Iran Today

From Beirut to Minab

by Iran Prism 10 min read

The Bekaa Valley

In 1982, a twenty-six-year-old cleric named Abbas al-Musawi returned to southern Lebanon from the Iranian city of Qom with a message and a mission. The message was Khomeini’s vision of Islamic revolution exported. The mission was to transform a loose coalition of Shia militants into a disciplined fighting force. He did not come alone. Approximately 800 IRGC advisors arrived in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley that year, setting up training camps in the agricultural flatlands between the mountains.1

What emerged was Hezbollah — and with it, the first iteration of a military doctrine that would shape four decades of conflict across the Middle East.

The early tactics were straightforward: guerrilla ambushes, truck bombings, kidnappings. But over time, as Hezbollah grew from an insurgency into a territorial force with political representation, its military strategy evolved to exploit a specific vulnerability in its adversaries. Israel, the United States, and their allies operated under legal and political constraints that required them to minimize civilian casualties. Hezbollah’s commanders recognized that this constraint could be weaponized.2

The result was a gradual, deliberate embedding of military infrastructure within civilian spaces. Not in open fields where targets could be struck without controversy, but in basements of apartment buildings, beside mosques, adjacent to schools, beneath hospitals. Hezbollah’s Deputy Secretary-General Naim Qassem confirmed that every member attended IRGC-supervised training.3 The student would eventually surpass the teacher — and then the teacher would bring the lessons home.

The Laboratory

The scale of what Hezbollah built is difficult to grasp without numbers.

In 2006, when Israel launched a thirty-four-day military campaign against Hezbollah, the group’s arsenal was estimated at roughly 15,000 rockets and missiles. Human Rights Watch documented weapons stored in civilian homes, a weapons-packed van parked beside a mosque in Marwahin, weapons inside a Dahieh apartment building transferred to a civilian bomb shelter, and a weapons warehouse in a basement adjacent to a family residence in Bar’ashit.4

But HRW also concluded something important in 2006: these violations were “not widespread.” The organization found “strong evidence that Hezbollah stored most of its rockets in bunkers and weapon storage facilities located in uninhabited fields and valleys.”5

What happened in the eighteen years between 2006 and 2024 transformed the picture entirely. The arsenal grew from 15,000 to an estimated 150,000 rockets and missiles. The Alma Research and Education Center identified twenty-eight Hezbollah missile sites within Beirut itself, including positions near schools and hospitals. IDF assessments estimated that one-quarter to one-third of buildings in most southern Lebanese Shia villages served Hezbollah’s military apparatus.6

This was engineered infrastructure, built by the IRGC’s own engineering arm, Khatam al-Anbia — an organization employing 25,000 engineers, with projects split roughly 70/30 between military and civilian work, blurring the line by design.7

The 2006 war taught Hezbollah a specific lesson: embedding works. Israel’s response — the “Dahieh Doctrine” of massive disproportionate force against any area from which attacks originated — killed an estimated 850 to 1,000 Lebanese civilians and displaced a million people, but killed zero senior Hezbollah leaders.8 Nasrallah declared a “divine, historic and strategic victory.” Israel’s own Winograd Commission called it a “missed opportunity.” The rational conclusion for any military organization watching: embed deeper, build closer, accept that civilian casualties from enemy strikes serve the political mission.

The Students

The IRGC did not limit itself to one proxy. The Hezbollah model was replicated, adapted, and transmitted to every new client militia — each one developing its own variation of the civilian embedding strategy.

Hamas. Beginning in 1992, IRGC and Hezbollah hosted Hamas deportees in Lebanon, teaching bomb construction and guerrilla tactics. By 2023, approximately 500 Hamas and PIJ militants had received specialized combat training in Iran under Quds Force officers.9 The tactics evolved from Hezbollah’s surface embedding into something more sophisticated: subterranean infrastructure beneath protected sites. At al-Shifa Hospital, the IDF discovered a tunnel shaft descending ten meters, extending over 213 meters beneath the surgery center, containing bunkers, living areas, and a communications room. CCTV footage from October 7, 2023 showed Hamas fighters leading hostages into the hospital.10 UNRWA facilities in Gaza were found to have tunnel networks beneath headquarters, with rockets discovered in UNRWA schools on at least three occasions in 2014.11

The Houthis. UN Panel of Experts documented Houthi militarization of Yemeni schools using satellite imagery — al-Wehdah and Ahmed Fareg schools among the confirmed sites — with explosives planted “in and around schools, mosques, and houses.” The panel directly attributed the Houthis’ military transformation to “transfer of materiel and the assistance and training provided by IRGC-QF, Hezbollah, and Iraqi specialists.”12

Iraqi militias. CSIS documented 10,000 Quds Force-led militia forces in the Mosul battlespace. The Popular Mobilization Forces occupied schools, operated secret prisons, and embedded as permanent armed presence in civilian neighborhoods. Iraqi militia leader Hamed al-Jazaeery explicitly stated that the IRGC served as the PMF’s organizational model.13

