This article titled “Qassem Suleimani: the Iranian general ‘secretly running’ Iraq” was written by Martin Chulov in Baghdad, for The Guardian on Thursday 28th July 2011 22.58 UTC

There’s a story that the new CIA director, David Petraeus, likes to tell which harks back to his days as a four-star general in Iraq.

Early in 2008, during a series of battles between the US and Iraqi army on one side and the Shia militias on the other, Petraeus was handed a phone with a text message from the Iranian general who had by then become his nemesis.

The message came from the head of Iran’s elite al-Quds Force, Qassem Suleimani, and was conveyed by a senior Iraqi leader. It read: “General Petraeus, you should know that I, Qassem Suleimani, control the policy for Iran with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, and Afghanistan. And indeed, the ambassador in Baghdad is a Quds Force member. The individual who’s going to replace him is a Quds Force member.”

Petraeus hardly needed to be told. Much of the US military’s work with Iraq’s Shia Muslims had been undermined by Suleimani and the client militias of the Iranian general’s al-Quds force. So too had US government diplomatic efforts elsewhere in the Middle East, especially in Lebanon.

Petraeus last year told a thinktank, the Institute for the Study of War, about the problem Suleimani created for him: “Now, that makes diplomacy difficult if you think that you’re going to do the traditional means of diplomacy by dealing with another country’s ministry of foreign affairs because in this case, it is not the ministry. It is a security apparatus.”

As he prepared for the job of the US’s most senior spy, Petraeus would surely have been preparing for further shadow boxing. Suleimani’s reputation as the most formidable operator in the region has not diminished in the past three years. By some measures it has actually increased: Syria now also comes within Suleimani’s sphere of influence.

The strength of the ties between Suleimani and Iraqi legislators has been revealed during weeks of interviews with key officials, including those who admire him and those who fear the man like no other.

Iraq’s former state security minister, Sharwan al-Waeli is one who knows Suleimani well. A formal conversation between the Guardian and al-Waeli last year took on a very different tone as soon as Suleimani’s name was mentioned.

The Shia legislator was a known ally of Iran, so much so that he was seen by secularists and Sunnis in parliament as someone prepared to do Iran’s bidding. He denied Iran played a pervasive role in Iraq until he was interrupted with a question that Iraqi officials have long prefered to ignore: when was the last time Qassem Suleimani came to the Green Zone, the fortified government district in the heart of Baghdad?

Al-Waeli’s left hand trembled slightly and his brow furrowed. “You mean Sayed Qassem Suleimani,” he said, giving Suleimani an Arabic honorific reserved for the most esteemed of men. He refused to elaborate.

In Baghdad, no other name invokes the same sort of reaction among the nation’s power base – discomfort, uncertainty and fear.

“He is the most powerful man in Iraq without question,” Iraq’s former national security minister, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, said recently. “Nothing gets done without him.”

Until now, however, few Iraqis have dared to talk openly about the enigmatic Iranian general, what role he plays in Iraq and how he shapes key agendas like no one else.

“They are too busy dealing with the aftermath,” said a senior US official. “He dictates terms then makes things happen and the Iraqis are left managing a situation that they had no input into.”

Suleimani’s journey to supremacy in Iraq is rooted in the Islamic revolution of 1979, which ousted the Shah and recast Iran as a fundamentalist Shia Islamic state. He rose steadily through the ranks of the Iranian military until 2002 when, months before the US invasion of Iraq, he was appointed to command the most elite unit of the Iranian military – the al-Quds force of the Revolutionary Guards Corp.

The al-Quds force has no equal in Iran. Its stated primary task is to protect the revolution. However, its mandate has also been interpreted as exporting the revolution’s goals to other parts of the Islamic world.

Shia communities throughout the region have proved fertile grounds for revolutionary messages and have formed deep and abiding partnerships with the al-Quds force. So too have several Sunni groups opposed to Israel – first among them Hamas in Gaza.

But Iraq has been Suleimani’s key arena. The last eight years have witnessed a proxy war between Suleimani’s Quds force and the US military, the full effects of which are still being played out, as the US prepares for a full departure from Iraq and Iraq’s leaders ponder over whether to ask them to stay.

Arabian heartland

At stake is no less than who gets to shape the destiny of the heartland of Arabia. “His power comes straight from (the country’s lead cleric Ayatollah) Khamenei,” said one of Iraq’s three deputy prime ministers, Saleh al-Mutlaq, a secular Sunni. “It bypasses everyone else, including Ahmadinejad.

