Exactly two months ago, on November 7, one of the Shiite militias in Iraq sent a suicide bomber to the home of Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Khazmi. The UAV exploded, injuring several security guards, but al-Khazmi himself survived.
Immediately after the incident, a delegation of senior Iranian officials, led by Revolutionary Guards Quds Force Commander Ismail Kaani, landed in Baghdad.
They sought to calm the spirits, but also to conduct an investigation.
The militia that launched the UAV operates under their auspices and is funded by them, but in this case it operated independently, without explicit instruction and even contrary to Iran's clear policy.
The West initially thought Iran was naive.
In one hand, she ordered the launch of the UAV, and in the other she withdrew from the operation. Later, it became clear that Iran was at least as surprised as the Iraqi prime minister. Behind the operation, senior Israeli officials confirmed the information this week.
Until two years ago, such independent action by the militias in Iraq was impossible.
They surrendered in spite of the power of Quds, or rather: in spite of Qassem Suleimani, the man in charge of exporting the Ayatollah revolution to the world.
Suleimani's assassination has significantly altered the balance of power within Iran, and it still radiates to the entire region.
In the specific case of the militias in Iraq, the matter is more significant.
Together with Suleimani, Abu Mahdi al-Mohandes, the deputy commander of al-Hashad al-Shabi, was assassinated - an umbrella organization that unites dozens of Iranian militias, most of them Shiites, backed by Iran.
Al-Mohandas was Suleimani's secret agent and executor in Iraq.
In its absence, the ability of Quds Force to impose discipline on organizations has weakened.
In his death, Suleimani was the most important security figure in Iran.
His rank did not attest to his seniority: officially he was only a champion - similar to other generals in the Revolutionary Guards, and younger than their commander - but in practice, he was far superior to them.
For the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, he was like a son.
"They spoke with their eyes, with a wink," says Brigadier General (Res.) Dror Shalom, former head of the research division at the Israel Defense Forces.
"Nasrallah barely knew"
Suleimani was one of the prominent members of the revolution.
There were quite a few myths of heroism around him.
He tells, for example, how he crossed the line of fire in the Iran-Iraq war, and survived.
Suleimani encouraged these myths, especially in his later years when he emerged from the shadows.
He started taking pictures and being interviewed, and became a celeb.
It may also have made him less cautious in his actions - a matter that cost him his life.
Qassem Suleimani, Photo: IP
Experts believe that if he had not been eliminated, he would have entered politics and become a key figure in it as well.
"Khamenei believed in and trusted Suleimani," said Meir Jabdenfar, an Iranian expert and senior researcher at the Lauder School of Government at Reichman University.
"Unlike Ahmadinejad, who betrayed the supreme leader after being elected president, Suleimani has always remained loyal to him."
Suleimani had an absolute credit line from Khamenei.
"He often performed actions, and reported to him only in retrospect," Shalom says.
"Everyone understood that he was acting on behalf of the leader and speaking on his behalf. He knew how to take Khamenei's strategy, and turn it into an operation. Just like Muhsin Fahrizadeh in the nuclear field. They were two extraordinary key figures, and not just both do not live today."
At the beginning of Suleimani's tenure, in the late 1990s, Quds Force was a relatively small, very secluded unit that dealt mainly with terrorist attacks around the world.
The first significant operation he conducted was in Afghanistan, and subsequently in Iraq and Lebanon, and after the outbreak of the Arab Spring - also in Syria.
In each of these countries he had arms, acting on his behalf: in Lebanon Imad Mourniyeh, and in Syria General Muhammad Suleiman.
Mourniyeh, Hezbollah's revered commander, was assassinated in February 2008 in Damascus, in an operation attributed to the Mossad and the Americans;
Suleiman was killed six months later by a sniper at his home in the Syrian coastal city of Tartus, in an operation that was also attributed to Israel.
The elimination of the two obliges Suleimani to strengthen his ties with the leaders - Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon.
