Esmail Qaani | Commander of the ‘Axis’

When Esmail Qaani was chosen to lead the Quds Force, an elite wing of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, in January 2020, immediately after Qassem Soleimani was assassinated by the U.S. outside the Baghdad airport, many doubted whether the veteran would be able to fill the very large shoes of the ‘Shadow Commander’. The gist Born in 1957 in the holy city of Mashhad, which hosts the shrine of Imam Reza, the eighth Imam of Shia Islam, Esmail Qaani grew up in the Shah’s Persia In the early 1980s, when the newly born theocratic republic was fighting a war of existence with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Mr. Qaani joined the IRGC His battlefield experience, close ties with the Supreme Leader as well as unflinching commitment and loyalty to the revolutionary regime helped his quiet ascent in the IRGC According to one account, IRGC commander Mohsen Rezai was looking for guardsmen to form a division in Iran’s Khorasan province. In 2012, when Syria was falling into chaos, Gen. Qaani told a state media outlet that the presence of the IRGC in Syria “prevented many massacres”, admitting, for the first time, that Iranian troops were present in Syria, fighting alongside the forces of President Bashar al-Assad in the country’s civil war. The designation stated that Gen. Ghani’s “authority covers IRGC-QF, financial disbursements to IRGC-QF elements, including elements in Africa, as well as to various terrorist groups, including Hezbollah.” Shadow war Gen. Qaani took over the Quds Force at a time when the shadow war between Israel and Iran was intensifying.