---
title: "Iran's Quds Force: The Shadow Hand of the Islamic Republic"
description: "They are the shadow hand of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the keeper and trusted guardian of Iran's spiderweb of alliances and proxy forces around the world. Specializing both in military intelligence and in unconventional, asymmetrical warfare, they have maintained a presence in some of the world's most intractable hot zones, as perhaps the most dangerous head of the hydra that is Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps. Depending on who you ask around the world, they may well be devils, or they may well be saviors. They are Iran's Quds Force, reporting directly to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, and at present, they are among the most ruthless and feared special-operations forces on Earth.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- The Quds Force was formed after the Iran-Iraq War in 1989 by unifying the Irregular Warfare Headquarters, Lebanon Guard, and Ramezan group under a single command within the Revolutionary Guard Corps.\n- Under Qasem Soleimani, the Quds Force evolved from a standard enforcer unit into an elite covert operations force, building a proxy network spanning Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Badr Brigade in Iraq, Afghan militias, the Houthis in Yemen, and others.\n- The Quds Force is organized into eight geographic directorates and five operational branches — Intelligence, Finance, Politics, Sabotage, and Special Operations — and is the first and only state security agency placed on the US list of foreign terrorist organizations.\n- In January 2020, Qasem Soleimani was killed in a US airstrike; General Ismail Qaani, his longtime deputy and expert in the Quds Force's financial networks, now leads the organization.\n- In 2022, the US Department of Justice revealed the Quds Force had attempted to recruit an assassin on US soil to kill former National Security Adviser John Bolton — one of many targeted-killing plots attributed to the group across multiple continents.\n\n## Forged in Revolution and War: The Origins of the Quds Force\n\nWhen the Islamic Revolution of 1978 and 1979 took hold of Iran, it set off a cascade of events that would see Iran's pro-Western Shah deposed, and convert the nation itself from a relatively secular state to a theocracy. Under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who would lead his new Islamic Republic for its first decade of existence, Iran purged itself of holdouts from the old regime, obliterated its former alliances and friendships with the West, and undertook a Cultural Revolution that was meant to orient the entire nation, its institutions, and its society around the Ayatollah's revolutionary version of Islam. Before long, Iran found itself at war, beating back an invasion from Saddam Hussein's neighboring Iraq and kicking off a broader conflict that would last from 1981 to 1989. It was from inside this crucible that the Islamic Republic began to build not just its conventional military, but a military with all the bells, whistles, and extra capabilities that would help Iran to defeat Iraq and become a major regional power during the Cold War. During the war, a number of organizations tried to take a leading role in developing Iran's capacity for extraterritorial operations—that is to say, their ability to wage war, carry out attacks, and operate covertly on foreign soil. The Irregular Warfare Headquarters, the Lebanon Guard, and the asymmetrical-warfare specialists in the Ramezan group each made their best attempts, with varying levels of success, and each one helped Iran to accumulate valuable experience in guerrilla warfare, but it was all of them, together, that would eventually form the Quds Force. When the Iran-Iraq War ended in 1989, Iran took the opportunity to reorganize and standardize its military. By order of Iran's President at the time, the country's asymmetrical-warfare forces were unified under a single command, one that would operate as an independent branch of the Iranian military, the Revolutionary Guard Corps. This new branch was named the Quds Force—translating directly to \"Jerusalem Force,\" in keeping with what the Quds Force's mission was meant to be.\n\n## From Hezbollah to the Northern Alliance: Building a Proxy Network\n\nOperating as an intelligence and unconventional warfare group, something like a combination of the American Green Berets and CIA, the Quds Force's stated mission would be to liberate what the Ayatollah considered to be Muslim lands, especially Jerusalem. The Quds Force assembled the surviving members of each of Iran's prior unconventional-warfare forces, under a series of commanders answering directly to the Ayatollah. One of the group's predecessors—also known as the Quds Force—had set up relationships with the mostly Shi'a militia known as Hezbollah, which it had helped to establish in Lebanon. Hezbollah was, and is, an imitation revolutionary group in the same ideological vein as the Iranian Revolution had been, and it became the first in a long list of partner organizations for the new Quds Force, who orchestrated training for its fighters and guided the flow of weapons, material, and funding as a sponsor. Around the same time, the Quds Force started backing an Afghan opposition movement known as Hebze Wadhat, which was hard at work as one of the major factions resisting Soviet occupation during the Afghan Civil War. When the Taliban, a Sunni-Muslim organization, took control of Afghanistan and declared an Islamic Emirate in 1996, Iran sent its support to the new opposition group in Afghanistan, called the Northern Alliance, and spent significant wealth and human capital trying to prop up the resistance for another five years. During those same years, Iranian officers led and trained Iraq's Badr Brigade, a Shi'a militia made up of Iraqi refugees and defectors who occasionally forayed back into Iraq to resist Saddam Hussein. A number of future Iranian leaders cut their teeth as a direct or indirect part of the Quds Force's efforts abroad, but none would become quite so prominent as Qasem Soleimani.\n\n## The Soleimani Era: Transforming the Quds Force into an Elite Covert Arm\n\nA veteran of the Iran-Iraq War and an early supporter of the Iranian Revolution, Soleimani had become a Brigadier General by the war's end. After a few years dealing with drug cartels in Iran's southeast, Soleimani became an integral part of Iran's attempts to assist the Afghan Northern Alliance, and before long, he had distinguished himself enough that he was appointed commander of the Quds Force. In the following years, Qasem Soleimani became synonymous with the Quds Force's work, their reputation, and their rapidly evolving capabilities. It was under Soleimani's command that the Quds Force evolved from an active, but fairly standard enforcer unit, sending detachments to aid their allies in war zones, to an elite unit with capabilities that mirrored American, Soviet, and European covert ops. Soleimani redoubled the Quds Force's support of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and began to ally the organization with Palestinian resistance organizations like Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, setting up proxy groups within striking distance to the Israeli-held territories that the Iranian regime coveted. With this approach, Iran was able to develop a robust patronage network in the region—not becoming a patron for any other recognized nation, but focusing on non-state actors who had the greatest chance of re-creating an Iran-style Islamic Revolution in their own countries. The Quds Force got its first chance to assert itself on the world stage in 2003, after the United States launched its invasion of Iraq. From the start of the conflict, the Quds Force pivoted into support for Shi'a militias, including not only its previous ally in the Badr Brigade, but a number of other scattered resistance sects across the country. During the war, Iran was infamously labeled part of an \"Axis of Evil\" by US President George W. Bush, and accused of providing those same Shi'a militias with the materials and training required to make roadside improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. In the following years, successive US administrations have blamed the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps—and, thus, their primary international operators, the Quds Force—for the death of hundreds of US troops in Iraq during the invasion years.