks that move beyond conventional categories of state/non-state and conventional/irregular to capture the hybrid realities of contemporary conflict in the Middle East. Those who continue to view Ansarallah through outdated conceptual lenses will likely continue to mispredict their capabilities and resilience, just as Israeli intelligence misidentified their leadership targets.

• This article is written by Abu Dhar al-Bosni (lokiloptr154668 on X) and does not necessarily reflect the views of A.E.P. (the owner of the website), nor does it necessarily represent an agreement with these perspectives.

Introduction: Two Men, Two Fiascos, One Strategic Lesson

The history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is punctuated by operations that alter the strategic landscape. Among the most significant are not just successes, but catastrophic failures that expose vulnerabilities and embolden adversaries. Two such events, occurring within the same pivotal month of September 1997, represent profound fiascos for Israel’s intelligence and military apparatus and for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. These operations, aimed at decapitating the leadership of Hezbollah and Hamas, instead resulted in humiliating defeat, strategic concessions, and a lasting lesson in the resilience of these resistance movements.

The two figures central to these events, Haj Khalil Harb of Hezbollah and Khaled Meshal of Hamas, not only survived but thrived, their legacies and operational command extending for decades. Their survival underscores a critical and persistent challenge to Israeli strategy.

Picture 1: Haj Khalil Harb (also known as “Sayyid Ahmad” or “Abu Mustafa”), commander-in-chief of Hezbollah’s military wing as of 2025, commander of Hezbollah’s central military operations in 1997.

Picture 2: Khaled Meshal, a Hamas politburo member as of 2025, Hamas’ most senior leader in 1997.

Both men are alive today, but both came perilously close to death in September 1997, in two of the Mossad’s and Israeli Defense Forces’ most significant operational failures to that date.

Part I: The Ambush at Ansariya – Hezbollah’s Tactical Masterpiece

The Primary Target: The Ascent of Haj Khalil Harb

On the night of September 4, 1997, Israel’s elite naval commandos, Shayetet 13, launched a high-risk operation into Southern Lebanon. Their objective was to capture Haj Khalil Harb, then Hezbollah’s number two military chief, subordinate only to the famed Imad Mughniyeh. The high value placed on Harb by Israeli intelligence is corroborated by the U.S. Department of the Treasury, which in 2017 placed a $5 million bounty on his head. Their press release detailed his long and escalating career:

• Deputy commander in Hezbollah’s central military unit in southern Lebanon (1988-1992)

• Lead commander of the unit (1992-1994)

• Commander of Hezbollah’s central military operations (1994-1997)

His significance only grew after surviving the 1997 operation. The Treasury noted that by 2000, Harb supervised Hezbollah military operations inside Israel, Jordan, Cyprus, and Turkey. He led a special unit in the 2006 war and was involved in smuggling Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives into the West Bank. By March 2006, he served as Hezbollah’s chief of military liaison with Palestinian factions and Iran.

In early 2007, Harb ascended to lead Hezbollah’s Unit 1800, dedicated to “supporting Palestinian militants and conducting Hizballah operations in the countries surrounding Israel.” In this role, he traveled to Iran for high-level coordination meetings. In 2010, he was involved in planning retaliatory attacks for Imad Mughniyeh’s assassination and was made a “special advisor” to Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah.

His portfolio expanded further: by 2012, he was involved in Hezbollah’s activities in Yemen, moving “large amounts of currency” through Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. By 2017, he was actively training and advising the Houthi (Ansarallah) movement. Notably, and curiously unlike other senior Hezbollah commanders, his public biography does not mention direct involvement in the Syrian Civil War. In 2021, he became head of Hezbollah’s Unit 133 for operations against Israel from the Golan Heights and the West Bank. Following the martyrdom of Fuad Shukr and Ibrahim Aqil in 2024, he is now the highest-ranking military commander in Hezbollah and the effective Number Two in the organization after Sheikh Naim Qassem.

The Setup: Intelligence and Meticulous Preparation

However, on September 4, 1997, Harb was not a distant commander but an active planner in the field. Alongside the two now-martyred leaders of the Radwan Force, Ibrahim Aqil and Ahmad Wehbe, he orchestrated what would become one of the most devastating ambushes in the history of the Israeli army.

Hezbollah’s preparation was a masterpiece of counter-intelligence. As revealed by Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah in a 2010 interview, the group had acquired Israeli drones and successfully downloaded video footage from their reconnaissance flights over Lebanon. In August 1997, analysts noticed a persistent Israeli interest in the area around Ansariya. The drones repeatedly followed a specific path from the beach, through citrus groves, to a point north of the village. Hezbollah correctly deduced a commando raid was being planned for that exact route.

They decided to preemptively plant explosives along the path. This presented two major problems. First, the timing was unknown, and the groves were worked by local farmers during the day. To avoid civilian casualties, the explosives had to be laid each evening after sunset and removed each morning before daybreak—a labor-intensive and risky process. Second, the area was a weak spot for Hezbollah, being dominated by the allied but rival Shiite movement, AMAL. Hezbollah leadership contacted local AMAL officials, warned them of the impending operation, and secured not only their consent but also an offer of a backup fighter unit.

The Hezbollah ambush unit consisted of 20 local militia fighters, led by Ahmad Wehbe. The overall strategic planning was the work of three senior leaders: Mustafa Badreddine (martyred in 2016), Ibrahim Aqil (martyred in 2024), and Khalil Harb. According to later Israeli sources, several similar ambushes were prepared at different locations as a contingency.

The Execution: A Tactical Annihilation

On the evening of September 4, 1997, a 16-strong Shayetet 13 team, commanded by Lt. Col. Yosef Korakin, landed on an uninhabited beach and moved inland, precisely following the route Hezbollah had predicted. They were shadowed by Israeli drones relaying their progress to command.

The unit reached a walled orchard. The forward team breached an iron gate. As the main force passed through it, a remote-controlled Claymore-type mine exploded. Fourteen seconds later, as the forward team returned to the site, a second mine detonated, killing the Israeli commander. The mines, designed to spray lethal metal marbles, caused chaos. Hezbollah fighters then opened fire, triggering the explosives carried by one Israeli soldier. In less than four minutes, eleven soldiers were dead, and four were wounded. Only the radioman escaped unhurt, and he frantically called for support and evacuation.

