Iran and the U.S., Part Three: Soleimani's Iran
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The relationship between the U.S. and Iran is on a lot of people's minds right now. And we've been bringing you episodes from our archives on how that relationship has developed over time. We started in the 1950s with the CIA-backed overthrow of the Iranian prime minister.

Next, we looked at the Iranian Revolution and 1979 U.S. hostage crisis, the expansion of conflict into Lebanon, and the start of uranium enrichment programs and cyber warfare. Today, we're looking back at the Iran-Iraq War, 9-11, and the killing of Iranian Revolutionary Guard General Qasem Soleimani.

I believe it is a Boeing 757. Can you see him up there, sir? That's concerned. It looks like he's rocking his wings. He's rocking back and forth.

I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon. In the tragedy of that moment, for those of us who paid attention to Iran, there was this glimmer of hope that

Both the United States and Iran are adversaries of the Taliban in Afghanistan, which was hosting al-Qaeda. So it seemed like there was this natural convergence of interests. And by all accounts, Iran played a quite constructive role in cooperating with the U.S. in the campaign to get rid of the Taliban in Afghanistan. This is Kareem Sajatpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment and adjunct professor at Georgetown.

Until 2001, Iran was boxed in. It was isolated and surrounded by enemies. On the east side, the enemy was the Taliban regime. On the western side, Baghdad and Saddam Hussein's regime. The terrorist attacks of September 11th of 2001 changed that situation completely. Because the U.S. would soon go after both of Iran's enemies.

The Revolutionary Guard welcomed that development. The Revolutionary Guard is a military arm of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It's also called the IRGC. And there were secret meetings in Geneva

This is Ali Al-Fonay. He's a senior fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute.

He's been researching the Revolutionary Guard for years, and he wrote the book on the topic called... Do you believe it or not? I don't remember it right now. I don't know. Iran Unveiled? Yes, yes, Iran Unveiled. I never liked the title of the book. That's why I don't remember. There was this hope in the air that maybe there's finally an opportunity for U.S.-Iran rapprochement. Many Iranians were hopeful about that.

But the good vibes, you know, between the two changed completely when President Bush delivered his so-called Axis of Evil speech. In which he put Iran, North Korea, and Iraq lumped them in as part of one Axis of Evil. States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an Axis of Evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. That...

only confirmed the already very cynical worldview of Iran's hardliners that cooperation with the United States is futile. The Iranian side and the Revolutionary Guard, they felt betrayed. They felt they had played...

constructive role in helping to get rid of the Taliban. In their own opinion, they had helped the United States. And they were rewarded by being placed in the axis of evil.

At that time, the Revolutionary Guard and the political leadership in the Islamic Republic decided that President Bush could not be trusted and the United States was a very, very serious threat. They also believed that it was about time to impose some losses on the United States.

That became reality after 2003, where the United States also invaded Iraq. Let me say this to all Iraqis who are listening. The regime is not telling the truth. There are no negotiations taking place with anyone in the Saddam Hussein's regime. There will be no outcome to this war that leaves Saddam Hussein and his regime in power. Let there be no doubt. Many of the greatest advocates of the Iraq War...

believed that this would be a project to democratize the entire Middle East. And that's going to immediately delegitimize the Iranian regime. It's going to delegitimize the theocracy in Iran. And so if you're Qasem Soleimani and Ayatollah Khamenei, you think to yourself, we will do everything in our power to make sure that the U.S. war in Iraq is a colossal failure.

The Revolutionary Guard and Qasem Soleimani embody both sides of the Islamic Republic of Iran's identity. On the one hand, they position themselves as the only power in the Muslim world resisting American imperialism.

And on the other, they behave cynically and try to dominate the affairs of the Middle East at any human cost. In this episode, we're going to explore the origins of the IRGC and the story of Qasem Soleimani to understand exactly what their impact has been on the Iran-U.S. relationship. Hi, this is Mayim from Iran and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR.