\n\n## Arab Spring, Syria, and the Fight Against the Islamic State\n\nThe experience that Quds operators and their Iraqi allies picked up during the US occupation was put to use a few years later in 2011's Arab Spring. Many of the early casualties of the Arab Spring were not much of a problem for Iran; Tunisia's ousted President Ben Ali had led a Sunni government, and so had Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, who had long stoked tensions with accusations that Shi'a Muslims in many Arab nations held a secret allegiance to Iran, rather than their own countries. Not only were those revolts not a problem, but they offered opportunities for the Quds Force to start working toward resolutions and new governments that favored Iran. But when the uprisings made their way to Syria, where Alawite Shi'a leader Bashar al-Assad and his minority government began to face resistance from the country's Sunni majority, it marked a shift toward regional destabilization that the Quds Force was built to prevent. Although they initially deployed to Syria on the pretext of protecting Shi'ite shrines from violence, the Quds Force entered the conflict with the intent of supporting the Assad regime. They did it not just by suppressing dissenters, not just by advising the Syrian military on how to proceed, but by sending their own forward operators to the front lines and dispatching substantial manpower from the Quds Force's militias in other countries. Iraqi Badr fighters, Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon, and armed, experienced Afghan combat veterans began streaming into Syria, and when Yemen started to go down the same way, the Quds Force dispatched operatives to support the country's Houthi rebels. Those rebels were fighting a government backed by Iran's major Arab rival, Saudi Arabia. The Quds Force only redoubled its efforts in response to the rise of the Islamic State, an extremist, but still very Sunni sect, and it was Iraqi militias backed by the Quds Force, not Iraqi government troops, who had the greatest success taking back territory from them. In Iraq, the Quds Force's militias relied on airstrikes from the US-led coalition fighting the Islamic State, and so, too, did the US rely on the Quds Force's militias to take ground targets without risking American soldiers. But after the Islamic State's downfall, the US and Iran's animosity was not so easily forgotten, and the Quds Force was a prime target for the messages America wanted to be sending. In January 2020, Qasem Soleimani himself was killed in a US airstrike, and the Quds Force has spent the past several years with the dubious honor of being the first, and only state security agency to have ended up on the US list of foreign terrorist organizations.\n\n## Eight Directorates and Five Branches: How the Quds Force Is Organized\n\nThe Quds Force is organized into eight directorates, each of which is responsible for managing Quds operations in a different geographical region. Two directorates handle individual countries—Iran's next-door neighbors, Iraq and Turkey. One is meant to deal with Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, while another focuses on Israel, Lebanon, and Jordan. The Arabian Peninsula and North Africa each have their own Quds directorates, and Europe, the United States, and Canada are unified under a directorate, while the same is done with Russia and the other former Soviet states. Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, East Asia, and Australia are generally spared their attention. In addition to its eight directorates, the Quds Force is stratified into five operational branches: Intelligence, Finance, Politics, Sabotage, and Special Operations. Each of these branches is assigned its own commander, with operatives from each of the five branches being assigned to one of the many directorates worldwide. At least from the outside, factional rivalries between these branches appear to be muted; they are all oriented directly under the Quds Force's commander, until recently Qasem Soleimani, and they coordinate a long list of support operations in concert with each other. Unlike some of the more provocative figures of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Quds Force prefers to act quietly and avoid international attention when possible. It is difficult to put a finger on just how large the Quds Force is; conservative estimates can be as low as two to three thousand, with under a thousand actual operatives around the world, while the more generous estimates can rise as high as fifty thousand. Wherever an analyst falls on that sliding scale is likely to bias assessments of what the group is and what it does; if it is made up of a small handful of operatives, then one might assume that those agents are meant to be highly capable, generalist solo operators, sneaking into war zones by themselves or in small teams and running things from the shadows. If it is made up of tens of thousands of personnel, then it might make more sense to interpret the Quds Force as a diversified array of specialists, support staff, and hidden large bases or front-line squads around the world. Either way, Iran is not telling.\n\n## Tradecraft and Training: The Quds Force's Operational Methods\n\nThe Quds Force retains some of its agents in order to train and oversee foreign assets, similar to global intelligence services like MI6 or the CIA. Others are meant to serve in combat roles—as front-line shock troops, saboteurs, or insurgent leaders. Their personnel are often in flux; talented troops from elsewhere in the Revolutionary Guard Corps might be pulled into a Quds Force operation, as might any of their regional partners in the nations where they do their work. But the mission is generally the same—to maintain Iran's proxy forces around the world, and ensure that they are in the best shape possible to fight back against their national regimes. It is especially important to note that despite interest from the US and the broader West in rooting out the Quds Force's influence, the Quds Force themselves do not appear to be particularly interested in direct confrontations with those nations. Instead, they prefer a decades-long approach, meant to slowly but surely extend their influence into the surrounding nations, and ensure that every time there is a push or pull in those societies, the Quds Force can move one step closer to ensuring that the next upheaval or revolution will fall in their favor. They do so by leveraging not just impressive amounts of financial capital—more than many of their proxy organizations could ever make on their own—but by orchestrating the transfer of some pretty heavy-duty weaponry: unmanned aircraft, air defense systems, cruise missiles, and armor-piercing ammunition, alongside a long list of other things these proxy groups would otherwise never get their hands on. The Quds Force selects its personnel partly due to their skill in serving other branches of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, but just as important as their service record is their ideological allegiance to the Islamic Revolution of Iran. Whatever the Quds Force's training regimen entails, the group's operatives are combat-tested, and so are the militias and resistance organizations they train.