The Israeli response was swift and chaotic. Cobra attack helicopters laid down suppressing fire with TOW missiles and 20mm chain guns. Reinforcements from the elite Sayeret Matkal and the Air Force’s Unit 669 rescue team were brought in by CH-53 helicopters. A fierce firefight ensued. After two Hezbollah fighters were lightly wounded, their command ordered a pullback. AMAL fighters continued to engage with rifles and RPGs before also withdrawing. Hezbollah, however, continued to mortar the Israeli position.

The collateral damage was significant. Captain Dagesh Maher, a Druze military doctor in the rescue team, was mortally wounded by mortar shrapnel. A Lebanese civilian couple driving by was fired upon by Israeli soldiers; the woman was killed, and the man severely wounded. A young girl was also killed in the crossfire. The Lebanese army fired anti-aircraft guns skyward and launched illumination rounds. An Israeli jet struck a Lebanese anti-aircraft position, and Israeli missile boats offshore shelled the village to silence mortar fire, damaging several houses.

After more than four hours, the last Israeli helicopter evacuated the dead and wounded. One soldier, Itamar Ilya, remained missing, his body blown to pieces by the detonation of his own explosives.

The Aftermath: A Strategic Victory for Hezbollah

The strategic outcome was a resounding victory for Hezbollah. On May 25, 1998, the remains of the soldiers were exchanged for 65 Lebanese prisoners and the bodies of 40 Hezbollah fighters and Lebanese soldiers, including that of Hadi Nasrallah, the 19-year-old son of Hassan Nasrallah.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it “one of the worst tragedies that has ever occurred to us.” This incident, coupled with a helicopter crash earlier that year that killed 73 soldiers, became a powerful catalyst for Israeli public disillusionment, directly contributing to Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000—a event celebrated by Hezbollah as a historic victory.

Part II: The Meshal Assassination Attempt – A Diplomatic Catastrophe

The Jerusalem Bombing and the Decision to Retaliate

On that very same day, September 4, 1997, hundreds of miles to the south, a coordinated Hamas operation was underway. Five suicide bombers simultaneously detonated themselves on Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem, killing 21 Israelis. The mastermind was Khaled Meshal, then Hamas’s senior leader operating from Amman, Jordan. He had enlisted expert bomb-maker Mahmoud Abu Hanoud and dispatched the bombers.

In retaliation, Netanyahu personally authorized Meshal’s assassination.

The Botched Mossad Operation

On September 25, 1997, Mossad agents using fake Canadian passports infiltrated Amman. Two agents waited outside Meshal’s office. As he entered, one agent came from behind and applied a device to his ear that administered a fast-acting, lethal poison. Meshal described the sensation as “a loud noise in my ear ... like a boom, like an electric shock.”

The operation was critically flawed. Meshal’s bodyguards, already suspicious, chased down and captured the two agents. Jordanian intelligence swiftly located and detained at least six other Mossad operatives involved in the mission. Initially feeling fine, Meshal soon developed a severe headache and began vomiting. His condition deteriorated rapidly, and he was rushed to a hospital, slipping into a coma.

The Diplomatic Crisis and Forced Capitulation

King Hussein of Jordan was furious. He threatened to sever diplomatic relations with Israel and put the captured Mossad agents on trial. Fearing Meshal’s death would trigger riots or even civil war in his kingdom, he demanded Netanyahu provide the antidote. When Netanyahu refused, the king threatened to abrogate the landmark 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty.

Under this immense pressure and with U.S. President Bill Clinton personally intervening, Netanyahu was forced to capitulate. Mossad chief Danny Yatom flew to Jordan with the antidote. Doctors, who had diagnosed symptoms consistent with an opioid overdose, administered it, saving Meshal’s life.

The price for the agents’ release was exorbitant. According to sources like Ronen Bergman, the antidote only secured the release of the two direct operatives. The other agents holed up in the Israeli embassy were only released after Israel agreed to free Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and a large number of other Palestinian prisoners—a major strategic concession that significantly bolstered Hamas’s prestige and morale.

In a 2008 interview, Meshal reflected on the attempt: “[It] made me more positive about life. I became more courageous in the face of death. My faith became stronger that a man does not die until his time comes. That is, I will die when God decides, not when Mossad decides. It also made me more resolute in fulfilling my responsibilities.”

Conclusion: The Enduring Legacy of September 1997

The moral of this story is profound. Within the same month, two distinct Islamic Resistance Movements successfully defied the material and technological superiority of their adversary. They devised and executed bold offensive operations (the Jerusalem bombing, the ambush planning) and implemented effective, intelligent defenses against expected countermeasures (the drone intelligence, the ambush, the bodyguard response).

The result was a comprehensive strategic achievement: they achieved key military objectives, secured the release of important prisoners, and inflicted deep humiliation on the Israeli state. This embodies the “path of Izz ad-Din al-Qassam” that Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah articulated in his triumphant 2000 Bint Jbeil speech: a path of relentless resistance, meticulous alertness, and constant pressure, standing in stark opposition to capitulation and sloth.

A comparison made by an American colonel in 2009—”Hezbollah is the Delta Force, Hamas is the National Guard”—reflected the conventional wisdom of the time. It suggested a vast qualitative gap between the two organizations. However, the lessons of 1997, and their culmination on October 7, 2023, demonstrate that these are learning, evolving entities. On that day, Zionist settlers and soldiers learned the hard way that Hamas, after years of dedicated training and strategic development, had indeed achieved a level of operational capability that demanded a grim and tragic reassessment. The seeds of that reassessment were sown on a single, dark day in September 1997.

• This article is written by Abu Dhar al-Bosni (lokiloptr154668 on X) and does not necessarily reflect the views of A.E.P. (the owner of the website), nor does it necessarily represent an agreement with these perspectives.