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Part 1. The Goat Thief. This is the sound of Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, leading prayers at the funeral of Qasem Soleimani. After a few minutes, he breaks down and cries. Your servants and your servants.

This moment perfectly illustrates the impact of Soleimani's death. Here you have the most powerful person in the country, the Middle East's longest-running autocrat, weeping openly because one of his soldiers has died.

But he wasn't just any soldier. He was the head of Iran's al-Quds Force, which is the intelligence arm of the Revolutionary Guard, established after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, when Iran's king, the Shah, was dramatically overthrown by a mass movement supporting the cleric, Ayatollah Khomeini. Hello.

Ayatollah, do you know yourself whether your followers are armed? They have told me that they are getting prepared and I have given the permission to prepare themselves.

Which means getting arms. The Revolutionary Guards were essentially set up in the immediate aftermath of the revolution because the Shah's military, which Ayatollah Khomeini inherited with the revolution, he was inherently mistrustful of them because he said, these are not my men.

These were men who were trained by the Shah's government. And so, like most authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, they were extremely paranoid about the prospect of a coup. And for that reason, they set up this initially ragtag group of men, they called the Guardians of the Revolution, to be the protectors of the revolution.

And even if you look at the name of the institution, the exact and word-by-word translation is the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution. In other words, the name Iran, you know, is not even mentioned in the name of the organization. And in the logo of the organization, there is, you know, a picture of the globe, not a map of Iran. So clearly, this group of Iranian revolutionaries...

perceive their own organizations as the vanguard of an internationalist revolution. This is Qasem Soleimani speaking.

When he died, he was one of the most powerful and well-known people in the Middle East. But his story starts the exact opposite way it ended, in complete obscurity. He was born the son of landless peasants who left school after only five years of schooling, left the village mountain of Rabor, goes to Kerman, and begins working as a construction worker.

There is no record of Mr. Soleimani being a revolutionary activist prior to the Revolution of '79. After the Revolution of '79, he appears to have joined the local branch of the Revolutionary God Corps in Kerman. At that time, we are not aware of his ideological beliefs, but there is one thing that we know in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution, and it is that many of them more or less lost their belief in the clerical class.

They believed in Khomeini, yes, as a spiritual leader and as a leader of the revolution. But most of the other members of the clerical class, they completely distrusted. And the reason for that is that Revolutionary Guard officers, they were taken out and recruited to serve as personal bodyguards to the clerics.

As personal bodyguards, they had to live physically under the same roof as members of the clergy. And when you live with people, you find out that not everyone wearing a cloak and a turban is a saint. You find out that someone who from the pulpit of the mosque is preaching against drinking alcohol perhaps enjoys a drink at home. Somebody who is reigning against homosexuality may be interested in handsome young men at home.

So the sanctity of the clerical class completely came down crashing. So instead of being overtly anti-clerical, the IRGC officer corps, including Mr. Soleimani, they developed an ideology which mixed Shia Islam and Persian nationalism, Iranian nationalism.

So in that sense, they managed to combine the two. And this combination was so unbelievably potent that it managed to mobilize millions of Iranians. When Qasem Soleimani joined the Revolutionary Guards, he was very young, only in his early 20s. But he still managed to impress his commanders enough to get an important task, one that probably had an impact on him for the rest of his life.

One of his earliest assignments was to go quell a Kurdish rebellion in northwest Iran. Because at the time there was an anti-government uprising in Kurdistan. And if you see the photographs of that rebellion, they are incredibly violent. Approximately 10,000 Kurds died during that period and I think that that was his baptism into that kind of career.

He saw terrible things with his own eyes, and perhaps he also engaged in acts which are difficult to defend morally. But at the time, it was perceived as necessity in order to preserve the territorial integrity of Iran. Immediately after that came the heroic phase of the Revolutionary Guards' history in Iran, and that is the war with Iraq. The war with Iraq.