\n\n## Assassination Plots, Yemen, and Syria: Notable Quds Force Operations\n\nAlthough Iran took several years to confirm that it had even minimally assisted Yemen's Houthi rebels, the true extent of its cooperation is believed to have gone far deeper. The Quds Force is believed to have supplied military advisors to train and help coordinate the rebels, sent plans and technology to aid in the manufacturing of weapons, provided crucial intelligence to guide rebel attacks with drones, missiles, and ground troops, and directed those attacks to target Saudi Arabia and its oil fields, as well as the Yemeni government. The Quds Force has been accused of facilitating the transport of heavy anti-tank weaponry, explosive drones, and even long-range ballistic missiles. In 2022, some of the financial ties between the two groups were exposed by US intelligence, attesting to transfers of tens of millions of dollars or more. The Quds Force also has a proclivity to plan and engage in assassination. Perhaps no example stands out better than the one involving former US National Security Adviser John Bolton. As was revealed by a spokesperson for the US Department of Justice in 2022, the Quds Force attempted to recruit an assassin on US soil to kill Bolton, who had previously served as national security adviser to Donald Trump—making him a particularly likely person to have privately advocated for Trump's approval of the strike that killed Qasem Soleimani two years prior. The attack was never carried out, but the threat was considered severe enough that Bolton was granted a full-time Secret Service detail, despite being well out of government by the time the plot was uncovered. A decade earlier, the Quds Force had been implicated in a plot to kill Saudi Arabia's then-ambassador to the United States. The assassination, planned by a Quds Force operative named Gholam Shakuri and an Iranian-American associate, would have involved hiring members of an international drug cartel to blow up the ambassador in a busy restaurant. That assassination attempt was also foiled, but the Quds Force operative who orchestrated it was never apprehended. These two plots are by no means the only time the Quds Force was believed to have been planning assassinations; targeted killings are a favored tool of the group, and have been planned or carried out on nearly every continent. In Syria, the Quds Force assisted Assad by sending its Shi'a proxy militias into the conflict from Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, but they did quite a lot more than that. Iran has been instrumental in keeping the Assad regime well-supplied by air, and has been accused of exploiting the Iranian Red Crescent organization, equivalent to the Red Cross, to smuggle material and personnel into Syria without interdiction. Quds Force teams have been dispatched on the ground during much of the war, assisting not just with troop training, but intelligence-gathering on Syria's behalf. The total amount of money Iran has sent to support Syria is estimated to be—at a minimum—in the tens of billions.\n\n## General Qaani and the Quds Force's Strategic Trajectory\n\nThese days, the Quds Force is led by General Ismail Qaani, whose longtime friendship with Soleimani—going as far back as the Iran-Iraq War—saw him serve as deputy commander during Soleimani's entire tenure. An expert in the Quds Force's financial operations and their network of monetary support worldwide, Qaani had also been responsible for training some of the most successful Shi'a brigades in Syria, and while Western analysts are split on just how much of a change Qaani will have on the organization, he is generally seen as being a smoothly competent, ruthlessly efficient leader in keeping with the Quds Force's formidable reputation. It is hard to deny that Iran and the Quds Force are likely to step up their operations, rather than drawing them down. In Lebanon, the Quds-trained Hezbollah organization is gaining more and more legitimacy; in Yemen, their Houthi proxies are on the verge of a political settlement to finally end their civil war. The largest political bloc in Iraq's parliament is Shi'a, and in Syria, the Assad regime is poised to finalize a near-total victory in the coming years. What this means is that Iran's strategy of backing up its Shi'a proxies in the Middle East appears to be working, and with rising tensions between Iran and the new Taliban government in Afghanistan, it is not hard to imagine where new militias might start popping up next. Furthermore, the Quds Force's ultimate objective is the liberation, as they see it, of occupied Muslim lands. Now that the nation Iran sees as its greatest regional enemy, Israel, is beginning to ally itself with the region's major Sunni power, Saudi Arabia, more and more fuel is being poured onto an already-burning fire around Iran's nuclear program and the situation in Palestine. The Quds Force will be an instrumental part of Iran's next moves. They will infiltrate, they will spy, they will cultivate their assets abroad, and when the time is right, they will supply the training camps, material, and critical knowledge that their proxies will need. With the Quds Force acting as Iran's shadow hand, the nation may well continue to rise in its regional influence.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### How and when was the Quds Force founded?\n\nThe Quds Force emerged from the Iran-Iraq War of 1981–1989. During the war, three separate organizations — the Irregular Warfare Headquarters, the Lebanon Guard, and the Ramezan group — each developed Iran's capacity for extraterritorial operations with varying success. When the war ended in 1989, Iran unified all three under a single command within the Revolutionary Guard Corps, naming it the Quds Force, translating directly as \"Jerusalem Force\" in keeping with its stated mission of liberating what the Ayatollah considered occupied Muslim lands.\n\n### What is the Quds Force's relationship to the IRGC and the Supreme Leader?\n\nThe Quds Force is an independent branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, functioning as something like a combination of the American Green Berets and CIA — specializing in military intelligence and unconventional warfare. It reports directly to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, not through the normal chain of military command. The Quds Force is organized into eight geographic directorates covering regions from Iraq and Lebanon to Europe, North America, and the former Soviet states, plus five operational branches: Intelligence, Finance, Politics, Sabotage, and Special Operations.\n\n### What proxy networks has the Quds Force built and maintained?\n\nStarting with Hezbollah in Lebanon — which the Quds Force helped establish and has continuously armed, funded, and trained — the organization built a patronage network focused entirely on non-state actors. It backed Afghanistan's Northern Alliance against the Taliban, trained Iraq's Badr Brigade, supported Hamas and Islamic Jihad, deployed advisors and proxy fighters from Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan into Syria to prop up Assad, and supplied the Houthis in Yemen with military advisors, drones, missiles, and tens of millions of dollars.\n\n### Why is the Quds Force designated as a foreign terrorist organization?\n\nIn January 2020, the United States carried out a drone strike that killed Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, making the Quds Force the first — and to date only — state security agency placed on the US list of foreign terrorist organizations. Successive US administrations had blamed the Quds Force for the deaths of hundreds of American troops in Iraq through IED materials and training supplied to Shi'a militias. The organization has also been implicated in assassination plots on US soil, including a 2022 Justice Department revelation that the Quds Force tried to recruit a hitman to kill former National Security Adviser John Bolton.