“There is a saying in Islam that you should never get angry with your father or mother. The [Shia] interpret that as meaning what (Khamanei, via Suleimani) says has to be respected by every [Shia] inside, or outside Iran.

“All of the important people in Iraq go to see him,” said Mutlaq. “People are mesmerised by him – they see him like an angel.”

A second MP – a senior member of Prime Minister Nour al-Maliki’s inner circle who regularly meets Suleimani in Iran – said the general has only travelled once to Iraq in the past eight years. He described him as “softly spoken and reasonable, very polite”. “He is simple when you talk to him. You would not know how powerful he is without knowing his background. His power is absolute and no one can challenge this.”

Silver-haired, slight and with a perennial serene smile, Suleimani comes across as the most unlikely of warlords. Those who met him during the one time he traveled to Baghdad at the height of the 2006 sectarian conflict say he walked around the compounds of his two key hosts without bodyguards. The Americans did not know he had been in the capital until he was back in Iran and were deeply unhappy to learn that their arch enemy had been among them.

“He is indeed like Keyser Söze,” said a senior US official this week – in reference to the legendary villain in the The Usual Suspects, whose ruthlessness and influence terrified everyone. “Nobody knew who he was and this guy’s the same. He is everywhere, but nowhere.”

The senior Shia MP added: “He has managed to form links with every single Shia group, on every level. Last year, in the meeting in Damascus that formed the current Iraqi government, he was present at the meeting along with leaders from Syria, Turkey, Iran and Hezbollah. “He forced them all to change their mind and anoint Maliki as leader for a second term.”

Over the five years that Maliki has been in power in Iraq, all his key advisers have been granted court in Iran by Suleimani. Iraq’s president, a Kurd – Jalal Talabani, has also regularly met the general, sometimes along the border separating both countries.

The Syrian uprising has added a new dimension. The al-Quds Force has been involved in suppressing the Syrian uprising, according to multiple sources inside and outside the country.

The US has slapped personal sanctions on Suleimani and two other generals in the Iranian security forces who it accuses of helping orchestrate the crackdown that is believed to have killed more than 1,600 civilians.”

Tehran has heavily invested in the survival of embattled Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, whose ruling Allawite clan has links to Shia Islam. Assad’s fall would be a serious strategic setback for Iran and Suleimani. It is perhaps the only part of the region where the general’s preferred mix of strategic diplomacy with aggressive operations is being strongly tested.

In the meantime, the work of the al-Quds force continues in Iraq. All but two of the US troops killed in June – the highest number in more than two years, were killed by client militias directly under Suleimani’s control, the Keta’ib Hezbollah and the Promised Day Brigades.

“It is clear that the al-Quds force is responsible,” said the director general of the intelligence division in Iraq’s interior ministry, Hussein Kamal. “There has been a systematic flow of weapons into Iraq for the past eight years. Of course they try to say it is not state-sponsored. But when weapons are flowing from the borders of a sovereign state, it is very clear where the blame lies.

“They are destructive weapons and they cannot deny the responsibility for them.”

Another Shia MP said he had personally asked Suleimani why his al-Quds force continued to smuggle weapons, many of which are fired into the Green Zone, where he and most of Maliki’s inner circle live. “He just smiled and said it is nothing to do with me,” the MP said. “He said he had no idea where the weapons were coming from.”

Suleimani has been variously described by those who dislike him – Iraq’s Sunnis, and those who have spent years trying to get his measure – as a “talented extortionist” and a highly skilled wheeler-dealer.

US officials who have spent years trying to disrupt the work of his loyalists say they would like to meet him, while at the same time being puzzled as to his objectives.

“I would simply ask him what he wants from us,” said a senior US military official. In addition to the soldiers killed this year, the US ambassador in Baghdad, James Jeffrey, said last summer that Iranian proxies accounted for roughly a quarter of US combat casualties in Iraq – around 1,100 deaths and many thousands more injuries.

Despite this, the US has landed few public blows on Suleimani’s close circle.

In March 2007, the British SAS captured a senior Hezbollah official, Ali Moussa Daqduq, who had allegedly planned an operation that killed seven soldiers in Karbala. The same year, US troops also captured two men in the Kurdish north who they believed were al-Quds leaders. Apart from that, the trophy cabinet remains bare – at least publicly. More troubling than the apparent dearth of tactical victories is how the rest of the year will play out.

The US – and some key neighbouring Sunni states – believe Iran’s strategy in Iraq as the conflict winds down is to keep the country in a permanent but manageable state of chaos.

“They keep it on simmer and turn it up and down when they want to,” said one Lebanese official in Beirut.

