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The Myth of Vertical Integration in Regional Conflict:
Iran and the “Axis of Resistance”
Yasuyuki Matsunaga
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
matsunaga@tufs.ac.jp
Abstract
By examining the public discourse on the proxy wars, the scholarly discussions and some of
the newly proposed perspectives on reconceptualizing proxy warfare, and how Iran sees the
matter, this chapter seeks to address the following two sets of questions. First, how best one
may understand the relations between the Iranian state including the Islamic Revolutionary
Guard Corps (IRGC) Qods Force, on the one hand, and the Palestinian militants, on the other,
and particularly whether the relations may best be captured by the oft-applied “proxy
warfare” perspective or not. Second, relatedly, why Iran supports the Palestinian militants,
and particularly, how Iran understands what it is doing. This chapter draws three general
conclusions. First, it is untenable to think that Iran is engaging in “proxy wars” in the
classical sense of the term, that is, for cutting human, transactional, material, and political
costs and benefiting from operational ambiguity and deniability. Second, from the point of
view of the Iranian state, those “resistance” groups are not clients or surrogates. Rather, they
are primarily treated as “allies.” Third, the Iranian support to the “resistance” groups may
continue as long as Iran benefits strategically from the effects and consequences of the
activities that those groups engage in with the support of the Iranian state.
A preprint of a chapter to be published in Gaza Nakba 2023–2024: Background, Context,
Consequences, ed. Hiroyuki Suzuki and Keiko Sakai (Springer Singapore, January 2025).
ISBN 978-981-97-4867-9. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-4868-6_8
© Yasuyuki Matsunaga, 2024. All rights reserved.
1
This is not just our war––it is also your war. This
is the war of the sons of light against the sons of
darkness. This is a war against the axis of evil led
by Iran and its three proxies: Hezbollah, Hamas
and the Houthis.
—Benjamin Netanyahu, January 2024
I don’t think this is a series of separate
conflicts…. I think it’s basically all driven by
Tehran.
—John Bolton, January 2024
Proxy warfare … has been pursued with varying
degrees of success. Perhaps the most successful
user of proxy warfare is Iran.
—Jack Watling, June 2019
1. Introducon
British military affairs scholar Jack Watling not only wrote the passage cited in the epigraph
above, but also noted in the same paper that “direct retaliation against Iran for its proxy
strategy would likely be seen as an unacceptable escalation” (2019b, 16). As if to fulfil the
prophecy of a sentence this researcher had written five years earlier, Iran’s IRGC Aerospace
Force, in the wee hours of April 14, 2024, fired in the first-ever direct military attack from
the Iranian soil a barrage of attack drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles on multiple
military targets in Israel, including the Nevatim and Ramon Airbases in the Negev desert.
The coordinated attacks were seemingly designed so that slow-moving drones and slightly
faster cruise missiles may arrive around the same time to keep the Israeli forces occupied
with their interception, thereby potentially opening the way for much faster ballistic missiles
(or at least some of them) to penetrate the Israeli air defense systems and hit the intended
targets. The plot apparently worked and, reportedly, as many as nine ballistic missiles,
including at least one Emad missile, successfully landed in the Nevatim and Ramon Airbases,
causing some declared (minor) and undeclared (perhaps not so minor) damages (ISW News
2024).1
In this particular exchange, the trigger event that seemingly amounted to a “direct retaliation
against Iran for its proxy strategy” had happened thirteen days earlier in the Syrian capital
Damascus. On the late afternoon of April 1, a suspected Israeli strike had completely
1 All translations from the Persian and Arabic sources are by this author.
© Yasuyuki Matsunaga, 2024. All rights reserved.
2
destroyed an Iranian Embassy building that housed, among others, its consulate section.
Reportedly, it was an Israeli F-35 flying over the Golan Heights that targeted the diplomatic
facility with guided missiles. The apparent intended targets were IRGC Quds Force Brigadier
General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, his deputy Brigadier General Mohammad Hadi Hajj
Rahimi and five other Qods Force officers, reportedly attending a meeting with Palestinian
militants inside the diplomatic compound. As of this writing, General Zahedi has been the
most senior IRGC commander killed in the regional conflicts that ensued the October 7, 2023
“Al-Aqsa Flood” operation by the Gaza-based Palestinian militants. A veteran of the Iran-
Iraq War (1980-1988), General Zahedi had not only served as the Commander of the IRGC
Ground Forces (2005-2008) and Operations Deputy of the IRGC Commander-in-Chief
(2016-2019), he had spent a total of 14 years in Lebanon and Syria as a young Qods Force
officer and then its commander there, including six years from 2008 following the
assassination of Hizbullah commander Imad Mughniyyah and four years from 2020
following the assassination of then Qods Force Commander, Qasem Soleimani. Zahedi,
known in Lebanon and Syria as Abu Mahdi, had been the key link on the ground between the
IRGC Qods Force and the Lebanese Hizbullah, as Hasan Nasrullah eulogized him after his
death (al-Manar 2024).
A question arises here, however. If he had been the chief liaison between the IRGC Qods
Force and the Lebanese Hizbullah for almost three decades, why was Israel so motivated to
assassinate General Zahedi at this particular time in the regional conflicts and at his
workplace, which happened to be the diplomatic compound in Damascus, Syria, even at the
risk of escalating the so-called decade-long “shadow” war between Israel and Iran into a
potential open and direct military confrontation between the two countries? After all,
although geographically spread beyond the Gaza-Israeli border, the post-“October 7” regional
conflicts were mainly being fought between Israel (and its primary military supporter, the
United States), on one side, and the Palestinian militants and some other “resistance” groups,
notably from Iraq and Yemen, on the other. In addition, the Secretary-General of the
Lebanese Hizbullah, Hasan Nasrullah, did declare on November 3 that his organization had
also entered the battle in support of the Palestinians, albeit in a markedly reserved manner, on
October 8—that is, the day after the beginning of the “Al-Aqsa Storm” operation—along the
Lebanese-Israeli border areas. In its turn, the U.S. had entered the regional conflicts by
bombing the facilities that reportedly belonged to the Yemeni Ansarollah group (a.k.a. the
Houthis), along with its chief European ally Britain. The U.S. also had bombed pro-Iranian
Shi‘i paramilitary bases in Iraq and Syria on multiple occasions and had assassinated a key
Iraqi Popular Mobilization Force (al-hashd al-sha‘bi) commander, Abu Baqir al-Sa‘idi of
Kata’ib al-Hizbullah, on a busy Baghdad street via one of its attack drones on February 8,
2024. But Iran had not been directly involved up to the point of the trigger event, at least not
in terms of joining any of the actual battles itself.
