As Middle East crisis grows, does Iran have control of its proxy forces? | Middle East and north Africa

The dramatic first week of 2024 has tipped the scale towards those who say the daily diet of drone strikes, assassinations and maritime assaults will at some point combust into a major war across the Middle East.

But the likelihood of a regional conflagration turns on the unclear intentions of Iran and the contested degree of control it exercises over the numerous linked but autonomous groups it has nurtured over the past decade in five sovereign countries.

With so many variables, what looks like being a long war in Gaza increases the risk of miscalculation, accident or that one of the many players loses patience and lights the touch paper.

It is already hard to continue to describe the level of violence around US bases in Iraq, on the Lebanese border or the Red Sea as low intensity.

Iran, led by a combination of the ageing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards, is at the centre of all that happens in the Middle East, and in another respect to one side.

It is to one side due to its inability to use its diplomatic or military influence to persuade Gulf state monarchies to adopt its policy of hostility to Israel amid the destruction in Gaza.

Iran makes up for its lack of regional diplomatic clout through the “axis of resistance” that is the lasting legacy of Qassem Suleimani, the head of Iran’s al-Quds force, who was killed on the orders of Donald Trump in 2020. The trail of blood that followed the general across the Middle East during his lifetime has continued after his death – Islamic State claimed responsibility this week for Wednesday’s deadly attack on a crowd in southern Iran gathered to mark the fourth anniversary of his assassination.

Suleimani was the architect of Tehran’s strategic efforts whereby Iran supplies, trains and sometimes directs militia operating in and outside governments in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and most recently Yemen.

But the degree of autonomy these groups enjoy is heavily contested by academics and thinktanks.

Some, including many US and Israeli politicians, see the groups as mere appendages, or puppets of Iran. On this basis Iran sends out orders to its proxies to step up, or dial down the pressure.

Others say this denies history, agency and the organic reasons the groups came into existence, including shared religion and shared opposition to the US’s presence. The relationship, they argue, is more symbiotic than controlling. They are no more puppets than Israel is a puppet of the US, and make their own judgments as to how to proceed, they say.

Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, the largest of these groups, argued in a recent speech that Iran itself insisted that indigenous organisations needed to be able to manufacture their own military capability, and to network between themselves organically, and not to depend on a hierarchical Iran-proxy formula.

Dr Amal Saad, a lecturer in politics at Cardiff University, says: “What’s unparalleled about the resistance axis’s participation in this war is that it’s the first time a transnational alliance of non-state or hybrid actors have formed a military coalition against another state and its allies, as Hezbollah, Ansar Allah [in Yemen] and the Popular Mobilisation Units [in Iraq] have done.”

Despite the confluence of ideology, it is argued, each member of the axis also operates within its own national context.

What is undeniable is that these forces are slowly cranking up the pressure, and Israel and the US are responding mainly through high-value assassinations.

But as Dennis Ross, a former US ambassador, told the BBC, there is a lot of evidence that Iran does not want an escalation or direct conflict with the US. This is partly because it thinks its current policy of attrition and strategic patience is paying off. Tehran senses the US is wanting to leave the region, Iran’s ultimate objective.

But that does not necessarily reassure him in what he describes as the most complex time in the Middle East he has ever known. “There is an underlying common interest in not wanting to see a regional war, but Iran is probably discovering something themselves. I am not sure they have as much control over some of their proxies as they wanted.”

The groups linked to Iran

The Houthis in Yemen

Ansar Allah, as the Houthis are known, are relatively new players on the international scene. The group has gained renewed prominence in recent weeks after stepping up its campaign of attacks against commercial vessels in the Red Sea in response to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

As recently as 1990, when the Republic of Yemen was formed, “the Houthi movement simply did not exist”, according to the anthropologist Helen Lackner. Within a decade its brand of Zaydi Islam, a branch of Shia, had grown out of the Saada governorate in the north, and through a series of brutal battles it took control of the capital, Sana’a, and the strategic port of Hodeidah.

Through the 2000s, according to WikiLeaks, Washington ridiculed claims made by the Houthis’ internal opponents that the group was receiving aid from Iran. But as the Houthis grew in influence, Iran saw a cheap way of unsettling the Saudis with whom the Houthis were fighting.