In 1980, Saddam Hussein invaded southwestern Iran, and the Revolutionary Guard forces were some of the first to respond. In the frontline cities, Iranian troops hurried to engage the invaders. Local resistance was led by Iran's Revolutionary Guards, who were fiercely loyal to Ayatollah Khomeini. What was initially this small ragtag group of men mushroomed into thousands of men.

They relied heavily on rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, and in sporadic engagements, exacted a heavy toll of the invading forces. From their example stemmed the Iranian mood of self-sacrifice in a holy war. Iraq, you know, in the beginning of the war, was occupying some of Iran's most important oil-producing areas. If Iran lost land to Iraq, the entire country would collapse.

Even though the Iranian side was outgunned, they were able to push Iraq's military back to its borders in two years. "The people who are sitting in front of God's house, the people who are standing in front of God's enemies,

To those who are sitting in the house of God, standing up against the enemies of God, I will kiss your hands and shoulders because the hands of God are above you. Qasem Soleimani became a Revolutionary Guard commander and began to build his reputation as a brave warrior. This is the commander.

Who would be talking personally to all men that are under his command before each attack? And we are talking about the war, which most of all resembles World War I. It was trench warfare. You had at least 250,000 Iranians being killed in that war. He wasn't this commander who would sit in a bunker in Tehran and order people around. He liked to go out there and

in war zones and appeared to be a man of the people. And here you have one commander, a young man from Kerman, doing reconnaissance missions behind enemy lines to minimize the risk for men under his command. And I'm really emphasizing this because most of the people from Kerman, they were in the same division, and many of them were actually personal friends and sometimes family members of Mr. Soleimani.

On one occasion, Radio Baghdad, which was transmitting programs in Persian language, made Mr. Soleimani a minor celebrity of the war. Because on one particular occasion when Mr. Soleimani was doing a reconnaissance mission, this young peasant sees a goat. And he steals the goat, brings the goat back and prepares kebab for his men.

I really believe that our war was a reward from the Beheshti who were not afraid of their eyes. It was a war.

With all my soul and belief, I believe our war was full of those blessed souls who the heavens were ecstatic to meet. Soleimani the Ghotif went on to fight for the entirety of the Iran-Iraq War with almost no leave, repeatedly committing acts of bravery. By 1988, when the war ended, he was widely considered to be a war hero. He had this charisma

which really engendered enormous loyalty and affection. And even after the war ended, he didn't, like many revolutionary guardsmen, then just enter the private sector and try to go off and get rich. His entire life was the revolution and projecting Iranian power.

At the end of the war, Soleimani was sent back to his home province, Kerman, where he became the chief of the local Revolutionary Guard force. Kerman province is close to the Afghan and Pakistani border. And at the time in the 1990s, many Afghan and Iranian drug cartels were operating in those areas, transporting particularly opium from Afghanistan to Iran and from Iran to the international market.

Mr. Soleimani became heavily involved in the fight against the drug cartels later when Iran and Afghanistan, you know, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, were almost on the brink of a war. The Quds Force was looking for a new face, for a new commander. And because Afghanistan was the primary threat to Iran's national security, the regime needed an Afghanistan expert. And Mr. Soleimani was one of those people.

So that was the reason why he became the chief commander of the Quds Force. Qasem Soleimani, in the course of two decades, had gone from a completely unknown construction worker to the head of Iran's most important intelligence military organization. But this was only the first half of his rise, because just three years into his tenure as the head of al-Quds Force, 9-11 happened.

He found himself right in the middle of the action, helping shape Iran's response to an incredibly difficult foreign policy challenge. And in the process, he showed a more cynical, deadly face to the world. Hello, my name is Iliana. I'm calling from Houston, Texas. And you're listening to ThruLine, the NPR. From Tin and Rond, I love y'all. You make sitting in Houston traffic way more enjoyable. Thanks.

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After Iran fell out with the U.S. in Afghanistan, they caught a break. A strange opportunity presented itself. When the Taliban government collapsed, many members of al-Qaeda fled Afghanistan and crossed the border into Iran. They were quickly arrested and interrogated by Iranian intelligence.