Two possibilities come to the mind of this author. First, as the remarks quoted in the epigraph
above suggests that the Israeli leadership may have been operating under the general
assumption that Iran has played a not insignificant role in fueling the regional conflicts,
including the onset of the October 7 attack, and wanted to either penalize the Iranian officials
for it or coerce Iran into halting its efforts and that General Zahedi happened to be nearby and
was therefore targeted. In the wake of the April 1 assassination, several Iranian domestic
media outlets circulated a two-month-old video clip from the Israeli Channel 14 claiming that
the Israeli government intended to kill four top Qods Force commanders including Zahedi
(see, for example, Khabaronline 2024). Second, the Israeli leadership wanted to specifically
© Yasuyuki Matsunaga, 2024. All rights reserved.
3
assassinate General Zahedi and his team precisely because of the role he and his men had
played in preparing for the October 7 attack by the Palestinian militants. There are several
indications that the latter may have been the case. The assassinations of General Zahedi and
his team came after a series of similarly precise targeted assassinations outside the Gaza
Strip, starting with Seyyed Reza Mousavi (a.k.a. Razi Musavi), a Syria-based veteran IRGC
Qods Force Procurement Deputy, in Damascus on December 25, 2023 and Salih al-Aruri, the
deputy chairman of Hamas’s political bureau, in Beirut on January 2, and most recently
Sadegh Omidzadeh, the Intelligence Deputy of the Qods Force in Syria, and his team in
Damascus on January 20, 2024. Still the question remains as to exactly why Zahedi was
singled out and directly targeted, given that there reportedly is a separate Qods Force unit in
charge of helping the Palestinians, whose commander had been identified, among others by
the U.S. Treasury Department, as Mohammad Saeed Izadi (a.k.a. Hajj Ramadan) (The
Treasury 2019; Brodsky 2023). The publicly circulated assumption seemed to be that General
Zahedi was the Qods Force’s link to Hizbullah, while Izadi was its link to the Palestinian
militants. As the relations and logistical cooperation between the IRGC and the Lebanese
Hizbullah date back to the period following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, that
General Zahedi had worked with the Hizbullah, on the surface, does not seem to have any
particular post-October 7 implication. If so, it remains puzzling why Israel wanted to
specifically assassinate Zahedi at this point even at the said risk of escalation.
In this context, it is highly notable that in the wake of Zahedi’s assassination, Kata’ib Izz al-
Din al-Qassam (the Qassam Brigades), the main Palestinian militant group in Gaza, issued a
communiqué praising his “great role in building the resistance front against the Zionist
occupation over many years and his prominent role in the Battle of Al-Aqsa Flood”
(Moqawama News 2024). This announcement, on its surface, seems in apparent contradiction
with what the Iranian officials, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and
Hizbullah Secretary-General Hasan Nasrullah proclaimed in the wake of the October 7
attack. They had claimed that the decision to launch an attack at this particular juncture was
exclusively made by the Palestinian militants, particularly the Qassam Brigades, and that
neither Iran nor Hizbullah had any prior knowledge about it (Khamenei 2023a; al-Manar
2003). Nasrullah also pointed out, seemingly cogently, that the operational secrecy that
included not giving any advance notice to its allies—in his words “the rest of the countries
and movements of the Axis of Resistance”—was what ensured the “dazzling success of the
operation” (al-Manar 2003). If it were a proxy warfare operation, however, these denials may
reenforce the classic image of a conflict delegation that allows deniability.
In the ensuing discussions, this chapter attempts to address the following two sets of
questions, assuming that Iran had been providing not only political but material (particularly
financial) support to the Gaza-based Palestinian militants prior to the October 7, 2023 attack.2
First, how best one may understand the relations between the Iranian state including the
IRGC Qods Force, on the one hand, and the Palestinian militants, on the other, and
particularly whether the relations may best be captured by the oft-applied “proxy warfare”
perspective or not. Second, relatedly, why Iran supports the Palestinian militants, and
2 It may be worth noting that the Iranian state’s financial support to the militant groups such
as Hizbullah and Hamas is not particularly popular among the general public in Iran, as best
captured by the popular slogan, “Na Ghazzeh, Na Lobnan; Janam Feday-e Iran” (Neither
Gaza, Nor Lebanon, I Sacrifice My Life for Iran), some versions of which have been chanted
by young protesters at least since the early years of the Khatami presidency in the late 1990s.
© Yasuyuki Matsunaga, 2024. All rights reserved.
4
particularly, how Iran understands what it is doing. It may be important to add that given the
limited scope, this chapter will not address what the October 7 attack by the Gaza-based
Palestinian militants constituted, for example, whether it was a justifiable operation, on
resistance grounds or otherwise, or an act of terrorism. Neither will this chapter address the
legitimacy of the ensuing Israeli operations against the Gazans, including the militants such
as the Qassam Brigades and the ordinary residents. Nor will this chapter address seemingly
the most pressing question, namely, what defines the pre-October 7 relations between the
Israeli state and the Gaza-based Palestinians, particularly whether the concept of setter
colonialism best describes them or not. Suffice it to say that, on these three questions, this
author agrees with the arguments laid out in the two articles published in the wake of the
October 7 attack and the ensuing Israeli operations by two contemporary social theorists,
Judith Butler and Talal Asad (Butler 2023; Asad 2024). I find them exceptionally well-
articulated.3
2. Seeing “Proxy Wars”
On January 13, 2024, marking the occasion of what he called “hundred days of the war,”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pronounced his version of the proxy war thesis as
follows:
Several days ago, I met with Secretary of State Blinken. I thanked him for the
American assistance and I emphasized to him: We embarked on this war after we
were massacred. We are not stopping. We are continuing until we eliminate Hamas
and return our hostages. I told him something else: This is not just our war––it is
also your war. This is the war of the sons of light against the sons of darkness. This
is a war against the axis of evil led by Iran and its three proxies: Hezbollah, Hamas
and the Houthis (Prime Minister’s Office, 2024; italics added).
