Iran's web of secret wars

As the world focuses on Iran’s uranium enrichment and its stance on the nuclear program there is a potentially much larger threat of Iranian power to international security taking place. Iran fuels conflict within the Middle East and beyond in an attempt to consolidate its influence and tie down western resources in these conflicts. This situation has become especially threatening through Iran’s system of creating a system in which these secret wars it wages support each other with minimal involvement of Iranian resources. Rebels in Lebanon, Gaza, Somalia and Yemen support each other through Iranian liaisons and cooperation by Iranian allied regimes in Eritrea and Sudan. As this Iranian activity poses a risk to peace by escalating these conflicts it also presents a threat to western objectives of isolating Iran and combating terrorism in these regions.

Summary

Iran’s geopolitical objectives go beyond the buildup of military power within its own borders. Iranian influence now stretches all the way to the horn of Africa. A web of self-sustaining secret wars has formed between Lebanon, Gaza, Somalia and Yemen with cooperation of Eritrea and Sudan. In Lebanon Iran has been fueling funds, weapons and training to Hezbollah, which in return delivers training to the Somali Al Shabaab and Houthi rebels in Yemen. The Somali conflict in return has delivered weapons, ammunition and even combatants to other conflicts through Iranian smuggle routes. Iran has also been smuggling weapons to Hamas in Gaza and the Sudanese government through Eritrea, the epicenter of Iran’s illegal smuggling activities. Iran is also believed to have constructed a naval base in Eritrea that supports these activities as well as military naval presence in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Through this activity Iran is not only able to tie down western resources, it has also succeeded in gaining a stronger position over for example Saudi Arabia as the Islamic state supporter of these rebellions.

While Iran is continuously in the spotlight for its efforts to enrich uranium as well as the ensuing threats and debate within the international community, there is a larger evolution of Iran’s geopolitical agenda that goes largely unnoticed. During the last decade Iran has expanded its involvement in several conflicts in the Middle East and East Africa in order to expand its zone of influence. It has boosted its involvement by supporting rebels by delivering weapons, troops and knowhow. Iran is waging several secret wars this way stretching from Somalia and Yemen to Gaza and Lebanon. It has even succeeded in making these conflicts complement each other by acting as the broker that couples assets from one conflict to needs in another. By doing this Iran is able to fuel these conflicts without having to commit too many of its own assets while still gaining maximum results in terms of destabilizing opponents and gaining influence among anti-western combatants.

Iran’s involvement in Lebanon is of course well known and is the clearest example of Iran’s secret wars. In the early 1980’s, when Israel had invaded Lebanon, Iran was already influencing the founders of Hezbollah and delivered weapons and training to help them defeat Israel. Since then cooperation between Hezbollah and Iran has continued and Iran has kept delivering funds, training, intelligence and more sophisticated weapons systems to Hezbollah, which was able to limit the Israeli victory during its recent invasion of Lebanon in 2006. Reports have surfaced that Iran would have delivered extra fighters to Hezbollah to bolster its defenses while also training these forces coming from Islamist rebels in Somalia. This way Iran was able to deliver troops to Hezbollah without even committing any of its own, while also delivering training and experience to the conflict in Somalia. All Iran had to commit were a couple of flights to transport these fighters from one country to another.

Another longtime engagement by Iran in a secret war is the support of Hamas in Palestine. While Hamas was not created as an Iranian puppet it did grow closer to Iran since the early 90’s. In these years Iran is reported to have committed funds, weapons and training by Revolutionary Guard forces in Iranian facilities. In the last decade Hamas and Iran grew even closer, especially when Hamas’ 2006 election victory proved their importance to Iran and the Isolation of the elected Hamas government by the international community pushed them closer to Iran. Hamas itself does not play a main role in Iran’s system of interdependent secret wars. It does not export anything to other conflict areas, obviously since Hamas itself is continuously short of weapons and ammunitions and no knowhow is exported because Hezbollah has shown itself to be much stronger in its fights against Israel and has become Iran’s main hub for experience. Hamas however continues to play a part on the receiving end as Iran continues to commit resources into smuggling weapons to Gaza.

