Before he was killed
in a U.S. drone strike,
Iranian general
Qassim Suleimani
was showing up everywhere —
in Aleppo, Baghdad,
Beirut,
with Iran’s leader,
with Iraq’s former prime minister.
It wasn’t always this way.
For years, Suleimani was
an under-the-radar operator
in the Middle East.
He ran an elite military unit
called the Quds Force.
It’s an arm of Iran’s
Revolutionary Guards Corps
that works to expand Iran’s
influence in the Middle East
using covert military
and intelligence tactics.
But in 2014, things
started to change.
The elusive commander was
spotted in the public eye
more often.
We started seeing
him with militias,
on battlefields, at funerals.
He even had his own Instagram.
We combed through hundreds
of images and videos,
many of them propaganda
from Suleimani’s
early military days
to his recent stint
as a social media sensation.
These appearances help
paint a more complete picture
of how the 
Quds Force operates,
through a network
of proxy forces,
or local militias,
along a key corridor
that Iran calls the
“axis of resistance.”
It stretches through Iraq
and Syria to Lebanon.
Let’s start in Lebanon.
These are rare images
that appear to have
been taken very recently.
They show Suleimani with
Hassan Nasrallah, who
is the leader of Hezbollah, a
Lebanon-based militant group.
Hezbollah is the archetype for
how the Quds Force operates.
They helped found the group
and fund it to this day.
This support fueled
Hezbollah’s rise
as a political party,
and as a military threat
to Israel, Iran’s archenemy.
These are Hezbollah fighters
posing with Iranian weapons.
and here’s a video
of Suleimani
with a senior commander
of Hezbollah.
The group gives
Iran a key foothold
in the region, along this
corridor we told you about.
This photo from 2013 reveals
just how strong the bond is
between these two groups.
It shows a prominent
Hezbollah member
at a funeral for Suleimani’s
mother in Tehran.
Two years later, that
Hezbollah member died,
and Suleimani himself
made the trip to Beirut
to pay his respects.
He’s seen here
praying at his grave.
Now let’s look
at how Suleimani
took the Hezbollah playbook
and mimicked it in Iraq.
Here, too, sightings
of Suleimani
help tell the story.
Here he is in 2015 with
Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis,
the leader of an
Iraq-based militia
called Kataib Hezbollah,
also known as K.H.
Over the last few
years, the two
were seen frequently
together, and the bond
is strong here, too, judging
by this propaganda video.
Similar to Hezbollah,
K.H. is active in politics
and helped push Iran’s
interests in Baghdad.
And it runs
military operations.
Suleimani’s team
trains and arms them,
and one of their main
targets over the years
has been American forces.
We found propaganda
footage of K.H. attacks
on American bases in Iraq.
And K.H. also joined the fight
against ISIS, which Iran
considered a major threat.
In fact, Suleimani
even shows up
at victories against
ISIS in Iraq.
These were brutal campaigns,
where civilians were often
collateral damage.
K.H. would later be seen during
the recent attack on the
U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.
That episode led up to
Suleimani’s killing,
and the other senior
commander to die in the attack
was none other than K.H.’s
leader: Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.
The next place
we see Suleimani
is Syria, the missing piece
in Iran’s strategic corridor.
The militias we
just told you about,
Hezbollah and K.H.,
here they are
in Syria, fighting to help
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad
stay in power.
Syria was also the
only place we actually
saw Iranian operatives
besides Suleimani in action.
Here, one of them describes how
they train fighters in Syria.
But this video wasn’t
meant to be released.
The footage was
captured and leaked
by Syrian opposition forces.
Remember, it’s all
part of the playbook.
Iranian Quds Force
fighters rarely
appeared in any of
the videos we found.
They stay under the radar
and do most of their work
through proxies.
But we still see Suleimani.
Here he is near Aleppo
in 2015.
The eventual fall of Aleppo
became a key turning point
for Assad, with devastating
consequences for civilians.
One big winner in
all this bloodshed
was Iran, which kept
its foothold in Syria.
There’s another place
on the map, Yemen,
where Iran is active, but
we don’t see Suleimani here.
Why?
Because Iran doesn’t want
to be linked directly
to the conflict.
We do see other clues.
These are Iranian weapons
being used by a group called
the Houthis.
They’re fighting
against forces
backed by Iran’s great
rival, Saudi Arabia.
And Suleimani’s lack
of public profile
here tells us one final thing
about the Quds Force:
controlling whether
they come out of
or remain in the shadows
is all part of their game.