For Assad he has become a kind of mentor;
He later also saved his life and rule, casting all the power of the Revolutionary Guards - and their envoys, Hezbollah - against the opposition forces in Syria, until he defeated them (with Russian assistance, and relying on the US-led coalition forces against ISIS).
"In 2016, we estimated that Suleimani would identify an opportunity to turn Syria into a platform for resistance to Israel. Brigadier General (Res.) Dror Shalom, Photo: Yehoshua Yosef
His relationship with Nasrallah was more complicated, but no less close.
"Nasrallah was wary of him because he remembered the Israeli experience from 2006. He did not always like Suleimani's activism, for fear of complicating Lebanon, but did not stop him," said a senior security official.
As part of this, Suleimani led the effort to equip Hezbollah with accurate rockets and missiles that could hit with an accuracy of less than 10 meters at any point in Israel.
This is a project that is written exclusively in his name: "Nasrallah barely knew about it, and was not really interested," says the senior official.
"The person who initiated and pushed the matter was Suleimani."
This is one of the two main efforts of the Quds Force in recent years, which has become the main target of airstrikes attributed to the Air Force in Syria. The second effort led by Suleimani was to establish himself in Syria. " "We believe he will recognize an opportunity to turn Syria into a platform for Muqawama - resistance - against Israel.
We recognized this vision even before Suleimani formulated it, and prepared for it.
When he came with him, we were already deep in MBM and we could have thwarted it. "
The rise of Khajizadeh
The idea that Suleimani formulated was simple.
Since he did not want to complicate Hezbollah and Lebanon in the war, but still wanted to attack Israel on a regular basis, he planned to establish permanent bases in Syria - air, land and sea - to place tens of thousands of Shiite fighters who would be trained, funded and equipped by him. In Israel.
This plan was thwarted solely as a result of Israeli determination.
Hundreds of operations were carried out, most of them kinetic, to thwart the establishment operations - from attacking military complexes in their construction stages, through the destruction of convoys of weapons and supplies, to various conscious operations.
Despite this, Suleimani continued to push his vision;
Several times he tried to respond with attacks on Israel (including launching armed UAVs and rockets, mainly to the Golan), without success. A combination of low tactical capability of pro-Iranian forces in Syria and Israeli intelligence and operational superiority can thwart all attacks.
"Suleimani wanted to surround us with a crescent of terror," the senior official says.
"In some of his plans he failed, but his general idea did not collapse. The opposite is true."
This is especially true of a process that began late in Suleimani's life, and has accelerated greatly since then: flooding the region with precise capabilities - mostly of unarmed armored aircraft of various kinds - that allow Iran to attack its enemies through its envoys to ward off evidence and danger.
Such capabilities, for ranges of up to 2,000 kilometers, have already been transferred to the Houthis in Yemen and some of the militias in Iraq, and it is to be assumed that some or similar ones are also found in Syria and Lebanon.
Iran, of course, also holds them on its land: they used it, among other things, to attack the facilities of the Saudi oil giant Aramco, which suffered a deadly attack in September 2019 that caused it tremendous damage.
Iran then denied any connection to the attack, but solid intelligence information revealed that the missiles were launched from Iran itself.
The person in charge of the attack at the time was Amir Ali Khajizada, commander of the Air Force and Space of the Revolutionary Guards.
Khajizadeh is one of the biggest beneficiaries of Suleimani's assassination: his status has strengthened dramatically since Suleimani's assassination two years ago, and he is biting into areas that were until then the exclusive domain of the Quds Force.
Hussein Salami, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards, has also gained significant power since Suleimani - who was senior to him - came out of the picture.
"Suleimani would not have allowed this to happen," the senior says.
"He would not let anyone bite into the powers of the Quds Force. He zealously made sure that everything that happened outside of Iran's borders would be under his responsibility and under his command. That is no longer the case, and not sure it is good for us. These new players have tools and means, and a lot of motivation. "They can give us quite a few headaches."
Suleimani's successor, Kaani, is significantly different from him.
"He lacks charisma, gray, a kind of office clerk," says Shalom.
"At first there were many in the Shiite axis who doubted his ability to fulfill the role, and even today he finds it difficult to deliver the goods."