And at that time there was a debate within Iran about whether these Sunni jihadists were a threat to Shiite Iran or whether they were an asset. You know, there were bin Laden family members, there was a guy who later went on to become the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Zarqawi.

And I think Qasem Soleimani was unique. That was kind of his sinister genius in thinking, you know what, we can potentially use these folks. And Soleimani assigned two Revolutionary Guard commanders to essentially tend to their needs. They were given televisions, they were given money to build a library, their families were taken out on shopping outings.

one of the most notorious al-Qaeda explosives experts, a guy who's still alive, he's still on the run, Saif al-Adel. He had access to this very posh gym in north Tehran in a neighborhood called El-Ahiyah, where he used to swim laps alongside foreign diplomats. And, you know, the children of Osama bin Laden affectionately called Qasem Soleimani Haji Qasem. They used to break bread together.

My friend Siamak was tortured in prison. He was in solitary confinement. And it really angers me to think that hardened jihadis, you know, al-Qaeda members, were treated as guests in Iran. And real patriots who love their country are treated like criminals and put into solitary confinement and exiled.

And I think that history is not going to reflect well on Qasem Soleimani when his biographies are written in the future. Now that Soleimani had these al-Qaeda fighters on his side, he had to figure out exactly how to use them. The way they figure out to do that initially is by taking these al-Qaeda jihadists and simply unleash them into Iraq.

with the understanding that you guys go do what you do. Go after the United States car bombings, suicide bombings. And just a few months into the war, August of 2003, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian al-Qaeda leader, he sets off these three major bombs, which essentially destroys the American experiment in Iraq in its infancy.

One bomb hit the Jordanian embassy. Another hit the United Nations, which reduced their peacekeeping presence there. And lastly, Zarqawi conducted this car bombing against the major Shiite shrine, Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf. This was unheard of at the time, that someone would go set off a car bombing at a mosque during Friday prayers. This totally...

radicalized the Shiite community in Iraq and it essentially pushed them into the arms of Iran and Qasem Soleimani who said to the Shiites of Iraq, we can protect you. You know, there's some

Slight parallels here with the way the United States fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, because the United States also supported these mujahideen, you know, essentially the jihadists of their day, to go fight the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, obviously not realizing that those folks would be the antecedents of al-Qaeda.

Different conflict, same strategy. And you never understand until years later what is going to be the residual impact of these choices. Soleimani didn't just use Sunni extremists to cause chaos in Iraq. He also used Iran's money and influence to organize militias among his fellow Shiites in southern Iraq.

It managed to use the Iraqi Shia militias who should be thankful to the United States military because the U.S. had overthrown Saddam's regime, but the Islamic Republic managed to mobilize them against the United States. It served the interests of the Islamic Republic to maintain Iraq in a state of controlled chaos and anarchy so that the United States could not declare itself the winner of developments in Iraq.

How does Ali or anyone else know this? Well, one Iraqi Shia fighter, while being interrogated by American military intelligence, explained exactly how he worked with Iran. He would go to Tehran. He would receive bags of money, approximately $700,000 to up to $1 million, to form a group of fighters in Iraq. Al-Quds Force funded, equipped, and even trained Iraqi Shia militias on how to ambush and attack vulnerable American forces.

One of their most effective tactics was teaching Shia fighters how to use IEDs. Improvised explosive devices. Which proved to be very effective in getting through metal tanks and maiming and killing, injuring U.S. troops.

At the very minimum, 600 American servicemen were killed in those years. U.S. officials hold Soleimani directly responsible for conceiving of that. And that's why you have one, if not two, generations of American military forces whom, if you were to ask them, "Who is your worst adversary in the world, the person you see as the greatest threat to the United States?"

And even when Osama bin Laden was living and Baghdadi was living, they would have still said Qasem Soleimani. Mr. Soleimani believed that by imposing heavy losses on the United States military in Iraq, that it

that it was possible to target the psychology of the American society. Every single time an American is coming home in a body bag, it would have an impact on willingness and support of the American public to preserve a sizable United States military presence in Iraq. And in some ways it worked.