The senior US military spokesman in Iraq, Major General Jeffrey Buchanan agreed. “Their overall strategy has been to keep [Iraq] isolated from the rest of its neighbours and from the US, because that makes it likely that it will depend on Iran. They want Iraq to play a subordinate, weak role.”

Only Iraq’s lawmakers can stop the master-client relationship from becoming entrenched here. It’s a task that Kurdish legislator in the national parliament, Mahmoud Othman, fears may prove to be beyond his colleagues.

“Qassem Suleimani is the key man to every decision taken in Iraq,” he said.

“It is a shame to have such a man playing such a role in this country. There should be a relationship between equals like normal relations with normal states.”

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This article titled “Hezbollah-backed candidate poised to become Lebanon PM” was written by Martin Chulov, for The Guardian on Monday 24th January 2011 21.20 UTC

The prospect of a Hezbollah-led government in Lebanon now appears certain after a Syrian-backed businessman emerged from a crucial political summit with the numbers needed to lead the turbulent state.

A narrow majority of 65 of the Lebanese parliament’s 128 members indicated their support for telecommunications tycoon Najib Miqati, which means that the ousting of Saad Hariri as prime minister of the US-allied government will soon be formalised.

The high-stakes talks were convened after the Hezbollah-led opposition walked out of a tenuous coalition government two weeks ago, forcing a political crisis with the potential to rupture already brittle sectarian fault-lines.

The support for Miqati means Hariri cannot secure the majority needed to hang on to the narrow mandate he won 18 months ago.

Today Hariri said he and his bloc would not take part in a Hezbollah-led government. Hariri was appointed caretaker prime minister just under two weeks ago, shortly after 11 Hezbollah-aligned ministers abandoned his government, causing it to fall.

Street demonstrations are tonightnight being staged in Sunni areas of Beirut, as well as Tripoli in north Lebanon and Sidon in the south. Tyres were burnt and roads and highways blocked in scenes that have stirred the ghosts of numerous past conflicts and spark fears of a return to sectarian chaos. Protests spread quickly after nightfall, but there were no reports of deaths, or injuries. Security forces seemed reluctant to intervene.

A member of parliament from Hariri’s bloc, Khaled Dahar said: “We announce our rejection of the candidate backed by the ‘party of arms’ [referring to Hezbollah]. What was plotted was a coup by a group that didn’t respect the voters’ freedom by relying on its weapons to threaten all Lebanese.

“We call on those who reject the Persian scheme in this defiant Arab country to stage a sit-in tomorrow … in Tripoli,” Dahar said, according to the Naharnet website.

Violence had been widely predicted in Lebanon for the past five months as criminal indictments were prepared for delivery to an international tribunal investigating the assassination of former prime minister, Rafiq Hariri.

The indictments are widely tipped to implicate members of Hezbollah, which has vowed to discredit them. If asked to form a government by Lebanon’s president, Michel Suleiman, Miqati will come under intense pressure to carry out Hezbollah’s demands that Lebanon withdraw all co-operation with the Hague-based Special Tribunal for Lebanon.

Miqati last week travelled to Damascus to meet Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, who has been widely consulted by Lebanese MPs on events in their homeland. Druze leader Walid Jumblatt is another to have sought a hearing with the Syrian president. Six members of Jumblatt’s 11-seat bloc on the Lebanese parliament confirmed today that they would align with Miqati.

The ousting of Hariri is a sharp blow to US interests in the Middle East. His government was toppled at the same time as he met Barack Obama in the White House, prompting the US to threaten to withdraw aid money from Lebanon.

Diplomats from Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia last week embarked on intense, but apparently unsuccessful rounds of shuttle diplomacy, trying to find a way out of an ever-escalating crisis that could sharply destabilise an already fragile region.

Israel has reacted with alarm at the latest developments, claiming a Hezbollah takeover will consolidate Iranian influence on its northern border.

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This article titled “Lebanon reels as Hezbollah topples government” was written by Martin Chulov, for The Guardian on Wednesday 12th January 2011 21.15 UTC

Arab states, the US and Israel reacted with alarm to the collapse tonightof Lebanon’s western-backed government, which threatens to plunge the fragile country into further chaos and stoke simmering sectarian tensions.

The 18-month-old government fell after the Hezbollah-led opposition pulled its ministers from prime minister Saad Hariri’s administration. Hezbollah and its allies pulled out in reaction to Hariri’s refusal to convene the cabinet to discuss how to deal with the naming of suspects in the killing of his father.

However, it had been agitating for at least three months for a new administration, which would help it confront the imminent issuing of indictments by a UN-backed tribunal that are expected to implicate at least three members of Hezbollah in the 2005 bombing on the Beirut waterfront.