In his turn, John Bolton, a former national security advisor to President Donald J. Trump,
expressed his version of the proxy war thesis in his on-camera interview with a U.S.-based
journalist affiliated with a news organization based in Iraqi Kurdistan a week earlier as
follows:
I look at the conflicts across the region as all being on one chessboard … and the
responsible party here are the ayatollahs in Tehran through their surrogate proxy
groups—terrorists like Hamas, Hizbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, the Shi’ite militia
groups in Iraq and Syria…. I don’t think this is a series of separate conflicts… I
think it’s basically all driven by Tehran (Mylroie, 2024).
Accusing one’s state-level adversaries of engaging in “disturbing” proxy wars has become
commonplace today among government officials, policymakers and political commentators
of various kinds. The public politics of proxy war accusations is on daily display, before both
domestic and international audiences. This may be true not just in the case of the Middle East
and North Africa, but in other regions of the world such as South Asia, Latin America, Africa
3 For an additional discussion by Judith Butler on the issue of whether to call the Palestinian
militants who staged the October 7 attack “terrorists” or not, refer to (New Yorker Radio
Hour 2024).
© Yasuyuki Matsunaga, 2024. All rights reserved.
5
and the post-Soviet areas (see Moghadam, Rauta and Wyss 2023). One indication of the
sheer prevalence of the practice is that the above-quoted examples of Netanyahu and Bolton,
as unrefined and unnuanced they sound, may well serve as not caricatures but truly
representative cases. In one sense, accusing adversary states of engaging in proxy warfare
appears to supplement, if not to have supplanted, the previously well-established practice
among sovereign states of accusing each other of supporting “terrorist organizations.” This
may go beyond simply lamenting the proliferation of a potentially problematic practice. As
has been pointed out (see, for example, Watling 2019b, 11), the use of “proxies” and
“supporting” rebel groups, terrorists or otherwise, are as an empirical matter almost
impossible to distinguish.
The aforementioned observed increase in the recourse to the proxy war perspective, in part,
reflects, on the one hand, the presence of multiple active “theaters” of armed conflicts in
many parts of the world, including the Middle East and North Africa, and the accompanying
sense of a seeming proliferation of proxy wars in recent years (cf. Akbarzadeh and Gourlay
2023, 326-327). It also reflects, on the other hand, the continuation on the part of officials
and policymakers, particularly among internationally interventionist states, of the long-
standing Kissingerian “realist” bias, that is, seeing international affairs through the prism of
great power rivalry and not paying attention to, or not being able to understand, nationalist
aspirations and sovereignty-seeking movements of various sorts, particularly in the extra-
Euro-Atlantic contexts. There also is a strong indication of the continued effects of the
nominalist bias, a flipside of the Kissingerian realist bias that sees viabilities of subnational
groups only when they are the “clients” of sovereign states.
3. Explaining “Proxy Warfare”
Seeing is one thing and explaining is another. For that matter, scholarly discussions on the
subject have evolved from the original discussions as part of the Cold War rivalry in the
“Third” world and the more recent, civil war scholarship. Proxy warfare has traditionally
been understood as third-party patronage and the delegation of armed conflict to local and
less-resourceful actors, such as regional states and armed rebels. The accrued benefits to the
patrons are: first, it enables them to cut costs (human, transactional, material and political
costs) and, second, it allows deniability (Salehyan 2010, 495; Watling 2019b, 12). Therefore,
beyond and regardless of the above mentioned Kissingerian bias, the idea of considering
other actors as one’s “proxy,” “surrogate” or “client” inevitably is based on a top-down
perspective and, as such, the idea of resource- and/or power-differentials is implicitly built in.
Thus, British scholar Jack Watling noted that “[t]he term ‘proxy’ is widely employed to
denote a client that receives funding and equipment from, and acts in the interests of, a
patron” (Watling 2019b, 11). Similarly, U.S. scholar Daniel Byman stated in his Editor’s
Note that “[m]inor powers, rebel groups, and other organizations often act as proxies for
more powerful states or groups, which use them to fight (or commit) terrorism, counter rival
regimes, or otherwise advance their interests” (Moghadam and Wyss 2018). For that matter,
Byman went on to write a commentary titled “Why Be a Pawn to a State? Proxy Wars from a
Proxy’s Perspective,” and emphasized the “proxies’” need for, and the benefits that accrue to
them from, outside support in terms of money, weapons, training, and recognition (Byman
2018).
© Yasuyuki Matsunaga, 2024. All rights reserved.
6
Since the matter involves two parties, however, patronage and delegation, if subjectively
accurate seen from the perspective of one side, will unlikely describe the entire dynamics.
That is, the parties on the receiving end may understand the relationships differently and
undoubtedly have a set of different calculations of their own interests. Scholars, therefore,
have utilized the principal-agent perspective to describe and analyze some of the
complications of what they describe as conflict delegation (e.g, Salehyan 2010; Salehyan,
Siroky and Wood 2014; for a critique, see Farasoo 2021). In addition, one is hard pressed to
empirically identify actual “proxies,” that is, subnational collective actors or smaller states
that behave—much less, are willing to behave—as “clients” in the ways defined above (Cf.
Watling 2019b, 11).