Elisabeth Kendall, a Middle East expert at the University of Cambridge, says: “The Houthi relationship with Iran is based on pragmatism rather than command and control, but it has become increasingly ideological as Yemen’s civil war has dragged on.”

By 2018 the UN panel of experts had incontrovertible evidence of Iranian supply of weapons, and by 2020 the frequency of Houthi drone and missile attacks inside Saudi Arabia had increased.

It is also clear that Iran foresaw the geostrategic importance of Yemen. At a meeting in 2014, an adviser to Khamenei, Ali Akhbar Velayati, told some Yemeni clerics: “The way to liberate Palestine passes through Yemen, because this country is strategically located – it is situated next to the Red Sea and, more precisely, next to Bab el-Mandeb [the narrow strait between Yemen and Djibouti].”

Hezbollah in Lebanon

Formed 40 years ago as a way to resist the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Hezbollah has grown with Iran’s help into the pre-eminent resistance movement in the region, operating inside and outside the Lebanese state. Indeed, it regards itself as a self-standing regional power in alliance with Iran. It shares the Shia belief in Velayat-e Faqih, the pre-eminence of the clergy, the first organisation in the Shia world outside Iran to do so. Some say this makes Hezbollah subservient to Iran’s supreme leader, but Saad says: “For Hezbollah this does not represent a political commitment to a national head of state but an intellectual commitment to a sacred Islamic figure and his successors, whose commands are considered ‘fixed truths’.”

Iran is seen less in terms of a nation state than a continuing revolutionary process headquartered in Tehran, a bulwark against American and Israeli designs on the region. By the same token, Khamenei is not only the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, but is also the leader of the Islamic revolution at large. Nasrallah says: “Alliance does not mean subservience. Alliance does not mean that when one ally takes a decision all other allies should follow suit, in that case that would be subservience.” It was Nasrallah for instance who convinced Iran it needed to intervene in Syria to save President Bashar al-Assad.

Shia groups in Iraq

Ever since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iranian-backed Shia groups have been challenging the US’s continued presence in their country, and most recently rejecting claims the US remains in Iraq to ward off IS.

The various militias, working under the umbrella brand of Islamic Resistance in Iraq, have tried to feed off the support for the Palestinian cause in Iraq and in the process regain some of the popularity they lost in 2022 when they came to be associated with a corrupt status quo. Some experts, including Michael Knights of the Washington Institute thinktank, believe the US is closer to being expelled from Iraq than at any time since 2020 when a similar campaign led to Joe Biden’s drawdown of US troops and reduction in the Iraq mission.

The two groups mounting most attacks on US bases – a tactic that well preceded 7 October – are Harakat al-Nujaba and Kataib Hezbollah, both funded and armed by Iran. They now operate under the title of Islamic Resistance in Iraq and have been responsible for more than 120 attacks on military bases housing US and other foreign troops in Iraq since 7 October, one of which seriously injured a US service member.

Although Iranian influence in Iraqi institutions remains controversial inside Iraq, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, the new prime minister installed with the backing of Iran-aligned factions, has been under pressure to expel US forces. On 28 December he said Iraq’s government was “proceeding to end the presence of the international coalition forces”. The US strike on Thursday that killed a top leader of the militia closest to Tehran will only increase the pressure in parliament to pass a legally binding motion expelling the US. There are more than 2,500 US troops in Iraq and 900 in Syria,

Hamas in Palestine

Hamas is a breed apart in the sense that its roots lie in the Muslim Brotherhood and, unlike other groups from 2012, it supported efforts to dislodge Assad from Syria, something Hezbollah opposed, causing one of the biggest rifts in Islamist politics in decades. The split took years to heal, and led Hamas to become increasingly dependent on Qatar as opposed to Iran.

Hamas claims the bloody massacre of Israelis on 7 October was mounted without the knowledge of either Iran or anyone in the axis of resistance. The US has said Iran was complicit but has produced no evidence that Tehran was forewarned.

Nasrallah has said he was not informed and that this reveals how the axis operates. “When I said that the al-Aqsa Flood was a Palestinian operation of which we were unaware, it was not to distance ourselves from this operation,” he said. “The resistance organisations operate independently in their respective countries, making decisions based on their own interests and the interests of their people.” Others insist an operation of this scale would never have been launched without consultation. In the land of plausible deniability, anything is possible.