In Somalia Iran has been delivering training, by revolutionary guards as well as Hezbollah fighters, and weapons to the Islamist rebels of the Al Shabaab. The biggest reasons for Iran to get involved in Somalia during the last decade were probably the perfect opportunity to destabilize a pro-western regime, tying up western resources being used to help Somalia in fighting these rebels, and the actual realistic possibility of an Islamist regime ruling Somalia to become a potential ally of Iran. But even if the latter never becomes reality, the conflict is possibly one of the most successful at destabilizing western hegemony. Iran’s involvement in Somalia was also the beginning of having conflicts support each other. Its long established experience with Hezbollah in Lebanon allowed it to try and transfer this experience directly by bringing Hezbollah trainers to Somalia to train directly with Al Shabaab forces. This makes any involvement by Iranian forces unnecessary unless in a function of liaisons.

The system however became even more complete with Iran’s decision to back Houthi rebels in Yemen. These Shiite fighters have a closer religious and political proximity to Iran than those in Somalia, but once again Iran has been able to fuel a conflict that draws in resources from both Saudi Arabia, its largest antagonist within the region, and the United States, its largest antagonist in the whole international community. On top of this Iran has not had to commit any weapons, trainers or ammunition coming from Iran in the conflict. Yemen itself has many small arms available and thus didn’t require Iran to import these. Ammunition was bought in Eritrea and Somalia and shipped to Yemen while once again Hezbollah trainers were brought in to bring the necessary knowhow. There were attempts at gathering fighters in Somalia to go into combat alongside the Houthis but it is unclear whether these attempts resulted in actually deploying a notable number of Somali fighters in Yemen. Iran was however forced to raise its involvement when Saudi Arabia and the United States deployed ships to blockade Yemeni ports to halt the smuggling of ammunitions. This prompted Iran to become more active in the Red Sea in order to facilitate its smuggling efforts and to keep Saudi Arabia and the United States submitting their naval assets to the blockades and patrols.

Apart from Iran’s dedication to these specific conflicts it has also invested greatly in its cooperation with Eritrea. While this country itself is not actively at war anymore, it does serve as the main transit area of smuggled weapons for the horn of Africa. It has been the central point in Iran’s connections between the conflicts in Lebanon, Somalia and Yemen as well as smuggling operations to Gaza. Goods smuggled by sea from and to Iran, Somalia and Yemen are channeled through the southern Eritrean harbor of Assab. The Iranian activity has caused a nearly continuous presence of Iranian intelligence officers in the region of Assab, with the sole purpose of running Iran’s secret wars and facilitating the cooperation between the parties supported by Iran. As Eritrea becomes more and more isolated by international community it finds support and protection in Iran. On top of this Iran is also able to help Eritrea improve its economical situation. This is why an Iranian team has taken over control of the refinery at Assab which had suffered greatly from being out of commission for years during the Ethiopian-Eritrean war. Iran itself also finds an important partner in this as it has no problems coming up with crude oil, yet finds itself constantly looking for solutions to gain access to enough refined products for its own market.

While the individual involvements of Iran in these conflicts by itself are quite worrying, it is not a very new concept. Countries have been waging secret wars since the beginning of times. The most well known examples are China and Russia’s secret war against the United States in Vietnam, the United States involvement in combating the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and even the activities of Congo’s neighbors during the Congo wars. What makes the current Iranian activity this extraordinary is the way Iran has tuned these different proxy wars into each other. This means Iran is still an instigator and facilitator, but it does not carry the full load of supporting these secret wars. It shifts resources from one conflict to another while committing a minimal amount of its own. The map displayed above shows how the transfer of weapons and ammunition (AK symbol), combatants (silhouette symbol) and training (brain symbol) create a web between the different conflicts. This map also illustrates how almost all of these activities pass through Eritrea, making Eritrea the nucleus of this activity. Eritrea and the Red Sea area are obviously paramount in Iran’s activities in these conflicts. It also has the ruling regimes in both Sudan and Eritrea at its side, securing most of the western banks of the Red Sea.