Partially for this reason, political scientist and civil war scholar Stathis Kalyvas went so far as
to state that ambiguity is inherent in the nature of civil wars. He noted:
In short, ambiguity is endemic to civil wars; this turns their characterization into a
quest for an ever-deeper “real” nature, presumably hidden underneath misleading
facades—an exercise akin to uncovering Russian dolls. Thus, it is often argued that
religious wars are really about class, or class wars are really about ethnicity, or
ethnic wars are only about greed and looting, and so on. The difficulty of
characterizing civil wars is a conceptual problem rather than one of measurement. If
anything, the more detailed the facts, the bigger the difficulty in establishing the
“true” motives and issues on the ground, as Paul Brass has nicely shown in the case
of ethnic riots in India. An alternative is to recognize, instead, that the motives
underlying action in civil war are inherently complex and ambiguous. At the same
time, just to state this point is as unsatisfactory as to ignore it. It is necessary,
instead, to theorize this more complex understanding of civil wars so as to
incorporate it into systematic research (Kalyvas 2003, 476).
In his turn, Kalyvas went on to argue that civil war dynamics are “substantially shaped by
local cleavages” and that “master cleavages” as represented in the “dominant discourse of the
war” often fail to explain the “nature of the conflict and violence” as they unfold on the
ground (Kalyvas 2003, 479).
Given the above discussion, it may well be warranted to dismiss outright the crudest version
of the “proxy war” thesis as articulated by some politicians and government officials, current
and former, such as Netanyahu and Bolton that Iran is the “puppet master” controlling and
deploying its “proxy forces” at will in a vertically-integrated region-wide conflict (see also
McChrystal 2019). For that matter, scholarly understandings and discussions of proxy
warfare tend to be more nuanced and robust than those crude representations. In fact, the
notion of hierarchical organization, or vertical integration, in sponsor-proxy relationships is
one of the first “conventional wisdom” notions that is dismissed as “simplistic” (Moghadam
and Wyss 2018, Myth #3).
Coincidentally, as has been pointed out, “the provision of external support to belligerents in
civil wars … internationalizes these armed conflicts,” while often prolonging them and also
“raising their lethality rate” (Moghadam and Wyss 2018). The wars in Afghanistan in the
1980s and Syria in the 2010s are the cases in point. And foreign intervention via conflict
delegation may also haunt the sponsor years later by sowing the seeds of different sets of
© Yasuyuki Matsunaga, 2024. All rights reserved.
7
“grievances” (or conflict cleavages) on the ground, as was apparently the case with the al-
Qa‘idah attack in the U.S. on September 11, 2001.4
It is important to note, in this context, that in the field of strategic studies, new efforts toward
reconceptualizing proxy warfare have been made lately. Rather than approaching proxy
warfare as inexpensive and politically convenient tools to deploy wherein proxy forces are
fundamentally considered fungible assets, scholars have started to emphasize the strategic
dimensions of competitions that may involve “proxy” or third-party forces. Jack Watling and
Vladimir Rauta are among those who have made contributions toward this direction. Watling,
for example, has commented on Andrew Mumford’s (2013, 40) definition of proxy wars as
“conflicts in which a third party intervenes indirectly in order to influence the strategic
outcome in favour of its preferred faction,” stating that “few wars fail to fit this definition”
(Watling 2019b, 11-12). He, nonetheless, proposes to focus on “understanding the strategic
objectives for which states establish proxies” (Watling 2019b, 12). In his turn, Rauta also
emphasizes the importance of “a strategic understanding of why proxy wars are waged”
(Rauta 2020, 5). Building also on Mumford’s (2013) proposal, Rauta has moved on to
conceptualize proxy wars as “strategic bargains waged on more complex grounds than risk
avoidance, cost efficiency and deniability” (Rauta 2020, 3).
In line with these reconceptualization efforts, Shahram Akbarzadeh and William Gourlay
pointed out that in the Middle East, particularly after the perception became widely shared
that the US disengagement from the region may be on the horizon, regional powers arguably
moved to “intensify their competition for advantage by sponsoring non-state proxies within
several theaters of conflict … [because they were keenly aware] of the asymmetric value of
proxy forces to project power and buttress their national security” (Akbarzadeh and Gourlay
2023, 326).
Interestingly, even among national security studies scholars, Iran’s case is considered a
positive outlier or “the most successful user of proxy warfare” (Watling 2019b, 13). Watling,
for instance, has noted that “Iran does not simply employ proxies for operational
convenience; they are integral to Iran’s national security strategy” (2019b, 13). By this, he
means that Iran has strategized a two-tiered defense policy, one of deterrence and another of
induced negotiation, in both of which the employment of its “proxies” is deemed central. He
thus writes:
Iran’s defence policy is … one of deterrence, using missiles, its navy and proxy
forces to inflict sufficient damage in a regional ‘deep battle’ to make war with Iran
too costly an undertaking. If deterrence fails … Iran would use its proxies to inflict
casualties on the US and its regional allies, with the aim of driving its adversaries to
negotiate (Watling 2019b, 14).
The problem of this account, however, is that it is based on a rather simplistic notion of
patron-client relations, as is clear from his assertion that “[a]lthough Hizbullah does not
currently seek a war with Israel, and has many domestic interests in Lebanon that are distinct
4 In addition, from the insurgents’ point of view, some sponsors turn out to be utterly
unreliable, as was the case with the sudden termination of support by the U.S. and Pahlavi
Shah’s Iran in March 1975 for Mostafa Barzani’s Kurdish rebellion (for an interesting on-the-
ground account, see van Bruinessen 1992, 3-5, 30-31).
© Yasuyuki Matsunaga, 2024. All rights reserved.