\n\n### Who leads the Quds Force today and what is its strategic direction?\n\nGeneral Ismail Qaani, Soleimani's longtime deputy since the Iran-Iraq War, now commands the Quds Force. An expert in its financial operations and global monetary networks, Qaani is seen by Western analysts as a smoothly competent, ruthlessly efficient leader. Iran's strategy of backing Shi'a proxies — Hezbollah gaining legitimacy in Lebanon, Houthi proxies near political settlement in Yemen, Shi'a majorities dominant in Iraq's parliament, Assad consolidating victory in Syria — appears to be working, and the Quds Force is expected to step up rather than draw down its global operations.\n\n## Related Coverage\n- [Where Are Iran's Proxy Forces? Why the Axis of Resistance Has Left Tehran to Face Israel Alone](https://warfronts.pub/geopolitics/iran-proxy-forces-axis-of-resistance-collapse-israel)\n- [The US Navy SEALs: Origins, Evolution, and Modern Operations](https://warfronts.pub/special-operations/us-navy-seals-origins-and-evolution)\n- [The Origins of Naval Special Warfare: Unconventional Warfare from World War II to the Present](https://warfronts.pub/military-history/origins-of-naval-special-warfare)\n- [Special Operators: Navy SEALs, United States.](https://warfronts.pub/analysis/special-operators-navy-seals-united-states)\n- [Special Operators: Navy SEALs, United States.](https://warfronts.pub/analysis/special-operators-navy-seals-united-states-uw6bmd98)\n\n## Sources\n1. <https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/evolution-irans-qods-force-1979>\n2. <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Qassem-Soleimani>\n3. <https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/religion-context/country-profiles/syria>\n4. <https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2006/4/10/mubaraks-shia-remarks-stir-anger>\n5. <https://www.britannica.com/topic/Quds-Force>\n6. <https://www.rferl.org/a/iran-quds-force-soleimani-explainer/30366930.html>\n7. <https://web.archive.org/web/20081014070859/http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,252212,00.html>\n8. <https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-feb-15-fg-quds15-story.html>\n9. <https://web.archive.org/web/20170701091213/http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/17/world/middleeast/17quds.html?_r=1&oref=slogin>\n10. <https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/irans-revolutionary-guards>\n11. <https://www.dni.gov/nctc/ftos/irgc_fto.html>\n12. <https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/who-are-iran-s-secretive-quds-forces-n1110156>\n13. <https://www.counterextremism.com/threat/irgc-islamic-revolutionary-guard-corps>\n14. <https://ctc.westpoint.edu/terrorist-groups/quds-force/>\n15. <https://www.nytimes.com/topic/organization/islamic-revolutionary-guards-corps-quds-force>\n16. <https://www.reuters.com/world/top-us-general-does-not-support-removing-irans-quds-force-terrorism-list-2022-04-07/>\n17. <https://english.alarabiya.net/News/middle-east/2022/03/07/US-intelligence-uncovers-plot-by-Iran-s-Quds-Force-to-assassinate-John-Bolton-Report>\n18. <https://web.archive.org/web/20140904194210/http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2011/October/11-ag-1339.html>\n19. <https://www.thenationalnews.com/mena_edition/mena/iran-supplied-houthis-with-weapons-technology-says-senior-irgc-official-1.1209431>\n20. <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-yemen-iran-houthis/exclusive-iran-steps-up-support-for-houthis-in-yemens-war-sources-idUSKBN16S22R>\n21. <https://www.state.gov/united-states-designates-houthi-finance-network-in-coordination-with-gulf-partners/>\n22. <https://www.understandingwar.org/report/iranian-strategy-syria>\n23. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/nov/28/iranian-spies-red-crescent-war>\n24. <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-syria-crisis-iran/iran-boosts-military-support-in-syria-to-bolster-assad-idUSBREA1K09U20140221>\n25. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep20716>\n26. <https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/war-yemen>\n27. <https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/conflict-syria>\n28. <https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10703#:~:text=Hezbollah%20>\n\n[1]: https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/evolution-irans-qods-force-1979\n[2]: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Qassem-Soleimani\n[3]: https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/religion-context/country-profiles/syria\n[4]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2006/4/10/mubaraks-shia-remarks-stir-anger\n[5]: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Quds-Force\n[6]: https://www.rferl.org/a/iran-quds-force-soleimani-explainer/30366930.html\n[7]: https://web.archive.org/web/20081014070859/http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,252212,00.html\n[8]: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-feb-15-fg-quds15-story.html\n[9]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170701091213/http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/17/world/middleeast/17quds.html?_r=1&oref=slogin\n[10]: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/irans-revolutionary-guards\n[11]: https://www.dni.gov/nctc/ftos/irgc_fto.html\n[12]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/who-are-iran-s-secretive-quds-forces-n1110156\n[13]: https://www.counterextremism.com/threat/irgc-islamic-revolutionary-guard-corps\n[14]: https://ctc.westpoint.edu/terrorist-groups/quds-force/\n[15]: https://www.nytimes.com/topic/organization/islamic-revolutionary-guards-corps-quds-force\n[16]: https://www.reuters.com/world/top-us-general-does-not-support-removing-irans-quds-force-terrorism-list-2022-04-07/\n[17]: https://english.alarabiya.net/News/middle-east/2022/03/07/US-intelligence-uncovers-plot-by-Iran-s-Quds-Force-to-assassinate-John-Bolton-Report\n[18]: https://web.archive.org/web/20140904194210/http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2011/October/11-ag-1339.html\n[19]: https://www.thenationalnews.com/mena_edition/mena/iran-supplied-houthis-with-weapons-technology-says-senior-irgc-official-1.1209431\n[20]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-yemen-iran-houthis/exclusive-iran-steps-up-support-for-houthis-in-yemens-war-sources-idUSKBN16S22R\n[21]: https://www.state.gov/united-states-designates-houthi-finance-network-in-coordination-with-gulf-partners/\n[22]: https://www.understandingwar.org/report/iranian-strategy-syria\n[23]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/nov/28/iranian-spies-red-crescent-war\n[24]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-syria-crisis-iran/iran-boosts-military-support-in-syria-to-bolster-assad-idUSBREA1K09U20140221\n[25]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep20716\n[26]: https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/war-yemen\n[27]: https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/conflict-syria\n[28]: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10703#:~:text=Hezbollah%20\n\n<!-- youtube:jRNngZzMYiA -->"
url: https://warfronts.pub/article/iran-quds-force-shadow-hand-islamic-republic.md
canonical: https://warfronts.pub/article/iran-quds-force-shadow-hand-islamic-republic
datePublished: 2026-03-04
dateModified: 2026-03-04
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  - name: Simon Whistler
    url: https://warfronts.pub/author/simon-whistler
publisher: Warfronts
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summaryUrl: https://warfronts.pub/article/iran-quds-force-shadow-hand-islamic-republic.md.summary.md
---