Evidence of this is the recent dismissal of the commander of the Syrian corps by Quds Force, Joad Rafari, after the grandiose plans he had forged collapsed (thanks in part to Israeli activity).
"Kaani is not Suleimani, but it is a mistake to compare him to what Suleimani has been in the last ten years of his life," said Raz Zimt, an Iranian expert at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University.
"It should be compared to what Quds Force used to be: a small, secretive force. We tend to attribute too much of the difficulties Quds Force has to eliminate, but the truth is that this is not the only factor; the wars in Syria and Iraq have ended "The Iranians revolve around the activities of the Quds Force, which complicates them."
Substitute, Kaani, Photo: IPI
And yet, Kaani has quite a few difficulties stemming from the big shoes he has had to get into the content.
"Suleimani was not only a prominent military strategist, but also a supreme politician," Zimt explains.
"Kaani's influence in the region is less significant than that of his predecessor, on Hezbollah and Nasrallah, for example. But here, too, expectations should not be developed: Nasrallah still sees Khamenei and Iran as the source of his religious authority, and this is unlikely to change. It is more influential, because they were more based on personal loyalty to Suleimani, who formulated and led them. "
Even without the Joker
Under Suleimani, the Quds Force underwent two significant transformations.
The first, in size;
From a small and secret unit, to a huge organization that operates in a variety of countries.
At its peak, it is alleged, the Quds Force paid salaries to some 150,000 fighters acting on its behalf, in a variety of countries.
Only the United States during this period paid salaries to more fighters who operated outside its borders.
The second transformation was in effect.
Suleimani made Quds power the most dominant factor in the Revolutionary Guards, and even beyond them.
His exceptional military ability - both in strategic vision and ability to get down to tactical details - combined with his rare charisma and his immense influence within the Iranian establishment as a result of his closeness to the leader, drew tremendous power from the mechanism he led.
"There are not many people who have been able to lead such a change. To take a relatively small organization, and make it a super-operator of systems in several countries at the same time," says the senior official.
"Suleimani did it in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, and at the same time constantly pushed for the strengthening of Hezbollah."
Kaani continues the vision of his predecessor.
The big systems may be over, but Iran continues to mature.
Anyone who thought that it would withdraw (because of the Israeli attacks, because of the American sanctions, because of certain restrictions imposed by Russia) - has long since lied.
And this is exactly the Israeli argument: the activity in Syria is part of a much broader, strategic campaign, designed to reduce its regional influence and the intensification of Iran.
"Iran is a deep strategic challenge, far beyond the nucleus," Shalom says.
"The confrontation with it is similar to that of the West against the USSR during the Cold War."
Shalom believes that removing Suleimani from the picture was critical because he was the kind of rare leader that is hard to find a replacement for.
He attributes Iran's relatively weak response to its elimination to the fact that it was the United States that carried out the operation: if Israel had killed it, the Iranian response would have been much more significant.
But that American deterrence has eroded over the past two years.
This is mainly due to the fact that Donald Trump is no longer sitting in the White House, and Joe Biden who replaced him is leading a conciliatory policy - some would say lax - by far.
The result is noticeable on the pitch;
From Iranian audacity in the nuclear talks in Vienna, to the attack on American bases in Iraq.
Israel, too, may pay a price for this erosion in American deterrence.
In the past year, Iran has waged a naval campaign against civilian vessels that it identified as Israeli, as a counterweight to the attacks attributed to the navy on oil ships and weapons operating on Iran's missions. The air force - led by the two attacks on the port of Latakia, which is attributed to Israel - is not expected to pass without an Iranian response. "The glass is almost full," said one senior official.
Suleimani, if he were alive, would surely have pushed for a tough response, but it can be estimated that this is exactly what his successor, Kaani, will do as well.
With or without Suleimani, Iran continues to mature - on all fronts, and with all its might.
The Joker may be missing, but the revolutionary fervor and imperialist ambitions ensure that the front against Iran and its emissaries will continue to fervor in the future as well.
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