09 May 2008
The Jerusalem Force
Life is funny, isn’t it?
If it is not one thing, it is another. I checked the e-mail before going to bed and found a string of notes that completely reorganized my day today. I imagine we will stumble through, since we always do, but it called to mind the fragility of human networks.
We have our health, after all, and since that is really all there is, ought to be content. It is not that way in Myanmar today and so many other places. Israel celebrates sixty years of national life this morning, while there is death in the Irrawaddy River delta. At least the latter is natural in origin. Mother Nature can be so cruel and capricious. The misery that has followed is contemptible, since it is deliberate.
Deliberate cruelty is the human beast at its worst. We had had demonstrations aplenty in this new century, though most if it is firmly rooted in the last.
I have had to confront some old adversaries who specialize in cruelty lately. I may have a chance to contribute vicariously to confound their plotting. If so, it is important to go back to Sun Tsu, and understand them, since that quality is one that is traditionally lacking in our North American approach to the world.
I remember the day of their birth: the Revolutionary Guard, or Pasdaran, were established on May 5,1979 by edict from the Ayatollah Khomeini. The Islamic Iranian Republic had a new Constitution, which entrusted the legacy military with guarding Iran's territorial integrity and political independence. That was an entirely problematic proposition to the new rulers, though, since the officer corps had been appointed by the Shah.
The Pasdaran was intended to assist the ruling clerics in the day-to-day enforcement of the government's Islamic codes and morality.
The Revolution was in a quandary. The military needed to be purged, and yet it had to rely on the severing officer corps (notably pilots) and technical maintenance experts (Homofars) who populated the Imperial Army, Navy and Air Force. Accordingly, the Pasdaran became a parallel and politically reliable force that eventually came to mirror and replace the functions of the armed forces.
Saddam’s war accelerated everything. The Iraqis made initial gains after the invasion in 1980, and then trench war stabilized the front, and with immense sacrifice, began to slowly push back the invaders. That required a levee of manpower. By 1986, the Pasdaran consisted of 350,000 personnel organized in battalion-size units capable of operating independently, or attached to regular army formations. It also acquired small naval and air elements, which grew exponentially, even after the war ended in 1988.
The Baseej (volunteers) who provided the numbers required to defeat the Ba’athists also came under the control of the Revolutionary Guards, numbering almost a million men by the time the war ended. At the end of hostilities with Iraq, the Baseej transitioned to a role as social and religious police. They were tasked with monitoring the activities of citizens, and providing on-the-spot correction of dress code and other instances of “indecent conduct.”
The Ashura Brigade was reportedly created in 1993 after anti-government rioting occurred across Iran, and some Pasdaran units reportedly refused orders to suppress them. In a move believed to indicate a shift in the trust of the ruling clerics from the Pasdaran to the Baseej volunteer force, on 17 April 1995 Ayatollah Ali Khameini promoted a veteran surgeon named Hassan Firuzabadi to command both.
Khameini gave him the rank of full general, placing him above the commanders of the Pasdaran (BG Mohsen Rezai) and the regular military (BG Ali Shahbazi).
By 1996 the ground and naval forces were reported to number 100,000 and 20,000, respectively, and today, the Pasdaran patrols the strategic Strait of Hormuz with swarming speedboats.
Replacing the regular armed forces was just part of the Pasdaran mission. From In the very beginning of the revolutionary government, the Pasdaran assumed the same internal security function of the Shah’s SAVAK, and was instrumental in crushing the leaders of the communist Tudeh movement.
The intelligence arm of the Pasdaran is believed to have formed the cadre of what has come to be known as the al Quds (Jerusalem) Force.
The Jerusalem Force is a secretive, highly effective core of Iranian paramilitary operators entrusted with the most sensitive of operations. Brigadier General Qassim Suleimani is their current leader, and he is very close to the conservative mullahs that make up Iran's governing council.
The primary mission of the Quds Force is to organize, train, equip, and finance foreign Islamic revolutionary movements. It has a sort of Title 10 function, analogous to the US Military, in maintaining and building contacts with underground Islamic militant organizations throughout the Islamic world. It also has an analogous function to the Special Operations Command, in taking direct paramilitary action where required to carry out the Revolutionary mission.
The Quds Force reports directly to the Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Any doubt about the influence of the Force should be resolved by the pivotal role of General Suleimani in arranging a ceasefire between the Iraqi Army and Mahdi Army in Iraq in March of this year.
The foreign operations by Pasdaran includes intimate liaison with Hizballah and Islamic Jihad, and there are al Quds operatives on the ground in Beirut this morning as Shia fighters occupy the city.
The Jerusalem Force requires a civilian cover. The is provided by the Committee on Foreign Intelligence Abroad and the Committee on Implementation of Actions Abroad, analogous to the Directorates of Intelligence and Operations at CIA. Al Quds influence is particularly important in US strategic presence-areas in Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE.
Al Quds operatives serve in front companies and non-governmental organizations in all three areas, as employees or officials of commercial trading companies, banks, cultural centers or as representatives of the Foundation of the Oppressed and Dispossessed (Bonyade-e-Mostafazan), or the what they like to call the Martyrs Foundation.
The largest branch of Pasdaran foreign operations consists of approximately 12,000 Arabic speaking Iranians, Afghans, Iraqis, Lebanese shi’ites and North Africans who trained in Iran or received training in Afghanistan during the Afghan war years. Presently these foreign operatives receive training in Iran, Sudan and Lebanon, and include the Hizballah intelligence, logistics and operational units in Lebanon.
Pasdaran has also supported the establishment of Hizballah branches in Lebanon, Iraqi Kurdistan, Jordan and Palestine, and the Islamic Jihad in many other Moslem countries including Egypt, Turkey, Chechnya and in Caucasia. Hizballah has been implicated in the counterfeiting of U.S. dollars and European currencies, both to finance its operations and to disrupt Western economies by impairing international trade and tourism.
Tehran's objective is to destabilize Arab Gulf states by supporting terrorist operations. In a moment of conciliatory mood sparked by the US build-up in the Gulf, Iran detained al-Qaida operatives in 2003, but refused to identify senior members in custody.
Al Quds is professional, and their tradecraft is good.
The five Iranian “diplomats” detained by US forces in Irbil in January of 2007 were al Quds operatives. That detention sparked one of the boldest attacks against US forces in the entire war.
Later in January, the Karbala Provincial Joint Coordination Center was attacked. It was an elegant operation and well bankrolled. The assault team passed through Iraqi checkpoints in a convoy of five black GMC Suburban SUVs, similar to those driven by US security and diplomatic officials. The team was wearing American military uniforms, carrying US weapons and spoke fluent English.
Four American soldiers were kidnapped and subsequently executed when police pursed them on a bee-line for the Iranian border.
The Jerusalem Force was going to use them as bargaining chips for their guys who were bagged at Irbil.
They are at it again this morning in the streets of Beirut. They are going to keep at it, since they are persistent and they are good at what they do.
Makes you wonder what they might be capable of, should the world allow them to wind up in possession of an atomic device, you know?
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com