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They are the shadow hand of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the keeper and trusted guardian of Iran's spiderweb of alliances and proxy forces around the world. Specializing both in military intelligence and in unconventional, asymmetrical warfare, they have maintained a presence in some of the world's most intractable hot zones, as perhaps the most dangerous head of the hydra that is Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps. Depending on who you ask around the world, they may well be devils, or they may well be saviors. They are Iran's Quds Force, reporting directly to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, and at present, they are among the most ruthless and feared special-operations forces on Earth.

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## Key Takeaways

- The Quds Force was formed after the Iran-Iraq War in 1989 by unifying the Irregular Warfare Headquarters, Lebanon Guard, and Ramezan group under a single command within the Revolutionary Guard Corps.
- Under Qasem Soleimani, the Quds Force evolved from a standard enforcer unit into an elite covert operations force, building a proxy network spanning Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Badr Brigade in Iraq, Afghan militias, the Houthis in Yemen, and others.
- The Quds Force is organized into eight geographic directorates and five operational branches — Intelligence, Finance, Politics, Sabotage, and Special Operations — and is the first and only state security agency placed on the US list of foreign terrorist organizations.
- In January 2020, Qasem Soleimani was killed in a US airstrike; General Ismail Qaani, his longtime deputy and expert in the Quds Force's financial networks, now leads the organization.
- In 2022, the US Department of Justice revealed the Quds Force had attempted to recruit an assassin on US soil to kill former National Security Adviser John Bolton — one of many targeted-killing plots attributed to the group across multiple continents.

<!-- aeo:section end="key-takeaways" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="forged-in-revolution-and-war-the-origins-of-the-quds-force" -->
## Forged in Revolution and War: The Origins of the Quds Force

When the Islamic Revolution of 1978 and 1979 took hold of Iran, it set off a cascade of events that would see Iran's pro-Western Shah deposed, and convert the nation itself from a relatively secular state to a theocracy. Under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who would lead his new Islamic Republic for its first decade of existence, Iran purged itself of holdouts from the old regime, obliterated its former alliances and friendships with the West, and undertook a Cultural Revolution that was meant to orient the entire nation, its institutions, and its society around the Ayatollah's revolutionary version of Islam. Before long, Iran found itself at war, beating back an invasion from Saddam Hussein's neighboring Iraq and kicking off a broader conflict that would last from 1981 to 1989. It was from inside this crucible that the Islamic Republic began to build not just its conventional military, but a military with all the bells, whistles, and extra capabilities that would help Iran to defeat Iraq and become a major regional power during the Cold War. During the war, a number of organizations tried to take a leading role in developing Iran's capacity for extraterritorial operations—that is to say, their ability to wage war, carry out attacks, and operate covertly on foreign soil. The Irregular Warfare Headquarters, the Lebanon Guard, and the asymmetrical-warfare specialists in the Ramezan group each made their best attempts, with varying levels of success, and each one helped Iran to accumulate valuable experience in guerrilla warfare, but it was all of them, together, that would eventually form the Quds Force. When the Iran-Iraq War ended in 1989, Iran took the opportunity to reorganize and standardize its military. By order of Iran's President at the time, the country's asymmetrical-warfare forces were unified under a single command, one that would operate as an independent branch of the Iranian military, the Revolutionary Guard Corps. This new branch was named the Quds Force—translating directly to "Jerusalem Force," in keeping with what the Quds Force's mission was meant to be.

<!-- aeo:section end="forged-in-revolution-and-war-the-origins-of-the-quds-force" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="from-hezbollah-to-the-northern-alliance-building-a-proxy-network" -->
## From Hezbollah to the Northern Alliance: Building a Proxy Network

Operating as an intelligence and unconventional warfare group, something like a combination of the American Green Berets and CIA, the Quds Force's stated mission would be to liberate what the Ayatollah considered to be Muslim lands, especially Jerusalem. The Quds Force assembled the surviving members of each of Iran's prior unconventional-warfare forces, under a series of commanders answering directly to the Ayatollah. One of the group's predecessors—also known as the Quds Force—had set up relationships with the mostly Shi'a militia known as Hezbollah, which it had helped to establish in Lebanon. Hezbollah was, and is, an imitation revolutionary group in the same ideological vein as the Iranian Revolution had been, and it became the first in a long list of partner organizations for the new Quds Force, who orchestrated training for its fighters and guided the flow of weapons, material, and funding as a sponsor. Around the same time, the Quds Force started backing an Afghan opposition movement known as Hebze Wadhat, which was hard at work as one of the major factions resisting Soviet occupation during the Afghan Civil War. When the Taliban, a Sunni-Muslim organization, took control of Afghanistan and declared an Islamic Emirate in 1996, Iran sent its support to the new opposition group in Afghanistan, called the Northern Alliance, and spent significant wealth and human capital trying to prop up the resistance for another five years. During those same years, Iranian officers led and trained Iraq's Badr Brigade, a Shi'a militia made up of Iraqi refugees and defectors who occasionally forayed back into Iraq to resist Saddam Hussein. A number of future Iranian leaders cut their teeth as a direct or indirect part of the Quds Force's efforts abroad, but none would become quite so prominent as Qasem Soleimani.

