Iran’s New Defense Minister: A Track Record of Irregular Warfare

The civil war in Syria has made it increasingly difficult for Iranian president Hassan Rouhani to claim that his country has embarked on a new or moderate path. Even if Rouhani is truly a moderate – a claim that remains to be confirmed – he is undercut by his own cabinet appointments. For example, Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan Poudeh, who now serves as Rouhani’s Defense and Armed Forces Logistics minister, is closely tied to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).

Among other things, Dehqan has a long and troubling history in Lebanon and Syria.  Following his active involvement in the 1979 hostage taking of American diplomats in Tehran and a brief tenure as IRGC Tehran commander, Dehqan deployed to Syria and Lebanon from 1982-1984, which is another way of saying that he was involved in the external IRGC operations of the Quds Force. According to the state-run Fars news, Dehqan was headquartered at the Iranian Embassy in Damascus, where he oversaw the training of Shi’a militias at a camp close to the Lebanese border. Dehqan, in cooperation with Lebanese Shi’ite cleric Abbas Mousavi, subsequently founded a training camp in the Bekaa Valley, and helped form the first cadres of the Lebanese terror group, Hezbollah. Hassan Nasrallah, current Hezbollah General Secretary, and the late Hezbollah operations chief Emad Mughniyah are widely believed to have been recruited by Dehqan. Hezbollah’s early acts of terrorism are also believed to have taken place under Dehqan’s watch.

According to Dehqan’s official biography, he was promoted to IRGC Air Force deputy and commander, while the IRGC’s multi volume Iran-Iraq war chronology reveals that Dehqan also served as operations chief at the Ramezan Base close to the Iran/Iraq border. In that capacity, Dehqan directed joint operations of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the IRGC-backed Badr militia, and the IRGC’s special operations forces, against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

The appointment of Dehqan, an irregular warfare expert, as defense minister, is a sign that the Islamic Republic of Iran will not likely cease to train and back violent non-state actors. The IRGC’s close cooperation with Hezbollah and other Shi’te militias in defense of the Assad regime in Syria, coupled with his recent defiant statements on Iran’s commitment to the Syrian regime, only underscores this point.

Ali Alfoneh is a senior fellow at Foundation for the Defense of Democracies