Starting around 2013, when Hassan Rouhani became Iran’s president, Western media suddenly began reporting about a general who had become the most influential man in Iran’s foreign policy. It was Gen. Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Soleimani, according to the New Yorker, was described by a former CIA officer as “the single most powerful operative in the Middle East.” He was “the shadow commander” who was “reshaping the Middle East.” He had been commander of the Quds Force of the guard for 15 years at the time of the article, and he was even on the U.S. Treasury Department’s terrorist list for his involvement in the killing of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and for commanding various operations in Afghanistan.
During those 15 years leading the Quds force, the Islamic Regime had always denied Soleimani’s role in interfering in other countries. But the Obama administration, when it hastily withdrew military forces from Iraq, urgently needed Iran’s help keeping the area stable. Obama therefore recognized Iran as a power in the Middle East and declared so publicly.
Concurrently, there were a lot of highly dramatized narratives about Soleimani in the West, some describing him as the “Dark Knight” (according to Foreign Policy magazine) and “Mr. Fix-It” (as stated by the Weekly Standard). He was also named “puppeteer of the Middle East” by the Guardian. Iran’s government had long been eager to build up the myth of Soleimani, but after the coverage by Western media outlets, even the U.S. government was willing to participate.
Ryan Crocker, the American ambassador to a few countries in the Middle East, including Iraq from 2007 to 2009, dealt with Soleimani indirectly several times and must be counted as one of his admirers. In the New Yorker profile, Crocker characterized him as a smart, flexible, and pragmatic man who had been cooperative with the U.S. in Afghanistan. Crocker believed that the Iranian government was very close to rapprochement with the U.S. until President Bush named Iran as part of an “axis of evil.”
“One word in one speech changed history,” Crocker said. He thought the reformers inside the Iranian government were on the defensive after that.
Crocker claimed that he once asked one of the Iraqi leaders if Soleimani was especially religious. The leader’s answer was “not really,” Crocker told the New Yorker. “He attends mosque periodically. Religion doesn’t drive him. Nationalism drives him, and the love of the fight.” That’s a strong claim about someone who is a senior member of the guard and one of those closest to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Dexter Filkins, the writer of the New Yorker profile, maintains that “if Soleimani couldn’t have the Basij [an Iranian paramilitary force], he settled for the next best thing: Brigadier General Hossein Hamedani, the Basij’s former deputy commander.” Hamedani was killed in October 2015, two years after the profile was published — one of the very first of Iran’s casualties in the Syrian Civil War. In his profile, Filkins even describes the Quds Force as an “elite branch of the Revolutionary Guard … the sharp instrument of Iranian foreign policy, roughly analogous to a combined CIA and Special Forces.” This was another exaggeration of the Quds Force and its capabilities. (Filkins also claimed, incorrectly, that “its name comes from the Persian word for Jerusalem.” It’s actually Arabic.)
“At least once,” Filkins writes, “he even travelled into the heart of American power in Baghdad. ‘[Soleimani] came into the Green Zone to meet the Iraqis,’ the Iraqi politician told me. ‘I think the Americans wanted to arrest him, but they figured they couldn’t.’”
But on March 18, 2016, the Wall Street Journal came out with a different narrative by Zalmay Khalilzad, the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq. “Mr. Khalilzad said he instructed U.S. and Iraqi forces that April to allow Gen. Soleimani to enter the American-controlled Green Zone to deliver the news to the Iraqi politician … Mr. Khalilzad said. ‘He thought we didn’t know’ that he was making the trip to Baghdad.”
The Guardian published a few articles about Soleimani that were frequently cited by Iranian media, in particular by Fars News Agency, which is affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Interestingly enough, the author of those articles is Saeed Kamali Dehghan, the Guardian’s Iran correspondent and a former journalist for Fars News Agency.
The long public-relations campaign on behalf of Qassem Soleimani boosted internet searches about him among Iranians. According to Wikipedia, the entry on Qassem Soleimani was the fourth most viewed article on Persian-language Wikipedia in 2014. Because of sanctions against Iran, the data for the most searched phrases on Google in Iran is not available, but the data for Qassem Soleimani in Google Trends shows the same significant rise in popularity during this period of time.
Soleimani’s death puts an end to years of the Iranian government’s propaganda investment in Soleimani. No effort was spared to build him up in the media and spread fear of this mythical nationalist figure based on disinformation. The mythical figure is now gone, but will the fear dissipate?
Saam Izadi is a journalist and media technologies analyst living in the U.S.