American public support for the war in Iraq waned as the conflict became more costly in lives and money. Slowly, the American presence in Iraq began to shrink. By 2011, the number of American soldiers there was a fraction of what it was just five or six years earlier. Emboldened by their success and fearing the downfall of allies in the Middle East, the Revolutionary Guard, with Gossam Soleimani leading the way, began to make moves beyond Iraq.

Hi, this is Bob Rogers from Merida, Yucatan, Mexico. And you are listening to ThruLine on NPR, where the past is omnipresent.

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Part 3. A String of Pearls.

At least 20 protesters have been killed during marches in several Syrian cities. It's estimated that up to a million people have taken to the streets to challenge President Bashar al-Assad's rule. Protesters demanded the end of the regime, ripping down a statue of the president's father, bracing to see the reaction of heavily armed government security forces. The answer came quickly and violently.

Here they are, members of the elite revolutionary guards on the front lines of Syria's civil war. The Islamic Republic perceives Syria as a bridgehead connecting Western Afghanistan to Iran, to Iraq, to Lebanon. Mr. Rafsanjani, the former president, he referred to this as a string of pearls.

If one of them collapses, it's going to cause very serious trouble for the rest of the system. And the strategic thinking of Mr. Rafsanjani was shared by the leadership of the Revolutionary Guard. And Bashar al-Assad had to be defended at all costs. At all costs. Not because they liked Bashar al-Assad. They criticized him, as a matter of fact. But they believed that collapse of the Bashar regime and emergence of a different type of regime

It would be bad for Iran. So the Islamic Republic began systematically to send first Quds Force officers, then deployed Lebanese Hezbollah, who did so rather unwillingly because Hezbollah's raison d'etre is to protect Arabs against Israel. But here they are going to kill fellow Arabs in Syria. So it was very embarrassing for Hezbollah, but they also felt that they had no choice.

This is an Iranian Al-Quds soldier serving as an advisor to the Syrian military, talking about the opposition to Bashar al-Assad.

He says that it isn't a war between the Syrian people and their government. It's a war between good and evil, between Shias from Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq, against Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. The people of Iran, Hezbollah, the Iraqi Mujahideen and other Afghan Mujahideen,

This man was likely reporting to Qasem Soleimani, who was tasked with coordinating and organizing the defense of Bashar al-Assad's regime. He did this at a time when Assad's military was using chemical weapons against its own citizens and bombing rebellious Syrian towns indiscriminately, killing combatants and civilians alike.

Despite all of this extreme violence, Syrian rebels and citizens were still gaining ground. And things were not looking good for Soleimani's military. After a few years, they were suffering so many losses that the Islamic Republic had to deploy other Shia militia groups in Syria. For example, Shia Afghans from the Fatimian division.

different Iraqi militias who were already busy fighting the civil war in Iraq. Some of them were also sent to fight in the civil war in Syria. And at some point, of course, they were so desperate that Major General Soleimani had to travel to Moscow and ask Vladimir Putin for military support because they needed air support. And after that, things began to go very well for the Revolutionary Guard.

The Revolutionary Guard commanders, they genuinely believed that Syria was a sensational success story. They won against all odds. While Damascus remains a target for armed groups in the region, local residents are without doubt. Bashar al-Assad has won the war. Of course we won the war. No one can argue with that. And as long as our president is in power, everything will be fine in Syria. The war in Syria

not only provided the Revolutionary Guard with an opportunity to achieve military success on the ground, but unfortunately also gave them the opportunity to compromise themselves ethically and morally.

The United Nations has found massive evidence pointing to the Syrian government's involvement in war crimes and crimes against humanity. Syrian activists have accused the forces of President Bashar al-Assad of killing hundreds of people in a nerve gas attack. The accusation goes to the highest levels and implicates the president, Bashar al-Assad.