Introduction: The Anglo-Zionist Strategy of Reactionary Alliances

In its persistent effort to secure a colonial foothold for itself and its Zionist proxy in the Middle East, the United States has repeatedly attempted to forge alliances between regional reactionary states. The objective is to create a unified front against revolutionary, anti-imperialist movements. The first major attempt was the 1955 Baghdad Pact, which established the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO)—a Middle Eastern analogue to NATO—comprising the pro-Western regimes of Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan, with the cooperation of Jordan and Iraq. This pact aimed to contain the revolutionary pan-Arabism led by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt. Its failure was sealed by the 1958 Iraqi Revolution and definitively buried by the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

The most recent iteration of this strategy is the 2020 “Abraham Accords,” a normalization agreement between the Zionist entity, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, Morocco, and Bahrain. Proponents acknowledge this project remains incomplete without Saudi Arabia’s participation, and it has suffered a severe blow from the Palestinian Resistance’s actions on October 7, 2023, and the subsequent Zionist genocide in Gaza.

Between these two well-known attempts lies a forgotten initiative: a silent, anti-Syrian coalition active between 1978 and 1982. If CENTO targeted Nasserist Egypt and the Abraham Accords target Khomeinist Iran, this proto-alliance was squarely aimed at containing Hafez al-Assad’s revolutionary Syria.

The “Unholy Alliance”: Members and Objectives

This unofficial pact brought together a constellation of actors whose primary common interest was the destabilization of Syria:

• “Israel” under Menachem Begin

• Egypt under Anwar Sadat

• Jordan under King Hussein

• Iraq under Saddam Hussein

• The Lebanese Phalangists

The alliance pursued three central objectives:

1. To Bury the Palestinian Question: Sadat’s strategy at Camp David explicitly excluded the Palestinian issue, aiming instead to create a fragmented West Bank governed by collaborationist “Village Leagues.”

2. To Contain Syria in Lebanon: The members coordinated covert support for the Lebanese Phalange, using it as a proxy to check Syrian influence and power in Lebanon.

3. To Destabilize Syria Internally: These governments provided support for the Muslim Brotherhood’s uprising against the government of Hafez al-Assad, seeking to undermine the state from within.

Syria in the late 1970s represented the most potent and active anti-Zionist force in the region. It not only refused normalization without the return of the Golan Heights but also hosted the “Rejectionist Front” of Palestinian factions that conducted operations independently of Yasser Arafat. Furthermore, as the host of two Soviet military bases, Syria was perceived as a direct geopolitical threat to American hegemony.

The Cracks in the Foundation: Why the Coalition Failed

The alliance was inherently fragile and ultimately collapsed due to three primary factors:

1. Divergent and Contradictory Interests: The member states shared a common enemy in Syria but were otherwise riven by mutual distrust and conflicting agendas. Saddam Hussein was enraged by Israel’s 1981 bombing of the Osirak nuclear reactor and, in retaliation, ordered Abu Nidal’s group to assassinate an Israeli diplomat, hoping to provoke a conflict between his two enemies. Furthermore, the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981 brought Hosni Mubarak to power in Egypt. Unlike Sadat, who held a personal animosity toward Hafez al-Assad, Mubarak was willing to de-escalate, leading to a thaw in Syrian-Egyptian relations.

2. The Game-Changing Iranian Revolution: The 1979 Revolution provided Syria with a powerful, unexpected ally: Khomeinist Iran. This strategic partnership bolstered Hafez al-Assad, who successfully crushed the Muslim Brotherhood uprising in 1982. The Iranian Revolution also unleashed a colossal wave of pan-Islamist anti-Zionism, leading to the formation of Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. These movements became persistent thorns in the side of Anglo-Zionist strategic designs.

3. Zionist Strategic Hubris: The government of Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon, intoxicated by Egypt’s capitulation at Camp David, committed a fatal strategic error. In 1982, it invaded Lebanon not merely to push the PLO beyond the Litani River but to conquer Beirut and install a puppet government. The ensuing Sabra and Shatila massacres ignited universal outrage across the Muslim world, galvanized a new generation of anti-Zionist fighters, and severely set back the normalization process for decades.

Conclusion: A Recurring Pattern of Failure

The failure of the 1978-1982 coalition illustrates a persistent flaw in the strategy of imposing reactionary alliances upon the Middle East. Such pacts are inherently unstable because they are built on a negative consensus (opposition to a common enemy) rather than shared positive interests. The internal contradictions among the members and the enduring power of revolutionary resistance inevitably cause them to unravel.

A parallel dynamic is visible today. The unprecedented brutality of the Zionist genocide in Gaza and the entity’s strikes against allied states have made even ostensibly pro-normalization leaders like Mohammed bin Salman and certain faction heads reluctant to formalize ties, fearing the wrath of their own populations—a cautionary tale reminiscent of Sadat’s fate. It is often observed that Arab governments might have long ago normalized relations with the Zionist entity, if not for its ghoulish propensity for the mass murder of Arab children. The failure of the proto-Abraham Accords serves as a historical precedent, demonstrating that no amount of top-down diplomacy can secure lasting peace without justice for Palestine.

• This article is written by Abu Dhar al-Bosni (lokiloptr154668 on X) and does not necessarily reflect the views of A.E.P. (the owner of the website), nor does it necessarily represent an agreement with these perspectives.

On April 11, 1996, during the Israeli military’s Operation Grapes of Wrath in southern Lebanon, artillery shells struck a United Nations compound in the village of Qana. The facility, a long-established peacekeeping base known as Fijibat, was sheltering hundreds of Lebanese civilians who had fled the fighting. The bombardment killed 106 people and injured over 116, a tragic event that became known as the Qana massacre. While the immediate horror was clear, the event’s deeper historical significance lies in its role as a catalyst, directly influencing the trajectories of key figures across the political and militant spectrum and altering the course of conflict in the Middle East.

The operation that led to the massacre was triggered by a critical on-the-ground incident involving a young Israeli soldier, Naftali Bennett. At the time, Bennett was a sergeant leading a commando unit of 67 soldiers operating behind enemy lines in Lebanon. According to subsequent investigative reports by Israeli journalists Yigal Sarna and Raviv Drucker, Bennett’s unit deviated from its original orders and was ambushed near the village of Kafr Qana by Hezbollah fighters. Under heavy mortar fire, Bennett radioed for immediate support.