8
from Iran’s, Tehran would have little difficulty in forcing Hizbullah to strike” (Watling
2019b, 14). It is unfortunate because Watling is fully cognizant that “[a]lmost none of the
groups routinely described as ‘Iranian proxies’ in public discourse would accept the label
themselves” (2019a, 6). He nonetheless justifies his use of the term “proxy” to distinguish
“proxy warfare” as implementation of one’s policy through others (Watling 2019b, 12) from
conventional special operations and espionage, while adding that his usage of the term “does
not imply any specific of degree of Iranian control, or alignment of values, between Iran and
the group” (Watling 2019a, 6). The author of this chapter, however, believes that it is exactly
the degrees of the latter (i.e. control and alignment) that are the key to understanding the
issues at hand. It is therefore important next to examine the nature of the relationships
between Iran and those groups that are often called its “proxies,” and how Hamas and the
Qassam Brigades may compare with other groups.5
4. How Iran Sees It
Although they are commonly used inside Iran as well, the Persian terms “jang-e niyabati”
(proxy war) and “goruh-hay-ye niyabati” (proxy groups) are primarily used to refer to what
the United States engages in and employs in the region, respectively. The Iranian officials
and pro-state domestic media never acknowledge that Iran engages in a proxy war, nor that
Iran has any “proxy force” in the region (e.g. IRNA 2023; Javan Online 2023). Instead, they
use the terms “goruh-ha-ye moqavamat” (resistance groups) and “niru-ha-ye moqavemat”
(resistance forces) to refer to those external groups and organizations aligned with or
supported by Iran. These terms align with the related concepts of the “mehvar-e moqavemat”
(axis of resistance) and “jebheh-yi moqavemat” (resistance front). Of the last two, the
“resistance front” is the concept most used by the Iranian officials and thus worthy of closer
examination here.6
Furthermore, the notion of “resistance groups” is linked with the concept termed “strategic
depth” (omq-e rahbordi) in the defense strategy of Iran in the post-Iran-Iraq-War period. The
notion of strategic depth seems to have two separate usages. One is coterminous with
“defensive depth” (omq-e defa‘i) and refers to the idea that Iran should encounter and fight
adversaries such as the so-called “Islamic State” and other salafi-jihadists well beyond and
before they approach its national borders. It was used to justify the fact that Iran had sent
military commanders and teams of soldiers to Syria and Iraq as “advisors” (mostasharan) to
fight the Nusra Front group in Aleppo, Syria, and the Islamic State forces near Mosul, Iraq
(cf. Khamenei 2016; Sadeghi-Boroujerdi 2014). In its second and more relevant meaning, the
term “strategic depth” often refers to what those groups and forces in the region who are
aligned with Iran could bring forth. Referring to the “resistance” groups as part of Iran’s
“strategic depth” in the context of countering the perceived U.S.-sponsored “proxy wars,”
Javan, a hardline conservative newspaper published by a subsidiary of the IRGC Cooperative
Foundation, wrote the following in its editorial on November 7, 2023:
5 To his credit, Watling considers the degree of dependence on Iran in other contexts, as he
notes that “the Badr Organization is not dependent on Tehran and therefore works as a partner
rather than a subordinate” (2019b, 16).
6 The term “axis of resistance” seems to be used more often by the Lebanese Hizbullah
officials than their Iranian counterparts (e.g. Jamejam 2018; IRNA 2022).
© Yasuyuki Matsunaga, 2024. All rights reserved.
9
What we see in the strategic depth of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the West Asian
region is the legitimate defense by the Islamic resistance of its independence,
territorial integrity and cultural identity against the proxy wars of the hegemonic
system [of the United States]…. The resistance fighters make decisions and act
based on their own diagnosis, and in this regard, as the wise Leader of the
Revolution has said, they also have the support of Iran (Javan Online 2023).
Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei had spoken of strategic depth in a similar way in a
meeting with the member of the Leadership Experts Assembly in September 2014. In the
context of discussing the challenges posed by the Western-dominated current global order
and what Iran should do in response, Khamenei remarked as follows:
The second important thing is to prepare ourselves to play a role in creating a new
order; prepare the country to play a role. And this will not be possible except by
strengthening the country. We must make the country strong. Strengthening the
country depends on using all the potentialities and capabilities that we have inside
and outside the country. Note that our potentialities and capacities are not only those
things that we have inside; we also have important potentialities abroad; We have
supporters (talaf-darani), we have strategic depth in the region [and] in the country;
Some [support us] because of Islam, some because of language, some because of the
Shia faith. These are the strategic depth of the country. These are among our
capabilities. We must use all these capabilities. It is not just in the region: we have
strategic depth in Latin America; we have strategic depth in important parts of Asia;
we have possibilities to use. We should use these. They will make the country strong
(Khamenei 2014).
More recently, Khamenei similarly suggested that the constitutive members of the “resistance
front” strengthen each other. In an annual meeting with the family of the late Qods Force
commander, Qasem Soleimani, he remarked:
We thank God for the worldly reward of Martyr Soleimani that is in front of our
eyes every day…. One point about the value of the career of Martyr Soleimani ... is
his role in reviving the resistance front in the region... Martyr Soleimani [even after
his martyrdom] has had an important role in keeping the resistance front alive in the
region; Martyr Soleimani [still] plays a big role. Once upon a time there was a
resistance group in a region. Well yes, this was before Martyr Soleimani. [But] at
one point a front has emerged. We always wanted this. Because the other side [i.e.
the U.S. side] make fronts, this side must also make fronts. Now, if it were not for
this front, Gaza would not have been able to resist this much. This resistance front
gives power to everyone around the issue. If four units are united together [or] five
units are united together, their might and power are more than five times those of
one unit. [When they are united in a front] a new identity will emerge. That new
identity is very important. Martyr Hajj Qasim Soleimani had a great role in this
issue. He did a lot of work. People see his presence on the mountains of Syria and
his fearlessness and braveness in front of danger; Well, this is very important, but
the main importance is that these visits, presence, and efforts [by Martyr Soleimani]
were able to revive, keep alive, and strengthen this front (Khamenei 2023b).
© Yasuyuki Matsunaga, 2024. All rights reserved.
