Outspoken Guards Commander Killed in Syria

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards announced on October 9 that Hossein Hamedani, one of its most prominent military figures, had been killed in Syria. Soon after, international media confirmed reports that he had died in action.  

The Guards’ public relations team issued a statement that said the brigadier-general, “a senior advisor” to the Guards, had been “martyred by Islamic State terrorists on the outskirts of Aleppo while performing his duties.”

Iranian news agency Tasnim reported that Hossein Hamedani and his family had previously been the targets of a terrorist attack in their Beirut apartment three years ago but had escaped unharmed. There were also rumors that Hamedani had been killed in Syria in 2014. 

Hamedani is the third senior Iranian military commander to be killed in the last year — following the deaths of General Hamid Taghavi and Commander Mohammad-Ali Allah-Dadi, who were both killed in January 2015.  

Hossein Hamedani, who had an established record of working with the Guards, served as an advisor to its commander and as deputy commander of Imam Hossein military base. Following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, he was assigned to the provinces of Kermanshah and Kurdistan, home to the majority of Iran’s ethnic Kurds, fighting against opponents of the Islamic Republic and Kurdish separatists. He later published an autobiography, entitled Brother, It's Duty.

After the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), he held important high-level military positions, including chief of staff of the Revolutionary Guards’ Ground Forces. He played an active role in cracking down on demonstrators during the violent aftermath of the disputed 2009 presidential election, and worked as the commander of the Guards’ Mohammad Rasoulollah Corps, which is responsible for maintaining security in Tehran.

“Defender of the Shrine”

Hamedani’s involvement in Syria started less than four years ago, after the civil war in the country intensified. At that point, he gave up his command of the Revolutionary Guards in Tehran and left for Syria. Pro-regime media in Iran nicknamed him and other Iranian military commanders in Syria as “Defender of the Shrine,” referring to a Shia holy shrine in Syria.

General Hamedani named his outfit in Syria the “Second Hezbollah,” after Lebanese Hezbollah (“Party of God”), and claimed that his forces were active in 14 Syrian provinces, with 42 brigades and 128 battalion.

At the same time, he actively drummed up support for the Syrian regime in Iran, including involvement in the headquarters for the Support the Syrian People organization, which raises money for the reconstruction of Syria and has branches in all Iranian provinces.

While in Syria, Hamedani also formed “cultural” groups modeled on Iran’s paramilitary Basij.“Syria no longer has an army in which praying and reading the Koran is banned,” he boasted. 

In September 2014, after General Ghassem Suleimani, commander of the Revolutionary Guards expeditionary Qods Force, suffered setbacks in Syria and Iraq, Arab media reported that Iran planned to hand over responsibility for its military operations in Iraq and Syria to General Hamedani and Ali Shamkhani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council. They also reported that President Rouhani and General Hamedani had worked together during the Iran-Iraq war, and as a result Hamedani was closer to the Iranian president than General Suleimani was. Although such reports were quickly denied, they served to show the key role that Hamedani was playing in the region’s military operations.

Banned by the European Union

But even before his venture into Syria, Hamedani’s name was well known across Iran. In 1999, he was one of a group of generals who wrote a letter to then President Mohammad Khatami, demanding that he take steps to end widespread student protests, a move that would inform his later role suppressing street demonstrations in 2009. “We will not permit anything called the ‘Green Movement’ to assert itself,” he said at the time. He also called for Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, the two reformist presidential candidates and leaders of the Green Movement, to face execution. 

Hamedani was pleased with how forces under his command performed, particularly with regard to the so-called “Sedition” of 2009.“They passed the test handsomely,” he said. He was often controversial: His claim that forces “cut the spinal cords” of 830 protesters during that period of unrest did not tally with any official numbers citing deaths, and it was soon refuted by media closely affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards. 

His role in brutalizing protesters led the European Union to include his name on its blacklist of Iranian officials guilty of gross violations of human rights — a boycott that was not helped by his persistent bragging about how protesters fared against the forces he commanded.

But Hamedani was also unabashedly political, and reformists were not the only ones he lashed out at. “The Guards and the Basij are good for nothing if they are not political,” he once said. He even launched a verbal attack against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2011 while the president was still in office, comparing him to Abolhassan Banisadr, the first president of the Islamic Republic who was forced to flee the country once he was forcefully removed from office. He labeled the views of Ahmadinejad’s chief-of-staff Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei “deviant” and even worse than the “Sedition” of 2009.

No Friend of Rouhani

Hamedani was prolific in his political commentary — and as a result his name frequently appeared in the media.

Contrary to reports about his cordial relations with President Rouhani, over the past two years, he was a vocal critic of the president’s foreign policy. When Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and Secretary of State John Kerry were photographed taking a walk together during nuclear negotiations in Geneva earlier this year, he angrily accused Zarif of presenting an affront to “martyrs.” By negotiating with the United States, he said, Rouhani had restored the “grandeur of the enemy.” For Hamedani, no matter what, Iran’s negotiations with the West represented a defeat for the Islamic Republic.

In his last published comments, Hamedani once again called on Iran’s leaders to adapt his hardline position on negotiations, and reminded the public of previous disasters in diplomacy. “We should not have trusted the enemy,” he said, referring to the Security Council Resolution 598 that ended the Iran-Iraq war. “Because the Great Satan America had launched a military attack on Iran....Any administration that allows compromise when dealing with America is responsible for its own humiliation and disgrace.”

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