Quds Force using militants in Iraq – Part 1

1. History of using militant forces in al-Anbar Province

- Dispatching militants to the al-Anbar front dates back to mid-January 2014. After Maliki’s classic army and police forces suffered a large number of casualties and lost their spirits for urban warfare in their initial attacks against cities and towns in al-Anbar, the Quds Force began to take action and ordered its associated militias, including Asaeb al-Haq and Katayeb Hezbollah, along with Badr forces, to rush to the support of Maliki’s army and police units in al-Anbar.

Quds Force Presence in Iraq – Part Three

In late March 2014 Qassem Suleimani was directly supervising and advancing Quds Force measures in Iraq in the Anbar warfront. Later on he sent his deputy, Ismaeel Gha’ani Akbar-nezhad, to Iraq and Anbar to coordinate the latest war conditions in Fallujah and evaluate with Iraq commanders why the war had not progressed. He was also charged to analyze how the fighting could be stretched into the city of Fallujah and provide a victory for Maliki in his crackdown against the people of Anbar Province. To this end the Quds Force sought to pursue the same methods used in Syria to form, as it claimed, the Iraqi Revolutionary Guards with the ranks and files of its militia forces. Tehran also sought to stabilize its hegemonic role over Maliki’s forces and all of Iraq as a result.

“Burned Lands”: Quds Force plan to takeover Fallujah

Following the US forces’ opposition regarding the participation of Shiite militias in operations aimed at liberating Iraq’s restive Anbar Province and emphasizing on the participation of Sunni tribes in these attacks, the Iranian regime saw all its plots facing serious threats. One of Tehran’s red lines is the participation of Sunni tribes because these forces are viewed as a rival against the Shiite militias it is fully backing, whereas the US plan of training and arming Anbar tribes also crosses Iran’s red line.

Presence of Quds Force in Iraq – Part Two

Following this trend and to actively use Shiite militants, the last method agreed upon between the Quds Force and the command HQ of Maliki’s forces in the Anbar war was providing specific orders to Shiite militants to focus the attacks conducted by these groups in the Anbar frontier.