10
As implied in the above quotes from Khamenei, the Iranian officials and pro-state media
describe the external groups aligned with Iran or supported by Iran not as clients or
surrogates but as “allies” (ham-peymanan). Khamenei also emphasized in the above remarks
the significance of providing a model via what it considers Iran’s soft power as embodied by
Soleimani and of co-constructing a new “resistance” identity through the project of creating
and maintaining the anti-hegemonic “front.” The information graphic on the Iranian leader’s
official website cites “ta‘lim-e narm-afraz-e moqavemat va olugu-ye mobarezeh be mellat-
ha” (teaching resistance software and the model of struggle to nations) as one of “Martyr”
Soleimani’s contributions to the “Ommat-e Eslami” (Islamic ummah) (Preservation and
Publication Office, 2023). However far-fetched it may appear, this has prima facie cogency.
While being in a front together does not make the interests of its constitutive units uniform
(perhaps it would only make them complementary at best), it might make it unfit to analyze
their respective interests in a patron-client fashion as in the principal-agent analysis. In the
case of Iran and its regional “allies,” there are rather significant resource- and power-
differentials among them. Some of its “allies” (such as the Lebanese Hizbullah) have longer
political histories, larger support bases, more entrenched distinct local political and social
interests, securer financial bases, and larger weaponry and manufacturing capacities. Others
may be much smaller organizations in size, having a smaller recruiting and support base and
being much younger as political organizations and much more vulnerable and dependent on
others in the front such as Iran, in terms of finances and equipment. Some (such as some of
the Shi‘i groups in Iraq) are more ideologically attuned with others in the resistance front
with Iran than some others (such as Ansarollah of Yemen and the Palestinian militant
groups).
Furthermore, if, as the quotes from Watling and Byman above suggest, clients are expected to
act in the interest of or on behalf of a patron, it would not be necessary for the patron to be on
the ground side by side with its “clients,” at least not for actual combat operations. But,
judging from high numbers of the news reports in the pro-state domestic media of Iran about
the IRGC personnel and commanders having been killed in the battle fields in Syria and Iraq
over the last decade as well as other reports that have appeared in the pro-state Iranian media
such as the Fars and Tasnim News, Iran appears to have sent the IRGC Qods Force
commanders apparently to actually “command” those joint (or “front”) units assembled in the
battle fields, not as the “advisors” as they are officially referred to (see, for example, Fars
2021, which describes IRGC’s Javad Ghaffari as the “principal commander of the Iranian
advisory forces and the allies of Iran such as Hizbullah and Fatemiyun in Syria”). All these
suggest that the very project, possibly led by Qasem Soleimani as Khamenei suggested, may
well have actually been to form a “front” and fight the adversaries of choice jointly, not just
militarily but also politically (see, for example, Babai 2015 for more concrete descriptions).
If so, what may have been happening between Iran and the Iran-aligned and Iran-supported
groups may have significantly differed from the “conflict delegation” image that the proxy
war literature often suggests.7
7 Incidentally, the relations between the IRGC Qods Force commanders and some of the
smaller armed Shi‘i Islamist groups in Iraq, such as Kata’ib al-Hizbullah, Kata’ib Sayyid al-
Shuhada’, and Harakat Hizbullah al-Nujaba’, do appear much closer to the conflict-
delegation type of “proxy warfare” model. That the IRGC Qods Force Commander Esma‘il
Qa’ani was able to pressure the “Islamic Resistance in Iraq,” reportedly composed of these
three groups, into halting its drone attacks on the U.S. forces stationed in Syria, Jordan and
© Yasuyuki Matsunaga, 2024. All rights reserved.
11
5. Iran’s Defense Strategy and Its Support to the Palesnian Militants
Three days after the onset of the October 7 attack, Khamenei in a public address at the joint
graduation ceremony of the students of the armed forces officer universities shared his
interpretation of why the Palestinian militants embarked on the offensive at this time as
follows:
When the cruelty and crime pass the limit, when the predatory behavior reaches its
extremity, one must expect a flood. What did you do to the Palestinian nation? The
brave and at the same time selfless actions by the Palestinians were a response to the
crime of the usurping enemy, which had been going on for years and had increased
in intensity in recent months … The last point: the supporters of and some of the
individuals of the usurping regime have been talking nonsense in the last two or
three days, which they still continue and among which is [an assertion] that Islamic
Iran was behind this operation. They are wrong. Of course, we defend Palestine, we
defend the struggles, we kiss the foreheads and forearms of the meticulous and smart
planners and brave Palestinian youth, we are proud of them. These are true. But
those who say that “the work of Palestinians emanates from non-Palestinians” have
not known the Palestinian nation; they have underestimated the Palestinian nation.
That is exactly their mistake. They make a wrong calculation here. Of course, the
entire Islamic world is obligated to support the Palestinians, and God willing, it will
support them. However, this work is the work of the Palestinians themselves. Smart
planners, brave young people, [and] self-sacrificing activists have been able to create
this epic, and this epic will be a big step toward saving Palestine, God willing
(Khamenei 2023a).
While sidestepping the issue of whether Iran had provided any material support to it, the
Iranian leader called the October 7 attack in this speech as an “important political and
military instance” (Khamenei 2023a) and threw his unequivocal public support behind those
who had planned and executed the operation. As for the reasons why he and the Iranian state
support the militants, but not the moderates, among the Palestinian groups and factions,
Khamenei had explained it seven years earlier in a keynote speech delivered at the February
2017 “pro-Intifada” international conference held in Tehran. While his lengthy speech
reveals so much about his worldview and understandings of the issues surrounding the
Palestinian question, Khamenei explained the rationale behind Iran’s support for the
Palestinian militants as follows:
The great nation of Palestine, which singlehandedly bears the heavy burden of
confronting global Zionism and its bully supporters, is patient and tolerant, but [at
the same time] strong and firm, and has given all claimants the opportunity to put
their claims to the test of experience. On that day when, together with the pseud-
realist claim of the necessity of accepting minimum rights to prevent losing them,
the compromise plans were seriously discussed, the Palestinian nation … gave them
a chance. Of course, the Islamic Republic of Iran emphasized the wrongness of these
Iraq in early February 2024 demonstrated that Iran (at least on this occasion) had not
insignificant leverage over those groups’ operational decisions.
