By Elizabeth Tsurkov
Monday, March 16, 2026
When Israel assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, one of
the many people who celebrated the death of the supreme leader was a Syrian
surgeon not far from Damascus. He had lived through four years of siege and
bombardment by pro-Iranian militias. Over WhatsApp, he told me that, in the
West, “the discussion of the war against Iran reduces it to merely being a
geostrategic struggle between powers fighting for influence in the region, and
this discussion usually ignores the direct victims of this regime,” like him.
He added: “For us who lived under the siege of the Iranian-backed militias,
this looks completely different, so our happiness for the death of Khamenei was
immense.”
Western audiences and policy makers naturally take
greater interest in Western victims and the threats Iran poses to the West.
However, the imbalance of power between Iran and the West, as demonstrated in
the 12-day war and the current conflict, means that Iran has caused relatively
limited harm to Western interests since its 1979 revolution. Countries in the
region experiencing civil war and foreign invasions have had it worse. They
were weak enough to become breeding grounds for militias serving Iran’s expansionist
project. Khamenei believed that these militias could serve as a component in
his grand plan to destroy Israel. The militias failed on both counts. These
militias, however, attained Iranian political domination through the
immiseration and repression of the people of the region, and thus their hatred
and schadenfreude.
Kataib Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militia in Iraq, kidnapped
me into one of its black sites in March 2023 and kept me in captivity for
903 days. Two Arab speakers were held in solitary cells next to and on top of
mine and were subjected to even more horrific torture than I was. The Arabic
writing on the walls in my cell indicated that the site had been used for years
and occupied by multiple prior inhabitants.
Since its founding, the Islamic Republic has wished to
export the Islamic Revolution beyond its borders. Early on, Iran established
militias and operated cells in countries with a sizable Shia population—Iraq,
Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia—yet failed to overthrow the regimes. The
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had success only in countries debilitated by
conflict, with weak state institutions. During the civil war in Lebanon, after
an Israeli invasion in 1982, Iran established the Shia Islamist militant group
that came to be named Hezbollah. After assuming the position of supreme leader
in 1989, Khamenei oversaw the rapid expansion of the IRGC’s external
operations, masterminded by the Quds Force led by Qassem Soleimani. Until being
assassinated by the United States in 2020, Soleimani oversaw the creation of
networks seeking to carry out attacks against Israeli and Jewish targets
outside of Israel, to assassinate Iranian dissidents abroad, and to shepherd
new militias across the Middle East.
In post-2003 Iraq, with its state institutions dismantled
and a sectarian civil war under way, Iran again set up a series of pro-Iranian
militias. In Syria, after the outbreak of civil war, Iran significantly
increased its influence, as the Assad regime grasped for foreign assistance to
remain in power. Assad welcomed Iran-run militias made up of tens of thousands
of foreign Shia fighters from Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. In
Yemen, too, instability allowed the Houthi militia to take over large swaths of
the country, including the capital, Sanaa. The Houthis have received
significant financial and military support from Iran.
From Hezbollah’s inception, members have, at Iran’s
orders, turned their weapons on fellow Lebanese. From 1988 to 1990, the group
engaged in what came to be known as the “War of Brothers” against Amal, a
Syrian-backed Shia militia. Hezbollah prevailed in this fratricidal war, which
led to the deaths of hundreds of Shia civilians and militants. On May 7, 2008,
following the decision of the Lebanese government to dismantle the independent
communications network Hezbollah had set up, the militia stormed Beirut and
took control of pro-government Sunni neighborhoods in the city, later clashing
with Druze communities in the Chouf and Sunnis in the north and killing dozens
of people. The Doha Agreement, which ended the conflict, cemented Hezbollah’s
political dominance of Lebanon, granting Shia ministers a third of the cabinet.
Hezbollah carried out dozens of assassinations:
politicians, intellectuals, journalists, and state officials. One of the recent
prominent victims was Luqman Slim, a Shia intellectual and activist and critic
of Hezbollah who was assassinated in 2021. A friend of Luqman, also a Lebanese
intellectual, explained to me the chilling effect these assassinations have had
on public discourse in Lebanon: “People are censoring themselves, particularly
until the 2024 war,” which significantly weakened Hezbollah, he said. In
private, individuals would be critical of Hezbollah, but when they were urged
to be outspoken in media interviews, he recounted, they told him, “Do you want
me to get killed?” That intellectual was granted anonymity, as were others I
interviewed for this article, because of the legal prohibition in Iraq and
Lebanon on “normalization” of relations with Israel, which in some court cases
has been interpreted as a ban on even engaging with an Israeli citizen like me.
The Syrian surgeon asked for his name to be withheld because of the political
sensitivity of talking with me after the Israeli invasion of southern Syria
that followed Assad’s fall.
In Iraq, pro-Iranian militias killed hundreds of American
servicepeople, mostly through roadside bombs. But the number of Iraqi civilians
they have killed far exceeds this. During the 2006–08 sectarian civil war,
these militias murdered, raped, and tortured to death countless numbers of
Sunnis. In 2014, during the anti-ISIS war, the militias kidnapped Sunni male
teenagers and men and disappeared them into a network of torture sites. The
militias also ethnically cleansed entire Sunni towns, such as Jurf al-Sakhr,
and established military bases there, preventing the residents from returning
to this day. The militias engaged in widespread looting of private property in
Sunni areas, and stripped state assets such as the oil refinery in Baiji and
multiple factories in Ninewa.
After years of abusing Iraq’s Sunnis, the militias turned
their guns on the country’s Shia in 2019. Starting in the fall and continuing
well into 2020, the militias violently repressed the mostly Shia anti-regime Tishreen
(“October”) protest movement, spraying activists with bullets, as well as
assassinating them or kidnapping them into their black sites. According to
testimonies of survivors, in Baghdad the militias used the abandoned houses of
Jewish residents as sites to torture and gang-rape female and male protesters
they would kidnap from the city’s Tahrir Square encampment.
An Iraqi Shia seminary student was kidnapped by a militia
for cursing Khamenei in front of a commander. The student was tortured, and
then his father was kidnapped and tortured too. The student told me that when
he heard of Khamenei’s killing, “I was happy as if it’s Eid al-Fitr,” one of
the two main holidays in Islam. “He was part of the destruction of Iraq. He is
the reason for sectarianism and extremism,” the student said.
Even the bloodshed caused by Iran’s proxies in Iraq and
Lebanon does not compare with what they inflicted in Syria. Under IRGC command,
the militias served as the ground troops in major offensives on rebel-held
towns, usually augmented by Syrian soldiers and militiamen. The Iranian-backed
militias imposed a series of sieges on rebel-held towns and neighborhoods, such
as Zabadani and Madaya near the Lebanese border, the suburbs of southern
Damascus, and eastern Aleppo, starving dozens, particularly children and the
elderly, to death.
The Syrian doctor was the sole surgeon serving a
population of about 10,000 people deprived of most medical help. He told me he
carried out hundreds of amputations of limbs without anesthesia because of a
shortage of staff, medical equipment, and medication. The Iran-run militias
prevented all of these goods and personnel from entering the besieged enclave.
The surgeon and the people around him would, he said, eat leaves and grass and
drink water with spices to quench the hunger pains. He lost dozens of pounds
under the siege.
The oppressive Iranian presence was evident in the
surgeon’s daily life. “Khamenei lived among us through his proxies: in the
checkpoints that besieged our city, in the militias that would storm our homes,
in the kidnapped children and missing women, and in our villages that turned
into ruins and mass graves,” he told me.
“Khamenei managed his colonial expansionist project from
afar, but it was executed over our bodies and our cities.”
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