Arab News has this week published a major report on Iranian militias in Lebanon and Syria. Most analyses call these militias “Iranian-linked” or “Iranian-sponsored,” but after a careful look at their activities, this did not prove to be the case.

My research identified not only significant fighting by these militias as part of an Iranian coalition — for example in Syria’s civil war and conflicts around Daesh’s emergence and defeat in Iraq — but also a couple of salient facts. On the battlefield, Iranian militias take orders and direction from Iranian officers, most famously from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, which oversees foreign operations. And most notably under the command of the now late Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

Instead of being merely Iranian allies, these militias are part of a region-spanning Iranian effort to visit violence upon its enemies, to take over the political systems of its neighbors and to punish dissenters and opposition figures who question the emerging Iranian axis.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah — which was founded at Iranian direction from a collection of Shiite parties between the revolution in 1979 and 1984 — exists as a fortress of a political party that dominates parts of the country, paralyzes the political processes of a nation, murders its critics and uses its territory as a base from which to conduct external operations in Syria and against Israel.

In Syria, meanwhile, Iranian militias continue to help prop up the regime of President Bashar Assad, as they have done for most of the 11 years it has been fighting its civil war.

Syria’s civil war has been especially brutal and the militias are at the very heart of that brutality

Dr. Azeem Ibrahim

Syria’s civil war has been especially brutal and the militias are at the very heart of that brutality. Hezbollah has often been in the thick of the fighting in Syria, including in the campaigns in the country’s south, which involved starvation sieges, the use of chemical weapons and appalling crimes committed against the civilian population. Hezbollah participated in the siege of Madaya, in which many of the town’s civilians and children starved to death.

In both Lebanon and Syria, the influence of the militias is malign. They are agents of violence, participating in civil conflicts, attacking nearby states and imperiling Lebanese politics and domestic peace.

This is part of what I describe as Iran’s “militia patchwork strategy,” which is a regional plan that for decades has included the seeding of militia groups that are in ideological agreement with the tenets of the 1979 revolution.

In more recent years, this strategy has developed a new angle that positions these militia groups as part of a so-called axis of resistance — a grouping with an explicit international focus on combating the US and Israel and their allies in every country where this might be possible.

These axis of resistance forces use of novel tactics to attack their enemies in Israel, the Gulf region and the US. They have collectively created a system of ballistic missile attacks and increasingly used the development of unmanned aerial vehicles, including “suicide” drones, to harass state industries like Saudi Arabia’s oil economy and Israel’s maritime natural gas assets.

Militias also harass and attack locals, including shaking down poor Syrian businessmen for bogus tolls and tariffs. Where militia violence is first used, organized crime often follows.

The cost of the militia strategy is somewhat hidden from the wider world. Individual Syrians and the families of murdered Lebanese politicians and journalists do not have much of an international platform. This is something my report is intended to correct.

Although American and European leaders frequently decry the broken nature of Syria and its frozen civil war, as well as the dysfunction of Lebanon’s politics, the overt causes and consequences — the militias — are less understood.

Indeed, this report traces the creation of a new militia, a “Syrian Hezbollah,” which seems to presage the new way Iran’s regional policy is going.

But make no mistake, militias act in violence and have violent ends in mind. To continue to allow the militias to operate as they do, in Lebanon and now in Syria, invites more violence of an unforeseeable extent and savagery.

Initially, those who will be worst affected are the locals the militias in Syria can shake down for protection money, followed by Lebanese intellectuals and politicians. But this sort of violence does not end there.

If unaddressed, the report notes — as it has been until now — both Lebanon and Syria could become a hotbed for region-spanning violence, delivered by drones, missiles, suicide bombs or brigades of fighting men.

It is long past time for the wider world to understand this challenge and begin to think, hard and realistically, about how best to prevent its most pernicious and potentially long-lasting effects.

The policy of Iran’s opponents, and those fearful of Iranian domination, must change to reflect this new reality.

  • Dr. Azeem Ibrahim is the director of special initiatives at the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy in Washington D.C. and author of “The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Genocide” (Hurst, 2017). Twitter: @AzeemIbrahim