© Yasuyuki Matsunaga, 2024. All rights reserved.
12
kinds of compromising methods from the very beginning and pointed out their
harmful effects and serious damage. The opportunity given to the compromise
process [i.e. the Oslo Process] had destructive effects on the path of resistance and
struggle of the Palestinian nation, but its only benefit was proving the wrongness of
the perceived realism in practice. Basically, the method of formation of the Zionist
regime is such that it cannot stop expansionism, oppression and violation of the
rights of Palestinians. Because its existence and identity depend on the gradual
destruction of Palestine's identity and existence…. This is the reason why protecting
the Palestinian identity and preserving all the representations of this truthful and
natural identity constitute an obligatory, necessary thing to do and a holy jihad….
The problem of the compromise process is not only that it gives legitimacy to the
usurping regime by shortchanging the rights of a nation, which is a grave and
unforgivable mistake, but the problem is that it fundamentally is not proportional to
the current situation of the Palestinian issue and does not take into account the
expansionist and repressive characteristics of the temptation of the Zionists….
Now, the Palestinian people have experienced two different models in their
history of the past three decades, and they have understood the extent of those
models’ [respective] suitability for their own conditions. In contrast to the process of
compromise, there is a model of heroic and continuous resistance of the Holy
Intifada, which has achieved great things for this nation. It is not without reason that
these days we observe that “resistance” is being attacked or “intifada” is being
questioned by the known centers. There is nothing else to expect from the enemy [all
the more so] because the correctness of this way and its fruitfulness have a complete
foundation. Nevertheless, sometimes we see that some of those currents and even
countries that claim to support the Palestinian issue but, in reality, try to divert the
right path of this nation, attack the resistance…. [Yet] no one can deny the essential
and decisive role of resistance in the first intifada. In the second intifada, the role of
resistance was fundamental and prominent. The intifada that finally forced the
Zionist regime to withdraw from Gaza. The 33-day war in Lebanon and the 22-day,
8-day and 51-day wars in Gaza are all brilliant pages of the resistance's history,
which makes all the nations of the region, the Islamic world, and all the freedom-
loving people of the world proud. In the 33-day war, practically all the ways of
providing aid to the Lebanese people and the valiant resistance fighters of Hizbullah
were closed, but with God's help and relying on the great strength of the Lebanese
people, the Zionist regime and its main supporter, the United States of America,
suffered a disgraceful defeat. They will not dare to attack that country easily. The
successive instances of resistance by Gaza, which has now turned into an invincible
fortress of resistance, have shown during several consecutive wars that this regime is
too weak to stand against the will of a nation. The main hero of the Gaza wars is a
brave and resistant nation that, despite enduring several years of economic siege,
still defends this fortress by relying on the power of faith. All the Palestinian
resistance groups, Saraya al-Quds from the Islamic Jihad movement, Kata’ib Izza al-
Din Qassam from Hamas, Kata’ib Shohada’ al-Aqsa from Fatah, and Kata’ib Abu
Ali Mustafa from the People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who played a
valuable role in these wars, should be praised (Khamenei 2017).
While contrasting the militants and the moderates among the Palestinians and throwing his
support behind all those who prefer armed struggles, whether Islamists or not, for the
Palestinian cause, Khamenei’s remarks quoted above reveals an important omission. The
© Yasuyuki Matsunaga, 2024. All rights reserved.
13
relations between Hamas and Iran, in fact, soured in 2012 after Iran started intervening in the
Syrian civil war on the side of the Ba‘thist state, sending its military “advisors,” while the
exiled Hamas officials, preferring to side with the opposition, closed their offices in
Damascus and left the country entirely for Turkey, among other places (cf. Alavi 2020,
Chapter 5). The apparent rapprochement between certain exiled Hamas officials and the
leadership of Iran did not occur after 2015 when Turkey, pressured by the U.S. and Israel,
nudged the exiled Hamas officials into moving out. Of those who left Turkey was Salih al-
Aruri, one of the more militant among the younger generation of the Hamas activists who had
spent years in the Israeli prison, only to become prominent leaders of the organization after
their release. It appears that it was Aruri who moved to Beirut, not Doha, that forged a three-
way alliance among the Hamas militants, the Lebanese Hizbullah, and the IRGC Qods Force.
In February 2017, as Khamenei made the above speech in Tehran, Yahya al-Sinwar, one of
those younger generation militants, took over the Hamas leadership in Gaza from Isma‘il
Haniyeh. When Haniyeh, in his turn, moved to Doha to take up the chairmanship of the
exiled political wing of the organization in the same year, Salih al-Aruri became its deputy
chairman. In July 2019, when Khamenei publicly met with the visiting high-ranking Hamas
delegation in Tehran—the first time since the exiled Hamas leadership left Damascus in
2012—as if to officially mark the rapprochement between Hamas and the Iranian state, it was
al-Aruri who headed the delegation. In his turn, when Hamas and Israel reached a cease-fire
after exchanging heavy fire for twelve days in May 2021, Sinwar held a press conference in
Gaza, which Qatar-based al-Jazeera network broadcast live. In answering one of the
questions the reporters present asked him apparently about the funds needed to rebuild Gaza,
Sinwar volunteered a praise for Iran, claiming that Iran had “spared us and the other
Palestinian resistance factions nothing,” thus seemingly confirming the material support the
Iranian state had been providing for the resistance groups in Gaza (see Memri 2021 for the
recorded remarks). It is also telling that the information graphic published on the Iranian
leader’s official website in late December 2023 mentioned “por-kardan-e dast-felestini-ha”
(making the hands of the Palestinians full) as one of “Martyr” Soleimani’s contributions to
the Islamic ummah, also seemingly confirming that the IRGC Qods Force had provided
material support to those Palestinian “resistance” groups (Preservation and Publication
Office, 2023).