Citing senior military sources, Drucker characterized Bennett’s call for help as “hysterical,” arguing that it contributed to the panicked and disproportionate response from command. The Israeli artillery barrage launched to cover his unit’s retreat missed its intended target and instead struck the UN compound. Sarna’s reporting in Yedioth Ahronoth concluded that Bennett displayed “poor judgement” and acted unilaterally, ignoring orders from superiors he reportedly viewed as insufficiently steadfast. This is what the enemy (Israeli) media narrated to justify their crime.

For Imad Mughniyeh, the sophisticated and genius military commander of Hezbollah, the massacre demanded a decisive response. Mughniyeh had a long history of orchestrating devastating retaliations for the Israeli atrocities, including the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut and the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires. Qana was no exception. Mughniyeh reportedly devised a two-pronged strategy for revenge: one immediate and spectacular, the other a longer-term political-military effort.

The rapid plan was an attempt to bomb an El Al flight departing from Tel Aviv. A Hezbollah operative, Hussein Mohammad Mikdad, using a forged British passport under the name Andrew Jonathan Neumann, successfully smuggled a kilogram of military-grade RDX explosive into Israel on a Swissair flight. The plot was only foiled by accident when Mikdad accidentally detonated the device in an East Jerusalem hotel room, severely injuring himself. From his hospital bed, he confessed that the operation was a “special gift” from Mughniyeh to Israel, intended to avenge the victims of Qana.

Mughniyeh’s slower, more strategic revenge proved far more successful. The massacre served as a powerful propaganda tool and a unifying force within Lebanon. The graphic images of dead women and children fostered a rare rally-around-the-flag effect, transcending sectarian lines and galvanizing national opposition to the Israeli occupation of the south. Hezbollah astutely capitalized on this sentiment by forming the Lebanese Resistance Brigades, which incorporated Sunni and Christian Lebanese fighters alongside its own Shiite forces. This broadened resistance intensified military pressure on the Israeli Defense Forces, contributing directly to Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000—a historic victory claimed by Hezbollah.

Levant and Beyond Levant

The reverberations of Qana extended far beyond the Levant, reaching the mountains of Afghanistan. For Osama bin Laden, who had just been expelled from Sudan and was establishing a new base for al-Qaeda, the massacre was a potent symbol of Western and Israeli aggression against the Muslim world. The event featured prominently in his ideological calculus.

In his August 1996 declaration of war against the United States, the “Ladenese Epistle,” bin Laden wrote:

“It is no secret to you, my brothers, that the people of Islam have been afflicted with oppression, hostility, and injustice by the Judeo-Christian alliance and its supporters. This shows our enemies’ belief that Muslims’ blood is the cheapest... Your blood has been spilt in Palestine and Iraq, and the horrific images of the massacre in Qana in Lebanon are still fresh in people’s minds.”

For bin Laden, Qana was not an isolated incident but proof of a widespread conspiracy, justifying a global jihad against America and its allies. His declaration becomes more significant knowing the victims of the Qana massacre were all Shia Muslims, which sharply contrasts OBL from the post-2003 Salafi Jihadi mentality. This event also helped cement his ideology and recruit followers who were outraged by the impunity of Israeli actions.

Meanwhile, within Israel itself, the political consequences of the spring of 1996 were profound. The climate of insecurity, shaped by both the Qana massacre and a wave of devastating Hamas bus bombings earlier that year (themselves retaliation for Israel’s assassination of bomb-maker Yahya Ayyash), dramatically shifted the political landscape. As noted by journalist and author Ronen Bergman, the Israeli public came to view Prime Minister Shimon Peres of the left-leaning Labor Party as weak and ineffective on security. Peres, who had been widely expected to win the upcoming election, was defeated by the hardline Likud leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, who campaigned on a platform of greater strength and security. Netanyahu won the May 1996 election, marking the beginning of his enduring dominance over Israeli politics.

In conclusion, the Qana massacre stands as a stark example of how a single horrific event can cascade through history with immense and unintended consequences. It catalyzed Imad Mughniyeh’s military strategy, bolstering Hezbollah’s legitimacy and contributing to Israel’s eventual withdrawal from Lebanon. It provided Osama bin Laden with a powerful rhetorical tool to globalize his jihad. And it altered Israel’s internal politics, helping to bring Benjamin Netanyahu to power and ending the era of the Oslo Accords.

• This article is written by Abu Dhar al-Bosni (lokiloptr154668 on X) and does not necessarily reflect the views of A.E.P. (the owner of the website), nor does it necessarily represent an agreement with these perspectives.

A critical, and often oversimplified, question in analyzing Hamas is the precise nature of its ideological foundation, particularly as it manifests within its military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades. This analysis argues that while individual members of Qassam may personally espouse Salafi-Jihadist (SJ) sympathies, the organization’s leadership structure, theological grounding, and political strategy remain firmly within the historical Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwani) tradition, distinct from the Salafi-Takfirism of groups like later Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State.

The Foundational Framework: Hamas as an Ikhwani Project

To understand Hamas, one must first recognize its genesis as an offshoot of the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood. Its scholarly and political leadership inherently operates within an Ikhwani ideological framework. This framework is pragmatic and politically engaged, prioritizing community building (da’wa) and national liberation within a Palestinian context, albeit with the long-term goal of an Islamic state. The theological references for these leaders are typically the modern pillars of Islamist thought, such as Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, rather than a direct and exclusive recourse to classical Salafi authorities like Ibn Taymiyyah or Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab.

This distinction is crucial. While Qutb’s ideas undoubtedly influenced later jihadist thought, his work exists within a distinct 20th-century Islamist context, separate from the strict, creed-focused (aqeeda) methodology of Salafism. The Ikhwani approach allows for a degree of flexibility in political and social matters that pure Salafism often rejects.

The Military Wing: Grassroots Sentiment vs. Command Structure

It is highly probable that many rank-and-file members, particularly those in their early twenties radicalized by conflict and immersed in global jihadist media ecosystems, fancy themselves as being the Vanguard of post-2000s Salafi Jihadism. They thus may adopt the aesthetic, rhetorical fervor, and rigid worldview associated with Salafi-Jihadism. This, however, is a phenomenon of grassroots adoption, not an indicator of official doctrinal alignment.

