American newspaper, the “Wall Street Journal” (WSJ), released an exposé on Monday revealing details surrounding Esmail Qaani, the Iranian military officer who took over leadership of Iran’s Quds Force, a critical branch of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), after the January 2020 assassination of Commander Qassem Soleimani in a US airstrike.
Qaani, whom the WSJ dubbed “The Shadowy Backroom Dealer,” is now in charge of increasing Iran’s presence in the Middle East while avoiding a disastrous reprisal from the US, following the path of his predecessor Soleimani, who spent two decades building a network of regional militias, and boosting Iran’s military reach across the Arab world.
Soleimani “had an almost cultlike following as the Middle East’s perhaps most recognizable military commander,” according to the WSJ.
Since taking command of the Quds Force, Qaani has quietly sought to integrate diverse militias under Iranian supervision, resulting in what the US government describes as “the most disruptive situation in the Middle East in decades.”
The WSJ underlined the new commander’s efforts to prevent the militias’ attacks on Israel and US sites from escalating into a larger conflict. Since Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, the paper asserted, Qaani has spent several weeks instructing militias to “ensure that their attacks are not so intense as to ultimately ignite a wider regional war.”
Born in the late 1950s, Qaani has spent most of his working life supervising Iran’s interests in Afghanistan. Despite speaking little Arabic, he joined the Revolutionary Army Guard in 1980. However, barely anything is known about his personal history, according to the WSJ.
The report revealed that Qaani had been Soleimani’s friend since the 1980s, and that after the latter’s death, the US targeted leadership structures in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories. However, added the source, this has not lessened their Iran’s ability to destabilize the region, as seen by greater freedom of movement, disruptions to Red Sea shipping, attacks on Israel, and a growing threat to US forces.
As wars in Iraq and Syria wind down, however, according to the WSJ Iranian militia networks are growing increasingly woven into the political fabric of these countries, becoming self-sufficient and relieving Tehran’s economic burdens.
Arash Azizi, a historian at Clemson University in South Carolina and the author of Soleimani’s biography, opined that Qaani lacked charisma while dealing with the militias, making it more difficult to keep them under control and aligned with the wider axis, reported the WSJ.
A senior Iranian government advisor revealed that after the Jordan-Syria-Iraq Tower 22 border attack, Iranian officials traveled to Iraq to inform their allies that the attack had overstepped the bounds of what Iran could stomach by killing U.S. soldiers, raising concerns about the militias’ receptiveness to these developments.