<!-- aeo:section end="from-hezbollah-to-the-northern-alliance-building-a-proxy-network" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="the-soleimani-era-transforming-the-quds-force-into-an-elite-cove" -->
## The Soleimani Era: Transforming the Quds Force into an Elite Covert Arm

A veteran of the Iran-Iraq War and an early supporter of the Iranian Revolution, Soleimani had become a Brigadier General by the war's end. After a few years dealing with drug cartels in Iran's southeast, Soleimani became an integral part of Iran's attempts to assist the Afghan Northern Alliance, and before long, he had distinguished himself enough that he was appointed commander of the Quds Force. In the following years, Qasem Soleimani became synonymous with the Quds Force's work, their reputation, and their rapidly evolving capabilities. It was under Soleimani's command that the Quds Force evolved from an active, but fairly standard enforcer unit, sending detachments to aid their allies in war zones, to an elite unit with capabilities that mirrored American, Soviet, and European covert ops. Soleimani redoubled the Quds Force's support of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and began to ally the organization with Palestinian resistance organizations like Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, setting up proxy groups within striking distance to the Israeli-held territories that the Iranian regime coveted. With this approach, Iran was able to develop a robust patronage network in the region—not becoming a patron for any other recognized nation, but focusing on non-state actors who had the greatest chance of re-creating an Iran-style Islamic Revolution in their own countries. The Quds Force got its first chance to assert itself on the world stage in 2003, after the United States launched its invasion of Iraq. From the start of the conflict, the Quds Force pivoted into support for Shi'a militias, including not only its previous ally in the Badr Brigade, but a number of other scattered resistance sects across the country. During the war, Iran was infamously labeled part of an "Axis of Evil" by US President George W. Bush, and accused of providing those same Shi'a militias with the materials and training required to make roadside improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. In the following years, successive US administrations have blamed the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps—and, thus, their primary international operators, the Quds Force—for the death of hundreds of US troops in Iraq during the invasion years.

<!-- aeo:section end="the-soleimani-era-transforming-the-quds-force-into-an-elite-cove" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="arab-spring-syria-and-the-fight-against-the-islamic-state" -->
## Arab Spring, Syria, and the Fight Against the Islamic State

The experience that Quds operators and their Iraqi allies picked up during the US occupation was put to use a few years later in 2011's Arab Spring. Many of the early casualties of the Arab Spring were not much of a problem for Iran; Tunisia's ousted President Ben Ali had led a Sunni government, and so had Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, who had long stoked tensions with accusations that Shi'a Muslims in many Arab nations held a secret allegiance to Iran, rather than their own countries. Not only were those revolts not a problem, but they offered opportunities for the Quds Force to start working toward resolutions and new governments that favored Iran. But when the uprisings made their way to Syria, where Alawite Shi'a leader Bashar al-Assad and his minority government began to face resistance from the country's Sunni majority, it marked a shift toward regional destabilization that the Quds Force was built to prevent. Although they initially deployed to Syria on the pretext of protecting Shi'ite shrines from violence, the Quds Force entered the conflict with the intent of supporting the Assad regime. They did it not just by suppressing dissenters, not just by advising the Syrian military on how to proceed, but by sending their own forward operators to the front lines and dispatching substantial manpower from the Quds Force's militias in other countries. Iraqi Badr fighters, Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon, and armed, experienced Afghan combat veterans began streaming into Syria, and when Yemen started to go down the same way, the Quds Force dispatched operatives to support the country's Houthi rebels. Those rebels were fighting a government backed by Iran's major Arab rival, Saudi Arabia. The Quds Force only redoubled its efforts in response to the rise of the Islamic State, an extremist, but still very Sunni sect, and it was Iraqi militias backed by the Quds Force, not Iraqi government troops, who had the greatest success taking back territory from them. In Iraq, the Quds Force's militias relied on airstrikes from the US-led coalition fighting the Islamic State, and so, too, did the US rely on the Quds Force's militias to take ground targets without risking American soldiers. But after the Islamic State's downfall, the US and Iran's animosity was not so easily forgotten, and the Quds Force was a prime target for the messages America wanted to be sending. In January 2020, Qasem Soleimani himself was killed in a US airstrike, and the Quds Force has spent the past several years with the dubious honor of being the first, and only state security agency to have ended up on the US list of foreign terrorist organizations.

<!-- aeo:section end="arab-spring-syria-and-the-fight-against-the-islamic-state" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="eight-directorates-and-five-branches-how-the-quds-force-is-organ" -->
## Eight Directorates and Five Branches: How the Quds Force Is Organized

The Quds Force is organized into eight directorates, each of which is responsible for managing Quds operations in a different geographical region. Two directorates handle individual countries—Iran's next-door neighbors, Iraq and Turkey. One is meant to deal with Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, while another focuses on Israel, Lebanon, and Jordan. The Arabian Peninsula and North Africa each have their own Quds directorates, and Europe, the United States, and Canada are unified under a directorate, while the same is done with Russia and the other former Soviet states. Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, East Asia, and Australia are generally spared their attention. In addition to its eight directorates, the Quds Force is stratified into five operational branches: Intelligence, Finance, Politics, Sabotage, and Special Operations. Each of these branches is assigned its own commander, with operatives from each of the five branches being assigned to one of the many directorates worldwide. At least from the outside, factional rivalries between these branches appear to be muted; they are all oriented directly under the Quds Force's commander, until recently Qasem Soleimani, and they coordinate a long list of support operations in concert with each other. Unlike some of the more provocative figures of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Quds Force prefers to act quietly and avoid international attention when possible. It is difficult to put a finger on just how large the Quds Force is; conservative estimates can be as low as two to three thousand, with under a thousand actual operatives around the world, while the more generous estimates can rise as high as fifty thousand. Wherever an analyst falls on that sliding scale is likely to bias assessments of what the group is and what it does; if it is made up of a small handful of operatives, then one might assume that those agents are meant to be highly capable, generalist solo operators, sneaking into war zones by themselves or in small teams and running things from the shadows. If it is made up of tens of thousands of personnel, then it might make more sense to interpret the Quds Force as a diversified array of specialists, support staff, and hidden large bases or front-line squads around the world. Either way, Iran is not telling.

