Irregular warfare—a deliberately asymmetric approach to the enemy to surprise and destabilize—is not just a tactic in Iranian military doctrine; it is also an established operational model of the “Islamic Revolution.” The day after taking power, the regime set up a “headquarters for irregular warfare,” which it used against its enemy then, Iraq. From the start, the aim was to have a force on the fringes of a conventional force, offering a wide range of interventions: combat, intelligence, special operations, and soft power, among others.
The IRGC was born out of the desire to protect the gains of the Islamic Revolution against internal and external enemies and to export the ideology of the regime, whatever the means and modus operandi. Mostly confined, in terms of external operations, to southern Lebanon and a few operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the years following its establishment after the 1979 revolution that overthrew the Shah of Iran, it became, during the Syrian civil war, a textbook case illustrating Iran’s expansionist strategy.
To understand the IRGC is to understand the deeper realities of the regime. Before being killed in a U.S. strike, the then Quds Force commander Major General Qassem Soleimani declared in 2018: “The IRGC has a structure, statutes, rules and regulations, but in reality [it is] an intellectual system” in which every action is sacred. The aim of Soleimani was summarized as: “to create opportunities out of dark crises.” This phrase exemplified the modus operandi of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps operating in the Syrian theater. It used the Syrian crisis to create opportunities for itself.
Tehran’s axes of intervention in Syria are: 1) To protect the Shi`a minorities in Syria; 2) to create a corridor to the shores of the Mediterranean by eliminating the American presence; and 3) to create the conditions for an encirclement maneuver of the Israeli state if necessary, pre-positioning men and military equipment on the outskirts of the Golan Heights without opening fire on Israeli positions. There is no time limit on any of the objectives. It is not a question of conquering an area and then withdrawing as soon as peace is signed. The Quds Force wants to establish Pax Irania in Syria and in all the countries of the “Axis of Resistance.” The aim is to create a transnational peace that transcends flags and borders, a space of shared theological values and strategic cohesion where Tehran, as the epicenter of the edifice, is the guarantor of everyone’s security.