IRGC Aerospace Force commander Hajizadeh summarized the relationship publicly in 2021: “All the missiles you might see in Gaza and Lebanon were created with Iran’s support.”14

The Mosaic Doctrine

No publicly available IRGC document explicitly teaches “use civilian infrastructure as shields.” But the consistency of the pattern across all groups — embedding in residential areas, hospitals, schools, mosques, and UN facilities — indicates shared tactical doctrine rather than independent convergent evolution.15

Researchers describe what happened as a co-evolutionary model. Hezbollah developed specific tactics in Lebanon’s geography — a small country where military infrastructure cannot be physically separated from civilian areas without abandoning most of the territory. The IRGC observed, refined, and standardized these approaches through what it calls the “Mosaic Doctrine” — a framework for dispersed asymmetric warfare designed to make a conventional military’s technological advantages irrelevant by distributing targets across civilian landscapes.16

The standardization happened through training pipelines. Hezbollah trainers — themselves IRGC-trained — deployed to each new proxy theater. Hamas militants trained in Lebanon and Iran. Houthi commanders received instruction from IRGC-QF, Hezbollah, and Iraqi specialists simultaneously. The Iraqi PMF modeled itself explicitly on IRGC organizational structure. Each new proxy added its own innovations — Hamas developed subterranean networks that Hezbollah later adopted, the Houthis adapted to Yemen’s tribal geography — and these innovations fed back into the shared doctrine.17

The result is a tactical ecosystem, continuously refined across multiple theaters, with the IRGC as its central node, standardizer, and distributor.

The Bridge Commanders

Three men connect the proxy theaters to what happened inside Iran in 2025 and 2026. Their career trajectories are the human evidence of doctrinal transfer.

Major General Mohammad Pakpour commanded the IRGC Ground Forces from 2009. Under his leadership, Ground Forces troops deployed to Syria — where they accounted for 25% of Iranian fatalities — gaining direct experience in the urban warfare tactics developed with Hezbollah and tested against ISIS.18 On June 13, 2025, following the reported death of IRGC Commander-in-Chief Hossein Salami in the opening strikes of Operation Rising Lion, Pakpour was appointed to replace him. When nationwide protests erupted in January 2026, Pakpour deployed the same Ground Forces to Kermanshah. CTP-ISW characterized this as indicating “the regime views the protests as an insurgency” — fighting its own people with the same units that fought in Syria.19 Pakpour was reportedly killed in U.S.-Israeli strikes on February 28, 2026.

Brigadier General Ahmad Vahidi served as the first commander of the Quds Force from 1988 to 1998 — the decade in which Iran’s entire proxy infrastructure was constructed. He personally mentored Hezbollah’s military architect Imad Mughniyeh. He is wanted by INTERPOL for the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people.20 On December 31, 2025, as the Winter of the Rial uprising intensified, Vahidi was appointed IRGC Deputy Commander-in-Chief — explicitly to manage the crisis. He had previously overseen the 2022 Mahsa Amini crackdown as Interior Minister. The man who built the proxy network from scratch was brought in to deploy its domestic application.

Brigadier General Mohammad Karami replaced Pakpour as Ground Forces commander. His previous assignment: governor of Sistan-Baluchestan province, where security forces massacred at least 105 civilians on “Bloody Friday” — September 30, 2022 — in Zahedan. He has been sanctioned by multiple governments for human rights violations.21

The pattern is unmistakable. Syria experience leads to domestic command. Proxy warfare expertise leads to crackdown authority. The skills developed for fighting foreign populations are applied to fighting Iran’s own people.

The Homecoming

In 2019, former Revolutionary Court head Mousa Ghazanfarabadi said something that, at the time, attracted little attention: “If we do not support the Revolution, the Iraqi Hashd al-Shaabi, Afghan Fatemiyoun, Pakistani Zeynabiyoun, and Yemeni Houthis will come to support it.”22

This was not metaphor. During the 2022 Mahsa Amini protests, approximately 150 Iraqi fighters entered Iran to assist with the crackdown. By the January 2026 uprising, the numbers were dramatically larger — an estimated 8,000 foreign fighters — roughly 5,000 Iraqi Hashd al-Shaabi, 2,000 Afghan Fatemiyoun, and smaller Pakistani Zainabiyoun and Lebanese Hezbollah contingents — deployed against Iranian civilians.23

The Fatemiyoun Brigade’s trajectory illustrates the pipeline’s scale. Founded with just 22 Afghan Shia fighters in 2012 to fight in Syria, it grew to over 10,000, with estimates of up to 50,000 Afghans total fighting in Syria under various IRGC-organized formations.24 These fighters — trained by the IRGC, battle-tested in Syrian urban warfare, owing their survival and their families’ residency permits to the regime — became the regime’s solution to a problem that every authoritarian faces: what happens when your own soldiers hesitate to fire on their own people?

You bring in soldiers for whom the protesters are not their own people.

Consider what it means when a government’s answer to its own citizens’ demands is to deploy foreign militias who share neither their language nor their grievances — fighters whose families’ residency permits depend on their willingness to fire.