They are accomplices of Bashar al-Assad's regime, use of chemical weapons against the Syrian population. They're accomplices of the Syrian regime using famine against his own population as a means of controlling them. In 2014, after years of fighting in Syria and Iraq, Qasem Soleimani and the Quds Force all of a sudden had a new problem, ISIS.

And there's a logical question here. If Iran had been able to work with al-Qaeda, then why couldn't they just support ISIS? Well, al-Qaeda was a little different than ISIS. Al-Qaeda was not out gratuitously beheading Shiites the way that ISIS was doing. For the Iranian regime, ISIS was just beyond the pale.

Islamic Republic and the Revolutionary Guard Corps perceived this as a serious threat which could take away all their gains from them. ISIS posed a real threat to Iran's Shiite allies in Iraq. At some point, the Islamic State was threatening Baghdad. At the same time, I would argue that both Iran and the Assad regime in Syria actually utilized these Sunni jihadists. The presence of

such an inhumane enemy, universally condemned as a terrorist organization, it was not such a bad thing from the Iranian side. Because the Islamic Republic, which had hitherto difficulties explaining and legitimizing its military actions in Iraq and Syria, suddenly had a legitimate cause to engage in the fight against terrorism.

On those occasions, just as it did before, you know, in 2001 in Afghanistan, the United States and the Islamic Republic cooperated with each other. The United States Air Force was providing air cover to the Quds Force operatives and Mr. Soleimani personally so that he could cleanse the city of Tikrit of the Sunni radical elements and Islamic State.

At that time, in 2014 and 15, the Quds Force and Mr. Soleimani, both of them were on the list of designated terrorists of the United States government. So you clearly see strange bedfellows at times of war. And this is the moment when Qasem Soleimani became internationally known.

The Revolutionary Guard knew his appeal. His face was put on posters. Camera crews followed him as he visited soldiers in Syria. Music was made about him. And all the way up to his death, he was successfully marketed. As kind of this...

This is footage of Qasem Soleimani speaking to al-Quds Force in Syria.

His Arabic is actually pretty good. And this is a song in Arabic made to honor him.

The late Major General Soleimani was a man with at least two faces. One face, that is the face of a young man who left his little village to go to the front to defend Iran against the invading Iraqi army in 1980.

That very same individual, of course, also had another face. That face is the face of a general who cynically attacked and killed American servicemen in Iraq since 2003, and also, most unfortunately, engaged or was complicit in war crimes in Iraq and also in Syria.

These two faces show the complexity of the individual. I respect the first one, the war hero, but of course I condemn the other face, which is that of a war criminal. And I think I have a somewhat different perspective here than many analysts of Iranian origin because not only did I live in Iran, but I also lived in Beirut and I would travel every couple weeks to Damascus for a year.

When I see the destruction of Syria, these numbers are not just a statistic for me, the 13 million people displaced, 600,000 people killed. I see Qasem Soleimani as being directly complicit in that horrific violence.

This is frankly my problem with a lot of Iranians who comment on this because I feel like they totally lack a self-awareness about, you know, they only view him in this Iranian context and they don't give a shit about the role he played elsewhere in the region. And I tell people, how would you feel as an Iranian to watch millions of Iraqis mourning Saddam Hussein? A lot of people commented about Soleimani was that he was soft-spoken.

He wasn't someone who was like this fire-breathing radical. And I'm always reminded of this Persian saying about the clerics, that if you look at the hands of the mullahs, of the clerics, their hands are always like perfectly manicured, as if they haven't done any manual labor in their life or even known war.

They talk a tough game, but they've never served in conflict. And I always think that's probably one reason why Suleiman was soft-spoken. You know, he didn't need to breathe rhetorical fire because everyone knew he had his elbows deep in blood.

That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdelfattah. I'm Ramtin Arablui. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me. And... Jamie York. Lawrence Wu. Lane Kaplan-Levinson. Lou Olkowski. Nigeri Eaton. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Volkl.

Thanks also to Anya Grunman, Aida Porassad, and Austin Horn. Our music was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric. If you'd like something you heard or you have an idea for an episode, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org. Thanks for listening.

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