The announcement was timed to coincide with the start of a meeting at the White House between Hariri and the US president, Barack Obama. It also followed the apparent breakdown of an initiative by Saudi Arabia and Syria to strike a compromise between Hariri’s bloc and the Hezbollah-led opposition, which formed a tenuous unity government amid heightened sectarian tensions three years ago.

All 10 opposition ministers resigned, along with Adnan Sayyed Hussein, a minister aligned to Lebanon’s president. His resignation was crucial because it meant more than one-third of the cabinet had quit – a move that meets a constitutional threshold to cause the fall of the government.

The energy minister, Jebran Bassil, fronted an evening press conference of all 10 opposition MPs at which he said Hariri must choose between “Beirut or Washington, or Beirut and any other capital”.

Hariri tonightcut short his US visit and was planning to meet the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, on his way home to Lebanon, where he will attempt to manage the crisis. He is expected to be named as caretaker prime minister while a new cabinet is formed.

The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said the Hezbollah move was an attempt to “subvert justice” that would not work. The US fears that the opposition will attempt to gain control over any new cabinet and use it to cut Lebanon’s share of funding for the tribunal and to delegitimise its findings.

Both sides had traded regular barbs over loyalty, with Hariri’s bloc claiming that the opposition takes its instructions from Iran and Syria.

The foreign secretary, William Hague, called on all sides to resolve the impasse, saying: “Justice needs to be done and there must be an end to impunity for political assassinations in Lebanon.”

Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, had been threatening to disrupt the government ever since he claimed to have received advice from the UN-backed special tribunal for Lebanon that several of his members were likely to be indicted for the assassination.

Nasrallah has described the indictments as a plot to discredit himself and Hezbollah. The release of the indictments was due in December, according to numerous Lebanese officials, but was thought to have been delayed as part of regional efforts to broker a face-saving deal.

Any compromise that meant Hariri’s alleged killers would not face trial was vehemently opposed by Washington. It is understood that the US stance was instrumental in the breakdown of the so-called Saudi-Syrian initiative, which had been seen by Hezbollah as the most likely way to defuse tensions.

Hezbollah ministers had resigned from the last Lebanese government, led by Fouad Siniora, which was paralysed for 18 months after Hezbollah fought Israel during a devastating war in the summer of 2006.

Throughout the standoff that followed, Hezbollah and its backers had demanded a bigger say in the affairs of state. Decision-making was crippled throughout 2007 and tensions finally spilled over into street battles, which saw Hezbollah overrun the streets of west Beirut and clash with Druze forces in the mountains. Three days of battles left more than 80 people dead. In the aftermath, a Qatar-brokered deal saw a government formed. However, Hariri conceded to the opposition a veto over most decisions and had since struggled to establish his authority.

Hezbollah’s opponents, who also include Sunni Arab states, have long viewed the militant group as acting largely in the interests of its two regional backers, Iran and Syria, both of which are often at odds with the Sunni Muslim world, especially Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Hezbollah has for the past three months sustained a heated campaign against the UN tribunal, which it says was tricked by conspirators acting on behalf of the US and Israel. Investigators had earlier alleged Syria was behind the killing of Hariri, a claim from which it has not publicly resiled despite the forthcoming indictments.

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Iranian thug dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took a trip to Beirut this week and gave a speech to Hezbollah. He purposely gave his speech in Southern Lebanon which is only 2.5 miles from the Israeli border.

He told the cheering crowd of radical Muslims that “The Zionists will not last long.”

“The whole world should know that the Zionist will eventually disappear and Bint Jbeil will remain alive… The occupier Zionists have no choice but to return to their original homelands.”

That’s Obama’s cue to tell him the door for negotiation remains open.

Take a look at this fascinating documentary. A journalist embedded with the IDF as they went house to house in Lebanon hunting down Hezbollah terrorists. This is from a few years ago when Israel attacked Lebanon to stop Hezbollah from firing rockets into Israel.

An explosion targeted a U.S. Embassy vehicle Tuesday in northern Beirut, killing at least three Lebanese and injuring an American bystander and a local embassy employee.

The blast, which damaged the armored SUV and several other vehicles, took place just ahead of a farewell reception for the American ambassador at a hotel in central Beirut.

No Americans were in the car, which was carrying two Lebanese employees of the embassy.

The bombing, which came as President Bush and Rice toured the Mideast, was the first attack on U.S. diplomatic interests in Lebanon since the 1980s, when the country saw some of the deadliest terror attacks against Americans in U.S. history.