The doctrine came full circle. Tactics refined through Hezbollah in Lebanon, transmitted to Hamas in Gaza, adapted by the Houthis in Yemen, tested by the PMF in Iraq — all converged on Iranian cities in January 2026. The hospitals besieged in Ilam and Tehran. The schools commandeered in Arak and Sari. The stadiums filled with dispersed forces in February.

From Beirut to Minab. Four decades. Four countries. One doctrine. And the children who happen to attend school next to whatever the IRGC has built this time.25

This article is part of The Shield and the Schoolyard. For the forensic evidence, see Twelve Incidents, Nine Cities. For the legal framework, see The Law Is Clear.

Footnotes

  1. Approximately 800 IRGC advisors deployed to Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley in 1982 to establish what would become Hezbollah. ↩

  2. The embedding strategy exploits the legal and political constraints on adversaries operating under international humanitarian law — specifically the requirements of distinction, proportionality, and precaution that raise the cost of striking targets in civilian areas. ↩

  3. Naim Qassem, Hezbollah Deputy Secretary-General, confirming universal IRGC-supervised training for Hezbollah members. ↩

  4. Human Rights Watch, documentation from the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, including specific sites in Marwahin, Bar’ashit, and the Dahieh suburb of Beirut. ↩

  5. Human Rights Watch, 2006 report finding that the majority of Hezbollah’s rocket arsenal was stored in unpopulated areas. This nuance is important for accuracy — the scale of civilian embedding changed dramatically between 2006 and 2024. ↩

  6. Alma Research and Education Center identification of twenty-eight Hezbollah missile sites within Beirut; IDF assessment of one-quarter to one-third of buildings in southern Lebanese villages serving Hezbollah military functions, by 2024. ↩

  7. Khatam al-Anbia Construction Headquarters, the IRGC’s engineering arm, employing approximately 25,000 engineers with a 70/30 military/civilian project split. ↩

  8. The 2006 war killed an estimated 850-1,000 Lebanese civilians and displaced approximately one million people. Israel’s Winograd Commission characterized the outcome as a “missed opportunity.” Zero senior Hezbollah leaders were killed. ↩

  9. Wall Street Journal, September 2023, reporting approximately 500 Hamas and PIJ militants trained in Iran under Quds Force officers. ↩

  10. New York Times verification of al-Shifa Hospital tunnel extending at least 213 meters. CCTV footage authenticated by multiple news organizations. ↩

  11. UNRWA confirmed rockets discovered in its schools on at least three occasions during the 2014 Gaza conflict. ↩

  12. UN Panel of Experts on Yemen, satellite-documented school militarization and attribution of Houthi military transformation to IRGC-QF, Hezbollah, and Iraqi training. ↩

  13. CSIS documentation of 10,000 Quds Force-led fighters in Mosul; Hamed al-Jazaeery’s statement on IRGC as PMF organizational model. ↩

  14. IRGC Aerospace Force commander Hajizadeh, 2021 public statement. ↩

  15. No publicly available IRGC military doctrine document explicitly prescribes civilian infrastructure embedding. The evidence for shared doctrine is pattern-based: identical tactics across every IRGC-supported group, in every theater, over four decades. ↩

  16. The “Mosaic Doctrine” describes the IRGC’s framework for dispersed asymmetric warfare — distributing military assets across wide areas rather than concentrating them in conventional formations. ↩

  17. The training pipeline’s multi-directional nature: Hezbollah trainers deployed to Hamas, Houthi, and PMF theaters; innovations in each theater fed back to other proxies and to the IRGC itself. ↩

  18. IRGC Ground Forces under Pakpour deployed to Syria with 25% of Iranian fatalities attributed to Ground Forces troops. This provided direct urban warfare experience applicable to domestic operations. ↩

  19. CTP-ISW analysis of Pakpour’s January 2026 Ground Forces deployment to Kermanshah. ↩

  20. INTERPOL Red Notice for Ahmad Vahidi in connection with the July 18, 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people. Vahidi served as first Quds Force commander (1988-1998) and mentored Imad Mughniyeh. ↩

  21. Iran Human Rights documentation of Zahedan “Bloody Friday” massacre, September 30, 2022. Karami sanctioned by multiple governments for human rights violations. ↩

  22. Mousa Ghazanfarabadi, former head of Tehran Revolutionary Court, 2019 statement. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies noted the strategy was “no longer covert.” ↩

  23. Estimated foreign proxy deployments during the January 2026 crackdown include Iraqi Hashd al-Shaabi fighters, Afghan Fatemiyoun Brigade members, and Lebanese Hezbollah operatives. Approximately 150 Iraqi fighters deployed during the smaller 2022 protests (Der Spiegel). ↩

  24. Fatemiyoun Brigade growth from 22 fighters in 2012 to over 10,000, with up to 50,000 total Afghan fighters in Syria under various IRGC formations. ↩

  25. The Iranian Archive (Atlantic Council and Mnemonic) has preserved over two million digital artifacts documenting the domestic application of the proxy warfare doctrine. The UN Fact-Finding Mission on Iran has collected over 38,000 evidence items. ↩