<!-- aeo:section end="eight-directorates-and-five-branches-how-the-quds-force-is-organ" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="tradecraft-and-training-the-quds-force-s-operational-methods" -->
## Tradecraft and Training: The Quds Force's Operational Methods

The Quds Force retains some of its agents in order to train and oversee foreign assets, similar to global intelligence services like MI6 or the CIA. Others are meant to serve in combat roles—as front-line shock troops, saboteurs, or insurgent leaders. Their personnel are often in flux; talented troops from elsewhere in the Revolutionary Guard Corps might be pulled into a Quds Force operation, as might any of their regional partners in the nations where they do their work. But the mission is generally the same—to maintain Iran's proxy forces around the world, and ensure that they are in the best shape possible to fight back against their national regimes. It is especially important to note that despite interest from the US and the broader West in rooting out the Quds Force's influence, the Quds Force themselves do not appear to be particularly interested in direct confrontations with those nations. Instead, they prefer a decades-long approach, meant to slowly but surely extend their influence into the surrounding nations, and ensure that every time there is a push or pull in those societies, the Quds Force can move one step closer to ensuring that the next upheaval or revolution will fall in their favor. They do so by leveraging not just impressive amounts of financial capital—more than many of their proxy organizations could ever make on their own—but by orchestrating the transfer of some pretty heavy-duty weaponry: unmanned aircraft, air defense systems, cruise missiles, and armor-piercing ammunition, alongside a long list of other things these proxy groups would otherwise never get their hands on. The Quds Force selects its personnel partly due to their skill in serving other branches of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, but just as important as their service record is their ideological allegiance to the Islamic Revolution of Iran. Whatever the Quds Force's training regimen entails, the group's operatives are combat-tested, and so are the militias and resistance organizations they train.

<!-- aeo:section end="tradecraft-and-training-the-quds-force-s-operational-methods" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="assassination-plots-yemen-and-syria-notable-quds-force-operation" -->
## Assassination Plots, Yemen, and Syria: Notable Quds Force Operations

Although Iran took several years to confirm that it had even minimally assisted Yemen's Houthi rebels, the true extent of its cooperation is believed to have gone far deeper. The Quds Force is believed to have supplied military advisors to train and help coordinate the rebels, sent plans and technology to aid in the manufacturing of weapons, provided crucial intelligence to guide rebel attacks with drones, missiles, and ground troops, and directed those attacks to target Saudi Arabia and its oil fields, as well as the Yemeni government. The Quds Force has been accused of facilitating the transport of heavy anti-tank weaponry, explosive drones, and even long-range ballistic missiles. In 2022, some of the financial ties between the two groups were exposed by US intelligence, attesting to transfers of tens of millions of dollars or more. The Quds Force also has a proclivity to plan and engage in assassination. Perhaps no example stands out better than the one involving former US National Security Adviser John Bolton. As was revealed by a spokesperson for the US Department of Justice in 2022, the Quds Force attempted to recruit an assassin on US soil to kill Bolton, who had previously served as national security adviser to Donald Trump—making him a particularly likely person to have privately advocated for Trump's approval of the strike that killed Qasem Soleimani two years prior. The attack was never carried out, but the threat was considered severe enough that Bolton was granted a full-time Secret Service detail, despite being well out of government by the time the plot was uncovered. A decade earlier, the Quds Force had been implicated in a plot to kill Saudi Arabia's then-ambassador to the United States. The assassination, planned by a Quds Force operative named Gholam Shakuri and an Iranian-American associate, would have involved hiring members of an international drug cartel to blow up the ambassador in a busy restaurant. That assassination attempt was also foiled, but the Quds Force operative who orchestrated it was never apprehended. These two plots are by no means the only time the Quds Force was believed to have been planning assassinations; targeted killings are a favored tool of the group, and have been planned or carried out on nearly every continent. In Syria, the Quds Force assisted Assad by sending its Shi'a proxy militias into the conflict from Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, but they did quite a lot more than that. Iran has been instrumental in keeping the Assad regime well-supplied by air, and has been accused of exploiting the Iranian Red Crescent organization, equivalent to the Red Cross, to smuggle material and personnel into Syria without interdiction. Quds Force teams have been dispatched on the ground during much of the war, assisting not just with troop training, but intelligence-gathering on Syria's behalf. The total amount of money Iran has sent to support Syria is estimated to be—at a minimum—in the tens of billions.

<!-- aeo:section end="assassination-plots-yemen-and-syria-notable-quds-force-operation" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="general-qaani-and-the-quds-force-s-strategic-trajectory" -->
## General Qaani and the Quds Force's Strategic Trajectory

These days, the Quds Force is led by General Ismail Qaani, whose longtime friendship with Soleimani—going as far back as the Iran-Iraq War—saw him serve as deputy commander during Soleimani's entire tenure. An expert in the Quds Force's financial operations and their network of monetary support worldwide, Qaani had also been responsible for training some of the most successful Shi'a brigades in Syria, and while Western analysts are split on just how much of a change Qaani will have on the organization, he is generally seen as being a smoothly competent, ruthlessly efficient leader in keeping with the Quds Force's formidable reputation. It is hard to deny that Iran and the Quds Force are likely to step up their operations, rather than drawing them down. In Lebanon, the Quds-trained Hezbollah organization is gaining more and more legitimacy; in Yemen, their Houthi proxies are on the verge of a political settlement to finally end their civil war. The largest political bloc in Iraq's parliament is Shi'a, and in Syria, the Assad regime is poised to finalize a near-total victory in the coming years. What this means is that Iran's strategy of backing up its Shi'a proxies in the Middle East appears to be working, and with rising tensions between Iran and the new Taliban government in Afghanistan, it is not hard to imagine where new militias might start popping up next. Furthermore, the Quds Force's ultimate objective is the liberation, as they see it, of occupied Muslim lands. Now that the nation Iran sees as its greatest regional enemy, Israel, is beginning to ally itself with the region's major Sunni power, Saudi Arabia, more and more fuel is being poured onto an already-burning fire around Iran's nuclear program and the situation in Palestine. The Quds Force will be an instrumental part of Iran's next moves. They will infiltrate, they will spy, they will cultivate their assets abroad, and when the time is right, they will supply the training camps, material, and critical knowledge that their proxies will need. With the Quds Force acting as Iran's shadow hand, the nation may well continue to rise in its regional influence.