The critical factor is the command structure. For the Qassam Brigades to qualify as a Salafi-Jihadist entity as an organization, its leadership must itself adhere to and enforce that ideology. The available evidence strongly suggests this is not the case. The Qassam Brigades are not an independent entity; they are the armed wing of Hamas and are ultimately subservient to its political bureau and religious authorities. Their operations are directed toward the nationalistic goal of liberating Palestine, which aligns with Ikhwani “staged” strategy, rather than the immediate, borderless global jihad proclaimed by IS and AQ.

Historical Precedents and the “Borderline Salafi” Label

Groups like the Jordanian MB Fedayeen, Lebanon’s Tawhid Movement, and Egypt’s Gama’a Islamiya (in its earlier phases) all exemplify the model of an armed Ikhwani wing. They often employed militant Salafi-like rhetoric and enforced strict social codes in their territories, leading some to loosely label them “borderline Salafi.”

However, this is a descriptive, not a doctrinal, categorization. Their ideology remained fundamentally rooted in the Islamist politics of the Brotherhood, not the pristine Salafi manhaj (methodology). The term “Sururi” – referring to followers of the Syrian thinker Muhammad Surur who blended Salafi theology with Ikhwani political activism – might be a more precise, though debated, classification for some of these groups. Yet, even this label requires that the leadership itself adopts that specific synthesis. There is no compelling evidence that the senior echelons of Qassam’s command are Sururi or Salafi in their theology.

The most definitive proof against a Salafi classification for Hamas’s leadership lies in some of their documented practices, which are considered blatant religious innovations (bid’ah) and even acts of disbelief by strict Salafis.

For instance, figures like Yahya Sinwar have not only permitted but participated in public Mawlid celebrations (commemorating the birth of the Prophet Muhammad). Furthermore, the use of honorifics like “Karamallahu wajhah” (May Allah honor his face) for Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib is a practice common among Shia and some Sunni traditions but is vehemently rejected by Salafis, who view it as excessive praise. For a Salafi leadership, engaging in these acts would be theologically impossible. Their occurrence in Gaza under Hamas’s rule is therefore a powerful indicator that the group’s ideological core remains pragmatically Ikhwani, not rigidly Salafi.

Conclusion

In summary, the ideology of Hamas and its Qassam Brigades cannot be monolithic. While a bottom-up adoption of Salafi-Jihadist sympathies among some fighters is a credible and important sociological factor, it does not define the organization. The command structure, theological references, and political strategies are orchestrated by a leadership that remains within the broad Ikhwani tradition. This leadership tolerates certain practices that are theologically irreconcilable with Salafism, proving that the Qassam Brigades are best understood as the military wing of an Islamist-nationalist organization, not as a protégé of Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. Their ideological lineage runs through Gaza, Cairo, and the legacy of Hassan al-Banna—not through Raqqa or the doctrines of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

• This article is written by Abu Dhar al-Bosni (lokiloptr154668 on X) and does not necessarily reflect the views of A.E.P. (the owner of the website), nor does it necessarily represent an agreement with these perspectives.

To mark the martyrdom anniversary of Shahid Ibrahim Aqil, I have published this biography to shed light on his lesser-known life and sacrifices.

A Year Without Ibrahim Aqil

“Ibrahim Aqil [...] had been accused in the July 1983 attack on Lebanese Prime Minister Shafiq Wazzan, in which a remote-controlled car bomb only partially detonated and no injuries resulted. The five suspects arrested in the assassination attempt named Aqil as the man who rigged the car with 154 pounds of explosives. He has also been tied to the Nov. 4, 1983, suicide-bombing of the Israeli Defense Forces interrogation center at Tyre, in southern Lebanon, in which 29 Israelis and 32 Arab detainees were killed.”

— The Washington Post, 2 January 1984

“His death is an important settling of scores not just for Israel but for me personally. He [Aqil] commanded an ambush in 1997 during which 11 commandos from the elite naval commando unit which I was leading, were killed in Lebanon.”

— Yoav Gallant, Israeli Defense Minister, 21 September 2024

Name: Ibrahim Mohammed Aqil

Kunya: Abu Abdulkader

Nom de guerre: Haj Tahsin

Birth date: 24 December 1962

Birth place: Bednayel, Beqaa Valley, Lebanon

Death date: 20 September 2024

Death place: Haret Hreik, Dahiya, Lebanon

Organizations: Hezbollah (1985-2024), Islamic Jihad (1982-1992)

Rank: Commander-in-Chief of the Radwan Special Forces

A Life in the Resistance: The Strategic Impact of Haj Tahsin

His name appeared in the American press even before that of Imad Mughniyeh. He was identified as a mastermind of the 23 October 1983 Beirut barracks bombings—a strategic blow that expelled US and French forces from Lebanon. He was present in Ansariya when the occupation’s elite naval commandos were ambushed, their corpses captured and literally cut to pieces without a single Hezbollah fighter lost. He witnessed the Liberation of Southern Lebanon in 2000, having narrowly survived an assassination attempt that same year. He was an integral part of that brilliant jihadi leadership—Mughniyeh, Badreddine, Shukr, Tawil—that fortified the south and humiliated the Zionist enemy in 2006. He defended Lebanon’s eastern border against the takfiris in Syria from 2013 to 2017, masterminding the decisive victory at al-Otaiba. He remained steadfast in supporting Gaza during the war of the al-Aqsa Flood and attained martyrdom as he had always sought: while planning an operation against the occupied Galilee, on the road to Jerusalem. He was Ibrahim Aqil, a lifer of the resistance, and this is his story.

Early Years and Formation of a Commander

Aqil was born in Bednayel in the Beqaa Valley, eastern Lebanon, near the Syrian border. Along with Wafiq Safa and presumably Fuad Shukr, he joined the Mughniyeh-Badreddine cell of Shia militants, which began claiming attacks under the name “Islamic Jihad Organization” in November 1982. This cell merged with Abbas Musawi’s and Hassan Nasrallah’s Islamic Amal in 1985 to form Hezbollah and its military wing, the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon.