If it was indeed the case that Hizbullah, the Hamas militants, and the IRGC Qods Force
renewed their close cooperation (also possibly potential operational coordination) after
Aruri’s relocation to Beirut and the Hamas leadership change in 2017 (during which time
General Zahedi again came to become the head of the Qods Force team on the ground in
Levant), the relevant question to ask may be what insight the proxy war perspective,
particularly the recent reconceptualized ones (e.g. Watling 2019b; Rauta 2020), may offer
regarding what Iran expected to strategically gain from materially supporting the Palestinian
militants during this particular time period. One document that seems to shed light on this
very question is titled “The Strategic Depth of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Twenty-Year
Perspective” and was published simultaneous at three places—the Kayhan newspaper, the
website called Basirat that is managed by the office of the political deputy of the Leader’s
representative at the IRGC, and the official website of the Leader itself—on September 7,
2008 under the byline (most likely a pseudonym) “Gholam-Reza Mohammadi” (Kayhan
2008; Basirat 2008; Preservation and Publication Office 2008). The “twenty-year-
perspective” appears to refer not only to the twenty years that had passed by then since the
end of the Iran-Iraq war but also to the following twenty years by which time Iran aimed to
reach full development, according to the document. As such, the document discusses a vast
© Yasuyuki Matsunaga, 2024. All rights reserved.
14
range of areas in which what it deems Iran’s “strategic depth” may be realized. The portion of
the document that is relevant to the interest of this chapter is the section titled “Strategic
Depth in the External Dimension” and one of its subsection titled the “Islamic and
Revolutionary Groups.”
One of the ways of strategic deepening in the external dimension is to support
aligned popular groups (goruh-ha-ye mardomi-ye hamsu) that oppose the great
powers, especially the countries hostile to the Islamic Revolution of Iran. These
groups have now been established in the most sensitive areas where any existence of
those groups may make the hostile powers tense. The Palestinian militant groups,
Islamic Jihad and Hamas, which are leading the fight against the regime that usurped
Jerusalem, have acted in such a way that although they want the liberation of their
land, they have provided the positions and strategic depth of the Islamic Revolution
with all-out pressure on Israel. This becomes more apparent and takes on a strategic
dimension when we know that these two groups are based in a place where the
existential heart of arrogant states, especially America, in the sensitive region of the
Middle East is (Kayhan 2008; Basirat 2008; Preservation and Publication Office
2008).
This document, likely a product of policymaking circles within the IRGC and National
Security apparatuses of the Iranian state, interestingly reveals that despite important overlaps,
those “resistance” groups have distinct strategic interests and goals of their own,8 but that
their “resistance” activities will nonetheless supply “positions and strategic depth” to the
strategic interests of Iran. This idea is fundamentally in line with the newer perspective of the
proxy war literature, for example, Rauta’s idea of “coping” as one of two “goal-focused
strategies” that states may pursue via waging proxy wars (2020, 5). It is of note that Ruata
associates “coping” with pursuing discrete and conservative goals, as opposed to maximalist,
coercive goals. Rauta characterizes proxy wars of “coping”-type as “a tool of managing an
adversary” (2020, 6). The choice of the term “resistance” (muqawamah/moqavemat) by Iran-
aligned and Iran-supported groups and Iran itself may also be indicative of this type of more
“conservative” strategic calculations.
6. Concluding Discussions
Assuming that Iran had been providing not only political but material (particularly financial)
support to the Gaza-based Palestinian militants prior to the October 7, 2023 attack, this
chapter sought to address the following two sets of questions. First, how best one may
understand the relations between the Iranian state including the IRGC Qods Force, on the one
hand, and the Palestinian militants, on the other, and particularly whether the relations may
best be captured by the oft-applied “proxy warfare” perspective or not. Second, relatedly,
8 It is not that the relevant discrepancies are about Hamas being Sunni Islamists and Iran
being Shi‘i theocratic Islamists. As the 2017-2019 rapprochement episode demonstrates, they
can work together despite those differences. But it is that their respective strategic objectives
differ. Strategically, Iran appears greatly more concerned about Israel being part of (or the
“proxy force”) of the US hegemony which it thinks is after its own destruction, and less about
helping the Palestinians redress their perceived ills.
© Yasuyuki Matsunaga, 2024. All rights reserved.
15
why Iran supports the Palestinian militants, and particularly, how Iran understands what it is
doing.
From the foregoing discussions of the public discourse of the proxy wars, the scholarly
discussions and some of the newly proposed perspectives on reconceptualizing proxy
warfare, and attempts to understand how Iran sees the matter, this chapter may draw the
following three general conclusions. First, it is untenable that Iran is engaging in “proxy
wars” in the classical sense of the term, that is, for cutting human, transactional, material, and
political costs and benefiting from operational ambiguity and deniability. Iran is not
particularly secretive about its support to those “resistance” groups in the region that are
aligned with or supported by Iran. This holds true not just about its political but even
organizational and material support to them. It seemingly even takes pride in providing such
support and consider it the provision of its soft power. Second, from the point of view of the
Iranian state, those “resistance” groups are not clients or surrogates. Rather, they are
primarily treated as “allies,” although where power- and resource-differentials are great
between Iran-aligned groups and the Iranian state, the former may be subject to varieties of
relational influence and pressure into “getting aligned” with Iran’s strategic objectives. Third,
the concept of “strategic depth” that appears to underpin (at least part of) Iran’s strategic
thinking and doctrine seems to entertain the idea that even those groups that are aligned with
and supported by Iran may well pursue their own goals and interests. Indications exist that it
may not be considered a problem in and by itself, and the Iranian support to the “resistance”
groups may continue as long as Iran may benefit strategically from the effects and
consequences of the activities that those groups engage in with the support of the Iranian
state. Based on these discussions, this chapter considers the publicly popular idea that Iran
engages in region-wide “proxy warfare” as the grand “puppet-master” is largely disproven.
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