In order to maintain their activity in Eritrea and the Red Sea it is likely that Iran is maintaining a military deployment in Eritrea, both to secure its operations on Eritrean territory as to support naval operations in the Red Sea to facilitate weapons smuggling. At the Geopolitical and Conflict Report we have located an undocumented naval base in Eritrea that is most likely used by Iranian forces for these purposes. The base, shown in the satellite picture below, is located near the city of Assab, which is known to be the city used by Iran for its smuggling activities. The base was constructed over the last decade, according to satellite footage initial construction started around 2000, the large dock was completed somewhere between 2003 and 2006. Based on rumors and satellite footage the base may only have become active in the last few years. While the dock was constructed after Eritrea’s independence it is clearly not constructed to be used by the Eritrean Navy. While the shortest dock on this pier is 50 meters long, the largest ships in the Eritrean Navy are only 37.5 meters long. This pier was built to accommodate ships longer than 110 meters, which makes it large enough to accept all of Iran’s frigates, its destroyer and of course its submarines. It is unclear which ships are currently using this base, but Iran’s navy has been operating closer and closer to the Red Sea during the last few years under the guise of anti piracy operations. After the Saudi and US blockades of Yemeni ports against Iranian weapons smuggling Iran also declared it would deploy its Ghadir mini-submarines off the coast of Yemen. These submarines would then require a base this close to their area of operations.

Iran’s whole system of supporting rebel groups is however not without competition. While there obviously are the western countries that try to fight Iran’s influence and activities in supporting these rebels there are also Islamic factions that compete with Iran for influence with these groups. In Somalia for example Iran has had to compete with quite a lot of factions to become the power behind the rebels. One of their main competitors in Somalia and any other conflict is of course the Al Qaeda network, with their resources and the 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States they have gained a position that gains them access to almost any Islamic rebellion. On top of this Al Qaeda was already very active in the horn of Africa before 2001; in 1998 for example, when it orchestrated the US embassy attacks in Tanzania and Kenya. While Al Qaeda’s influence is hard enough to fight in a country inhabited by Sunni Muslims, there are many others competing for this influence. There have been reports of Pakistani Military Intelligence delivering weapons to Somalia. This is probably not an official Pakistani policy, but an action taken by pro-Taliban factions within Pakistani Military Intelligence. Al Shabaab has many links with the Taliban dating back from the 70’s and 80’s that facilitate this cooperation. The main purpose of this operation is probably for the Al Shabaab to tie down western resources that are then unavailable for the Afghanistan theater. Besides these non-state actors there are also several state actors that have supported the Al Shabaab, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Saudia Arabia however is likely to have ended its support of the Al Shabaab since the Iranian-made links between the Yemeni Houthi rebels and the Somali Al Shabaab became apparent. In fact this could be seen as a direct victory of Iran over Saudi Arabia because it was able to secure a position of main foreign state sponsor of the Somali rebellion by coupling this rebellion to one the Saudis could impossibly tolerate.

If Iran is able to continue to expand this system by adding an insurgency or isolated state every few years, Iran may well become a superpower before the world even realizes it. Iranian influence has clearly already burst out of the boundaries of the Middle East and Iran’s logistical abilities only become stronger. At this point the west’s reaction is also one of combating the symptoms, being the separate insurgencies, without tackling most of the causes. While this is a very careful business and western actors are obviously trying to avoid an open war with Iran it is careless to allow Iran to fuel these conflicts and to expand its influence and anti-western agenda to a level where western nations are unable to control the consequences. Any attempts at diplomatically and economically isolating Iran also become useless when the west allows them to operate beyond Iranian borders where it finds other isolated diplomatic and economical allies. It should be top priority for western nations to halt the illegal smuggling of weapons orchestrated by Iran, since this is their most important means of gaining influence and tying down western resources beyond its borders.