Iran’s shadow army

Thanks to an accident of official schedules, last Tuesday, almost at the same time that President Obama was charging the Islamic Republic with plotting to kill the Saudi ambassador in Washington, Iran’s “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei was announcing “the imminent end of America.”

The coincidence was uncanny because Khamenei was unleashing his lava of hate against the American “Great Satan” at the headquarters of the Qods Corps, the very body named by Obama as the architect of the alleged plot. Standing by Khamenei in suitably solemn attitudes was Qods Corps Commander Gen. Qassem Suleimani, flanked by some of his closest associates, all named in connection with the plot.

The Qods Corps, or “The Jerusalem Army,” is an autonomous unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps under the direct supervision of the Khamanei. Created by the late Ayatollah Khomeini in 1984, its stated task is to help “ export the revolution” throughout the world.

The new force’s slogan was “ On Our Way to Jerusalem, via Baghdad!” The idea was that once Jerusalem had been “ liberated” and Israel wiped off the map, the Khomeinist revolution would spread beyond the Middle East with the ultimate aim of destroying the United States as “ the principal manifestation of Satan’s power” in the contemporary world.

Iran’s Khomeinist rulers have always been fascinated by the idea of “exporting revolution.” Initially, this was limited to propaganda and financial support for radical groups friendly to the Islamic Republic.

In 1982, however, Khomeini decided to create a network of foreign radical groups, known under the generic term “Hezbollah” ( Party of Allah) directly controlled by Tehran.

Very quickly, Hezbollah branches were set up in more than a dozen Muslim countries, with sub-branches among Shiite communities across the globe.

Over the years, the Qods Corps absorbed these various organizations, along with the foreign intelligence department of the Revolutionary Guard.

Initially focused on Islamic radical groups alone, the Qods Corps gradually extended its ideological span to cover a range of non-religious groups such as the Japanese Red Army, the Peruvian Shining Path, the Colombian FARC, the Nicaraguan Sandinista, the Armenian Secret Army and the Turkish Kurdistan Workers’ Party, and the People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine, among others.

The Qods Corps is believed to employ around 12,000 people and runs a number of training centres inside and outside Iran.

Abroad, the corps maintains training camps in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and the Sudan. Last August, Qods opened a new center in Syria, led by Brig. Gen. Muhammad-Reza Zahedi, to train Syrian forces in crowd control and the terrorization of President Bashar al-Assad’s opponents.

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