During the 1980s, as a senior member of the Hezbollah-affiliated Islamic Jihad Organization, Aqil participated in operations that included the 1983 US embassy bombing in Beirut, which killed 63 people—among them eight high-ranking CIA officers, including Middle East station chief Robert Ames. The group was also responsible for the attacks on the multinational force barracks, which killed 305 American and French soldiers. In that decade, Aqil was also tasked with capturing American and German nationals in Lebanon. Islamic Jihad intended to use them as leverage to secure the release of 17 mujahideen imprisoned in Kuwait since 1983, including Mustafa Badreddine. Following the liberation of those prisoners and Badreddine’s return to Lebanon in the 1990s, Aqil assumed leadership of Hezbollah’s Rapid Intervention Unit, which later became the Radwan Special Force.

Master of the Ambush: The Ansariya Operation

On 4 September 1997, the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon, under the overall command of Mustafa Badreddine and the operational command of Ibrahim Aqil, Khalil Harb, and Ahmad Wehbe, executed a flawless ambush on an elite Israeli naval commando unit. The operation killed 12 soldiers, captured all their corpses—most dismembered by IEDs—and resulted in no Hezbollah casualties. The bodies were returned to Israel in May 1998 in exchange for 65 Lebanese prisoners and the remains of 43 Hezbollah fighters, including Hadi Nasrallah, the 18-year-old martyred son of Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later described the ambush as one of the saddest days in Israeli history.

Surviving Assassination and Wartime Command

On 4 February 2000, during the South Lebanon conflict, Israeli AH-64 Apache helicopters fired AGM-114 Hellfire missiles at Aqil’s car in the village of Barish, where he was serving as Hezbollah’s commander of the southern sector. The first missile struck the rear of the vehicle, throwing him clear. He escaped and hid behind a building just before a second missile destroyed the car. A third missile was fired at his position but hit the wall instead. Aqil sustained only light injuries and evaded capture. Five civilians, including an infant, were wounded in the attack.

During the 2006 Lebanon War, Aqil coordinated intelligence between Hezbollah and the Syrian Army, overseeing the transfer of weapons from Syria into Lebanon. He expertly deceived enemy surveillance, moving arms through secure border points unlikely to be bombed. In September 2006, while serving as head of Hezbollah’s security and intelligence services, the French service-affiliated outlet Intelligence Online reported that Aqil—along with Hassan Nasrallah and Mustafa Badreddine—had visited North Korea for training during the 1980s and early 1990s. Such claims, though unproven, are consistent with reports of North Korean engineers assisting Hezbollah with fortifications in southern Lebanon from 2000 to 2006.

The Syrian Battlefield: Turning the Tide at al-Otaiba

By 2013, takfiri elements backed by Turkey and Gulf states had seized control of the Syrian side of the Lebanon-Syria border and began kidnapping Lebanese civilians and deploying car bombs against Beirut’s Shia communities. Initially, Hezbollah’s Shura Council believed the Syrian Army could manage the threat alone. But by May 2013, as the situation deteriorated, Sayyid Nasrallah declared in a public speech that the fall of Syria to “America, Israel, and the takfiris” would plunge the entire region into darkness. Hezbollah then intervened directly, winning a critical victory at Qusayr—though the takfiris soon regrouped and renewed their offensive.

The ambush that turned the tide of the war in favor of the Syrian government occurred on 26 February 2014 in al-Otaiba, Eastern Ghouta. Ibrahim Aqil, leveraging his intimate knowledge of southwestern Syria as a Beqaa native, masterminded the operation alongside Mustafa Badreddine and special forces commander Haj Ala al-Bosna.

Aqil was reported to have “planned, overseen and led” a key segment of the siege against Jaysh al-Islam takfiris in Eastern Ghouta. He also played a critical role in capturing the strategic town of Shebaa, near Damascus International Airport, and led operations to besiege and isolate Syrian rebel groups south of Damascus after pushing them away from the Sayyida Zeinab shrine.

As the mastermind of the al-Otaiba ambush, Aqil orchestrated the operation that killed 175 rebel fighters—a mix of Jaysh al-Islam and Jabhat al-Nusra elements. Haj Ala al-Bosna detonated the landmines, as seen in a video released by Hezbollah’s al-Manar TV. The network reported that the takfiri fighters were attempting to break out of Eastern Ghouta to reinforce battles in Daraa or the Qalamoun Mountains. Jaysh al-Islam claimed the dead were civilians fleeing a siege, but images later surfaced on social media confirming they were militants. Aqil’s tactics were also instrumental in halting the Syrian rebels’ advance toward the Syrian coast.

International Designation and Later Command

On 21 July 2015, the U.S. Department of the Treasury designated Aqil as a senior figure closely tied to Hezbollah’s leadership, alongside Mustafa Badreddine, Fuad Shukr, and Abd al-Nur Shalaan. He was identified as playing a key role in Hezbollah’s military campaign in Syria, assisting both its fighters and Syrian government forces. Aqil was also the subject of multiple Interpol Red Notices, which documented his involvement in capturing and detaining two German citizens in the late 1980s—an effort to pressure Germany into releasing Mohammad Ali Hamadi, a perpetrator of the TWA Flight 847 hijacking imprisoned in 1987—as well as the 1985–86 Paris attacks, carried out to secure the release of militants Anis al-Naqqash and George Ibrahim Abdallah.

In May 2016, following Mustafa Badreddine’s assassination, Aqil was shortlisted as one of two candidates to succeed him as Hezbollah’s de facto defense minister, though Fuad Shukr was ultimately identified in the role.

On 10 September 2019, the U.S. Department of State designated him as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist. On 18 April 2023, the Rewards for Justice program offered a reward of up to $7 million for information leading to him.

Prior to his death, Aqil served as head of Hezbollah’s operations and commanded the Radwan Force during the al-Aqsa Flood war. He also led Hezbollah’s tunnel project in Lebanon. He was reportedly injured during the 2024 Lebanon pager explosions and released from the hospital on the day of his assassination. In the event of an Israeli invasion, Aqil’s unit had plans to launch a counter-operation into the occupied Galilee, akin to Hamas’s al-Aqsa Flood, while also defending southern Lebanon.

