When Israel killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, one of the many people who celebrated the great leader’s death was a Syrian surgeon not far from Damascus. He had lived through four years of siege and bombardment by pro-Iranian militias. Through WhatsApp, he told me that, in the West, “discussions of war against Iran reduce it to only a geographical struggle between powers fighting for influence in the region, and this discussion usually ignores the direct victims of this regime,” like him. He added: “For those of us who lived under siege by Iranian-backed militias, this looks completely different, so our joy at Khamenei’s death was great.”
Western observers and policy makers are usually more interested in the victims of the West and the threats that Iran poses to the West. However, the imbalance of power between Iran and the West, as demonstrated in the 12-day war and the current conflict, means that Iran has caused little harm to Western interests since its revolution in 1979. Countries in the region facing civil war and foreign invasion have fared worse. They were weak enough to be breeding grounds for militias serving Iran’s expansionist project. Khamenei believed that these militias could be used as part of his master plan to destroy Israel. The militia failed on both counts. These militias, however, achieved political dominance in Iran through the humiliation and oppression of the local people, hence their hatred and schadenfreude.
Kataib Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed militia in Iraq, he kidnapped me in one of his black sites in March 2023 and imprisoned me for 903 days. Two Arabic speakers were kept in private rooms next to and above mine and were tortured worse than me. The Arabic inscriptions on the walls of my cell indicated that the site had been used for many years and occupied by many previous occupants.
Since its establishment, the Islamic Republic has sought to export the Islamic Revolution outside its borders. Early on, Iran established militias and operated cells in countries with large Shia populations—Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia—but failed to overthrow regimes. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was only successful in countries weakened by conflict, with weak government institutions. During the civil war in Lebanon, after the Israeli invasion in 1982, Iran established a Shia Islamic militia group that came to be known as Hezbollah. After assuming the position of supreme leader in 1989, Khamenei oversaw the rapid expansion of the IRGC’s foreign operations, overseen by the Quds Force led by Qassem Soleimani. Until he was killed by the United States in 2020, Soleimani oversaw the creation of networks seeking to carry out attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets outside of Israel, assassinate Iranian opponents abroad, and shepherd new militants in the Middle East.
In post-2003 Iraq, with its government institutions dismantled and a sectarian civil war raging, Iran re-established a series of pro-Iranian militias. In Syria, after the outbreak of civil war, Iran significantly increased its influence, while the Assad regime held on to foreign aid to stay in power. Assad welcomed an Iranian-led militia comprising tens of thousands of foreign Shia fighters from Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. In Yemen too, instability allowed Houthi militias to take over large areas of the country, including the capital, Sanaa. The Houthi rebels have received significant financial and military support from Iran.
Since the founding of Hezbollah, members, at the behest of Iran, have turned their weapons on their fellow Lebanese. From 1988 to 1990, the group participated in what came to be known as the “War of the Brothers” against Amal, a Syrian-backed Shia militia. Hizbullah won in this civil war, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of civilians and Shia fighters. On May 7, 2008, following the Lebanese government’s decision to dismantle the independent Hezbollah communications network it had established, the militants invaded Beirut and took control of pro-government Sunni neighborhoods in the city, later fighting the Drauze communities in Chouf and the Sunni north, killing tens of people. The Doha agreement, which ended the conflict, strengthened Hezbollah’s political dominance of Lebanon, giving Shia ministers one-third of the cabinet.
Hezbollah carried out several murders: politicians, intellectuals, journalists and government officials. One of the most recent high-profile victims was Luqman Slim, a Shia scholar and activist and critic of Hizbullah who was killed in 2021. A friend of Luqman, who is also a Lebanese scholar, explained to me the terrible effect this assassination has had on public discourse in Lebanon: “The people themselves have weakened,” Hezbollah said. Privately, individuals would criticize Hezbollah, but when urged to be open in media interviews, he recounted, they told him, “Do you want me killed?” The scholar remained anonymous, as did others I interviewed for this article, because of the legal prohibition in Iraq and Lebanon on “repairing” relations with Israel, which in some court cases has been interpreted as a ban on even engaging with Israeli citizens like me. The Syrian surgeon asked that his name be withheld because of the political sensitivity of speaking to me after the Israeli invasion of southern Syria that followed the fall of Assad.
In Iraq, pro-Iranian militants killed hundreds of American soldiers, many of them through roadside bombs. But the number of Iraqi civilians they killed exceeds this. During the 2006-08 civil war, these militants killed, raped, and tortured unto death untold numbers of Sunnis. In 2014, during the war against ISIS, militants kidnapped young Sunni men and lost them in a network of torture sites. The militias also ethnically cleansed all Sunni towns, such as Jurf al-Sakhr, and established military bases there, preventing residents from returning to this day. The militants engaged in massive looting of private property in Sunni areas, looting government assets such as an oil refinery in Baiji and several factories in Ninewa.
After years of oppressing Iraq’s Sunnis, the militias turned their guns on the country’s Shiites in 2019. From the fall and continuing into 2020, the militias violently suppressed the anti-Shia government. Tishreen (“October”) protest movements, spraying activists with bullets, as well as killing or kidnapping them on their black sites. According to the testimonies of the survivors, in Baghdad the militants used the abandoned houses of the Jewish residents as places to torture and rape the female and male protesters who would kidnap them from the Tahrir Square camp of the city.
An Iraqi Shia seminary student was kidnapped by militants for cursing Khamenei in front of the commander. The student was tortured, and then his father was kidnapped and tortured as well. A student told me that when he heard of Khamenei’s assassination, “I was as happy as if it were Eid al-Fitr,” one of the two major holidays in Islam. “He was part of the destruction of Iraq. He is the cause of sectarianism and extremism,” the student said.
Even the bloodshed caused by Iran’s allies in Iraq and Lebanon does not match what they have inflicted in Syria. Under the command of the IRGC, the militias served as ground troops in major offensives against rebel-held towns, which are usually reinforced by Syrian troops and militias. Iran-backed militias laid a series of sieges on rebel-held towns and villages, such as Zabadani and Madaya near the Lebanese border, southern Damascus suburbs, and eastern Aleppo, killing several people, mostly children and the elderly.
The Syrian doctor was the only surgeon serving a population of about 10,000 people who were deprived of most medical aid. He told me he performed hundreds of amputations without anesthesia because of a shortage of personnel, medical equipment, and drugs. Iranian-run militia prevented all these goods and workers from entering the besieged zone. The surgeon and the people around him would eat leaves and grass and drink spicy water to ease the pangs of hunger. He lost dozens of pounds under siege.
Iran’s oppressive presence was evident in the surgeon’s daily life. “Khamenei lived among us through his allies: in the checkpoints that surrounded our city, in the militias that would raid our homes, in the kidnapped children and missing women, and in our villages that turned into ruins and mass graves,” he told me.
“Khamenei managed his project of colonial expansion from afar, but it was carried out on our bodies and our cities.”