<!-- aeo:section end="general-qaani-and-the-quds-force-s-strategic-trajectory" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="frequently-asked-questions" -->
## Frequently Asked Questions

### How and when was the Quds Force founded?

The Quds Force emerged from the Iran-Iraq War of 1981–1989. During the war, three separate organizations — the Irregular Warfare Headquarters, the Lebanon Guard, and the Ramezan group — each developed Iran's capacity for extraterritorial operations with varying success. When the war ended in 1989, Iran unified all three under a single command within the Revolutionary Guard Corps, naming it the Quds Force, translating directly as "Jerusalem Force" in keeping with its stated mission of liberating what the Ayatollah considered occupied Muslim lands.

### What is the Quds Force's relationship to the IRGC and the Supreme Leader?

The Quds Force is an independent branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, functioning as something like a combination of the American Green Berets and CIA — specializing in military intelligence and unconventional warfare. It reports directly to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, not through the normal chain of military command. The Quds Force is organized into eight geographic directorates covering regions from Iraq and Lebanon to Europe, North America, and the former Soviet states, plus five operational branches: Intelligence, Finance, Politics, Sabotage, and Special Operations.

### What proxy networks has the Quds Force built and maintained?

Starting with Hezbollah in Lebanon — which the Quds Force helped establish and has continuously armed, funded, and trained — the organization built a patronage network focused entirely on non-state actors. It backed Afghanistan's Northern Alliance against the Taliban, trained Iraq's Badr Brigade, supported Hamas and Islamic Jihad, deployed advisors and proxy fighters from Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan into Syria to prop up Assad, and supplied the Houthis in Yemen with military advisors, drones, missiles, and tens of millions of dollars.

### Why is the Quds Force designated as a foreign terrorist organization?

In January 2020, the United States carried out a drone strike that killed Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, making the Quds Force the first — and to date only — state security agency placed on the US list of foreign terrorist organizations. Successive US administrations had blamed the Quds Force for the deaths of hundreds of American troops in Iraq through IED materials and training supplied to Shi'a militias. The organization has also been implicated in assassination plots on US soil, including a 2022 Justice Department revelation that the Quds Force tried to recruit a hitman to kill former National Security Adviser John Bolton.

### Who leads the Quds Force today and what is its strategic direction?

General Ismail Qaani, Soleimani's longtime deputy since the Iran-Iraq War, now commands the Quds Force. An expert in its financial operations and global monetary networks, Qaani is seen by Western analysts as a smoothly competent, ruthlessly efficient leader. Iran's strategy of backing Shi'a proxies — Hezbollah gaining legitimacy in Lebanon, Houthi proxies near political settlement in Yemen, Shi'a majorities dominant in Iraq's parliament, Assad consolidating victory in Syria — appears to be working, and the Quds Force is expected to step up rather than draw down its global operations.

<!-- aeo:section end="frequently-asked-questions" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="related-coverage" -->
## Related Coverage
- [Where Are Iran's Proxy Forces? Why the Axis of Resistance Has Left Tehran to Face Israel Alone](https://warfronts.pub/geopolitics/iran-proxy-forces-axis-of-resistance-collapse-israel)
- [The US Navy SEALs: Origins, Evolution, and Modern Operations](https://warfronts.pub/special-operations/us-navy-seals-origins-and-evolution)
- [The Origins of Naval Special Warfare: Unconventional Warfare from World War II to the Present](https://warfronts.pub/military-history/origins-of-naval-special-warfare)
- [Special Operators: Navy SEALs, United States.](https://warfronts.pub/analysis/special-operators-navy-seals-united-states)
- [Special Operators: Navy SEALs, United States.](https://warfronts.pub/analysis/special-operators-navy-seals-united-states-uw6bmd98)

<!-- aeo:section end="related-coverage" -->
<!-- aeo:section start="sources" -->
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[1]: https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/evolution-irans-qods-force-1979
[2]: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Qassem-Soleimani
[3]: https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/religion-context/country-profiles/syria
[4]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2006/4/10/mubaraks-shia-remarks-stir-anger
[5]: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Quds-Force
[6]: https://www.rferl.org/a/iran-quds-force-soleimani-explainer/30366930.html
[7]: https://web.archive.org/web/20081014070859/http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,252212,00.html
[8]: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-feb-15-fg-quds15-story.html
[9]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170701091213/http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/17/world/middleeast/17quds.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
[10]: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/irans-revolutionary-guards
[11]: https://www.dni.gov/nctc/ftos/irgc_fto.html
[12]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/who-are-iran-s-secretive-quds-forces-n1110156
[13]: https://www.counterextremism.com/threat/irgc-islamic-revolutionary-guard-corps
[14]: https://ctc.westpoint.edu/terrorist-groups/quds-force/
[15]: https://www.nytimes.com/topic/organization/islamic-revolutionary-guards-corps-quds-force
[16]: https://www.reuters.com/world/top-us-general-does-not-support-removing-irans-quds-force-terrorism-list-2022-04-07/
[17]: https://english.alarabiya.net/News/middle-east/2022/03/07/US-intelligence-uncovers-plot-by-Iran-s-Quds-Force-to-assassinate-John-Bolton-Report
[18]: https://web.archive.org/web/20140904194210/http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2011/October/11-ag-1339.html
[19]: https://www.thenationalnews.com/mena_edition/mena/iran-supplied-houthis-with-weapons-technology-says-senior-irgc-official-1.1209431
[20]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-yemen-iran-houthis/exclusive-iran-steps-up-support-for-houthis-in-yemens-war-sources-idUSKBN16S22R
[21]: https://www.state.gov/united-states-designates-houthi-finance-network-in-coordination-with-gulf-partners/
[22]: https://www.understandingwar.org/report/iranian-strategy-syria
[23]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/nov/28/iranian-spies-red-crescent-war
[24]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-syria-crisis-iran/iran-boosts-military-support-in-syria-to-bolster-assad-idUSBREA1K09U20140221
[25]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep20716
[26]: https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/war-yemen
[27]: https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/conflict-syria
[28]: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10703#:~:text=Hezbollah%20

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<!-- aeo:section end="sources" -->