The Targeted Assassination and Martyrdom

On 20 September 2024, Israeli F-35 fighter jets fired four missiles at a residential building in Beirut’s Dahiya suburb, targeting Aqil two stories underground during a meeting. The strike killed at least 45 people, including senior Radwan Force commander Ahmad Mahmoud Wehbe—Aqil’s deputy since the 1997 Ansariya ambush—14 other Hezbollah Mujahids, three children, and seven women. Another 68 were injured, and two buildings collapsed. The precision timing of the strike, during an operational meeting, made clear that a significant intelligence breach had occurred within Hezbollah.

Hours later, Hezbollah confirmed Aqil’s martyrdom, describing him in a statement as “a great jihadist leader” who had “joined the procession of his brothers, the great martyred leaders, after a blessed life full of jihad.”

Legacy and Succession

U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan stated that the assassination served justice, saying: “any time a terrorist who has murdered Americans is brought to justice, we believe that that is a good outcome”—a reminder that the bloodthirsty Great Satan remains as vendetta-driven as its Little Satan proxy (Israel) in the region.

Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Ansarallah each sent condolences to Hezbollah, honoring Aqil as “a great jihadi leader ascending on the road to Jerusalem,” echoing the movement’s own words.

Haytham Ali Tabatabai, formerly commander of Hezbollah’s special forces in Yemen assisting Ansarallah, reportedly succeeded Haj Ibrahim Aqil as Commander-in-Chief of the Radwan Special Force. May Allah preserve him in his role.

• This article is written by Abu Dhar al-Bosni (lokiloptr154668 on X) and does not necessarily reflect the views of A.E.P. (the owner of the website), nor does it necessarily represent an agreement with these perspectives.

A previously unreported diplomatic initiative in 2014, spearheaded by the late Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, reveals a bold and ultimately unfulfilled strategy to create a Sunni-Shia alliance against their common adversary, Saudi Arabia. This attempt, which unfolded on Turkish soil, underscores the complex and often pragmatic nature of regional alliances that can transcend the sectarian divide.

The Secret Summit in Turkey

According to a leaked Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) cable published by The Intercept, in 2014, Hajj Rahim Noei-Aqdam (also identified in the cable as Abu Hussain), an Azeri deputy to Qasem Soleimani, led a delegation of senior Quds Force officials to Turkey. The original plan was for Soleimani himself to attend, but the Turkish government, despite its good relations with both Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood, reportedly refused to grant him a visa due to his high profile. The meeting was therefore held in his stead.

The Muslim Brotherhood was represented by three of its most prominent Egyptian leaders in exile: Ibrahim Munir Mustafa, Mahmoud El-Abiary, and Youssef Moustafa Nada. The latter had previously been sanctioned by the U.S. and U.N. under allegations of financing Al-Qaeda, though these restrictions were lifted in 2009 for lack of evidence. (In a subsequent interview with The Intercept, Nada denied ever attending such a meeting).

A Pragmatic Proposal: Uniting Against the “Common Enemy”

The MOIS cable details a conversation grounded in pragmatic realism. Both sides acknowledged their “indisputable” ideological differences, with Iran representing the Shia world and the Brotherhood the Sunni world. However, they emphasized the need to “focus on joint grounds for cooperation.” The most powerful of these was a shared animosity towards Saudi Arabia, which they identified as the “common enemy” of both Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood.

The delegation from the Brotherhood then presented a concrete proposal for collaboration: Yemen. With the Houthi insurgency against the Saudi-backed government escalating, they saw a strategic opportunity. The Brotherhood argued that “in Yemen, with the influence of Iran on Houthis and the influence of the Brotherhood on the armed tribal Sunni factions, there should be a joint effort to decrease the conflict between Houthis and Sunni tribes to be able to use their strength against Saudi Arabia.”

Confirmation and Contradiction

The story was later corroborated from an unexpected source. Fars News Agency, a media arm of the IRGC, published an intelligence report citing senior Muslim Brotherhood leader Ibrahim Al-Mounir—one of the figures named in the original leak—as confirming that the 2014 meeting did indeed take place. However, Al-Mounir sought to downplay its significance, stating that there was no discussion of a formal alliance against Saudi Arabia and that the Brotherhood did not request Iranian support against the Egyptian government.

Strategic Context and Eventual Outcome

This initiative must be understood in its proper context. The anti-Saudi elements of the Muslim Brotherhood engaging with Iran were largely represented by exiled figures from the ousted Morsi administration in Egypt. These were effectively Quds Force-backed rogue elements operating outside the Brotherhood’s mainstream international consensus. The Brotherhood’s official Yemeni affiliate, the Islah Party, has remained consistently pro-Saudi and continues to be a key part of the Saudi-led coalition opposing the Houthis.

While the 2014 attempt to broker a direct Houthi-Brotherhood tribal alliance failed, the strategic objective of neutralizing Sunni tribal opposition in Yemen endured. Over the following years, the Ansar Allah-led revolutionary government successfully pursued this goal independently, convincing numerous Sunni tribes—some with historical ties to the Muslim Brotherhood—to either defect from the Saudi coalition or remain neutral, thereby refusing to fight against Ansar Allah. This grassroots success in building a domestic Yemeni consensus ultimately proved more impactful than the top-down alliance that Soleimani had once envisioned.

• This article is written by Abu Dhar al-Bosni (lokiloptr154668 on X) and does not necessarily reflect the views of A.E.P. (the owner of the website), nor does it necessarily represent an agreement with these perspectives.

The Doctrine of Strategic Accelerationism

A doctrine of strategic accelerationism—premised on two core assumptions: overwhelming superiority in firepower and the unconditional, permissive support of the United States—has characterized Israeli strategy following the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023. This approach involves a continuous push beyond established norms of escalation, systematically testing the strategic patience of its adversaries. The calculation is that Israel will face no meaningful consequences from its less-equipped regional foes nor any restraining pressure from its American ally.

The 2023-2025 Escalation Ladder

This pattern of escalation began with the assassination of IRGC General Sayyid Razi Mousavi in Damascus (December 2023) and progressed through a series of high-profile targeted killings: Hamas deputy leader Saleh al-Arouri in Beirut (January 2024), Quds Force commander Mohammad Reza Zahedi on Iranian diplomatic grounds in Damascus (April 2024), Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran (July 2024), and Hezbollah Secretary-General Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut (September 2024). It culminated in large-scale aerial campaigns against Iran (June 2025) and Qatar (September 2025).

The underlying logic is straightforward: regional resistance actors lack the conventional military capacity to escalate in kind, a disparity exacerbated by the inconsistent military support from powers like Russia and China when compared to the steadfast American sponsorship of Israel. Furthermore, from this perspective, the U.S. is unlikely to impose restraints, viewing the conflict through a lens that frames the destruction of resistant, independent political forces in the Middle East as a preferable outcome to the current regional order. This creates a punishing dilemma for resistance forces: retaliate and face devastating bombardment, or exercise restraint and still face continued military pressure.

A Historical Blueprint: The 1982 Lebanon War

This strategy, however, is not without historical precedent. It finds a clear blueprint in the Israeli government’s meticulously planned escalation that led to the 1982 Lebanon War, a conflict often described as Israel’s “Vietnam.” As documented by Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman in Rise and Kill First based on extensive interviews with former Mossad director Meir Dagan, the Likud government of Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon began implementing a strategy of tension as early as 1977.

Following Egypt’s departure from the conflict sphere after the Camp David Accords, Israel shifted its focus to the northern border with Lebanon. The 1969 Cairo Agreement had legitimized the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) presence in Lebanon, creating a persistent security concern for Israeli leadership. The stated goal became to create conditions that would justify a full-scale invasion to expel the PLO, even if the organization maintained calm. The strategy was to provoke the PLO into a response that could be used as a casus belli.

The Provocation and Response Cycle

This provocation began with the assassination of senior PLO leader Kamal Adwan in Beirut by an Israeli commando unit—a team that included Ehud Barak, who was famously disguised as a woman. This action was designed to force the PLO into a strategic dilemma: choose a rapid, violent revenge operation that would provide Israel with its desired pretext for invasion, or adopt strategic patience, which risked appearing weak to its constituent base and the wider Palestinian public.

The PLO chose the former. Military chief Abu Jihad masterminded the retaliatory “Kamal Adwan Operation,” in which a team led by Dalal Mughrabi infiltrated Israel by sea and hijacked a bus on the Coastal Road, resulting in the deaths of 38 Israeli civilians on March 11, 1978. Israel responded with Operation Litani, a limited invasion of southern Lebanon. However, under American pressure to de-escalate, Israeli forces withdrew to a slim border buffer zone. This outcome frustrated the maximalist objectives of Begin and Sharon, necessitating a new, more covert strategy.

A Strategy of Covert Proxies and False Flags

In 1979, Ariel Sharon authorized Meir Dagan to establish a covert proxy force within Lebanon, the “Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners” (FLLF). This Mossad-controlled entity, described by Bergman as a “proto-ISIS,” conducted bombings against PLO officials and even targeted public spaces like markets, killing ordinary Palestinians. This campaign served two purposes: it provided Israel with plausible deniability for its attacks, and it aimed to goad the PLO into a retaliatory strike—either against Israel or against the Lebanese Phalange, a Christian militia allied with Israel—that would finally justify a full-scale invasion.

Recognizing the trap, PLO leaders Yasser Arafat and Abu Jihad imposed strict discipline on their factions, refusing to retaliate for three years. During this period of imposed calm, Israel continued its campaign of targeted assassinations, killing Abu Hassan Salameh, a key PLO liaison with the U.S., in 1979. This move mirrored contemporary strikes on figures like Ismail Haniyeh, aiming to sever channels for diplomatic negotiation and make a military solution appear inevitable.

The pretext for invasion finally arrived in 1982 from an unexpected source: Abu Nidal, a Palestinian splinter leader operating as an agent for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Abu Nidal’s attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador in London (who was wounded) provided the trigger. While the Begin-Sharon government knew the mainstream PLO was not responsible, they publicly blamed Arafat and launched a massive bombing campaign against PLO targets in Lebanon. This time, the PLO retaliated with rocket fire into northern Israel, giving Begin and Sharon the domestic political justification needed to launch a full-scale invasion in June 1982, which culminated in the siege of Beirut.

Parallels in the Modern Conflict

A textbook repetition of this strategy appears to be unfolding in the 2023-2025 conflict, albeit on a larger, regional scale. Each significant Israeli escalation—particularly strikes on Iranian soil or the assassination of Hezbollah leadership—presents Iran and its allies with the same double-bind: retaliate forcefully and risk a catastrophic regional war against a U.S.-backed Israel, or absorb the attack and risk appearing weak, thereby inviting further strikes. Iran’s responses have oscillated between these poles: its rapid but measured drone and missile barrage in April 2024 (”True Promise 1”) demonstrated a capacity for direct retaliation, while its subsequent hesitation to launch larger-scale strikes (”True Promise 2 & 3”) reflected a calculus of strategic patience. This hesitation, whether born of diplomatic engagement with the U.S. or a strategic decision by Supreme Leader Khamenei to cast Israel as the unambiguous aggressor to galvanize domestic unity, ultimately served to consolidate national morale once the wider war began in June 2025.

The lesson from both cases—Lebanon 1977-82 and the ongoing regional conflict—is that in the absence of either military parity or consistent, reliable sponsorship from a superpower to counterbalance American support for Israel, resistance leaderships are forced to navigate an extraordinarily narrow path. The “long game” school of thought, exemplified by Arafat, Nasrallah, and Khamenei, posits that time is on the resistance’s side, and that avoiding existential confrontations while gradually building capacity is the surest path to eroding Israeli dominance. In contrast, the “accelerationist” school, embodied by figures like Yahya Sinwar and Abdulmalik al-Houthi, argues that only a dramatic and violent show of force can alter the regional calculus, forcing external powers to take the resistance axis seriously as an immutable geopolitical reality and ultimately demonstrating that Israel, for all its power, cannot survive in a region engulfed in flames. This fundamental strategic tension continues to define the response to Israeli escalationism.

• This article is written by Abu Dhar al-Bosni (lokiloptr154668 on X) and does not necessarily reflect the views of A.E.P. (the owner of the website), nor does it necessarily represent an agreement with these perspectives.