Goodbye to a regime superstar: At Thursday’s burial, supporters mob the coffin of Gen. Hassan Shateri, Iran’s pointman in Lebanon and Syria. (AP)
The killing of a senior Iranian commander west of Damascus highlights Tehran’s military involvement in the Syrian civil war.
Gen. Hassan Shateri was gunned down last Monday while driving south to Lebanon after a week of “consultations” with Syria’s military leaders. But official confirmation of his death only came days later, after Shateri’s body was returned to his native city of Semnan, east of Tehran.
Gen. Qassem Suleimani, Commander of the Quds (Jerusalem) Force, led the cortege at Thursday’s burial ceremony.
Quds, of which Shateri was a senior commander, is in charge of “exporting” the Islamic revolution. In practice, this means raising and leading pro-Iran militias and terrorist groups in countries of special interest to Tehran.
According to Tehran sources, two of Shateri’s aides were also killed in the ambush set up by rebels fighting the Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad. It’s not clear whether the aides were Iranian, or Lebanese members of Hezbollah.
Shateri was sent to Lebanon after the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah war. His mission: Help rebuild the Iran-backed Shi’ite militia, which had been shattered in the conflict. Shateri used the nom de guerre of “engineer Hessam Khosnevis,” with the title of special representative of the president of the Islamic Republic.
According to Tehran sources, Shateri used several funds amounting to $200 million a year to replace Hezbollah’s lost arsenal and rebuild its missile sites near the Israeli border.
As special representative of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, he sat on Hezbollah’s central committee and helped shape the party’s policies with advice from Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah.
Shateri’s key achievement was the creation of a mini-state within in Lebanon. This consists of a set of fiber-optic communication networks built in parallel with those controlled by the Lebanese government. Thus, Iran has its own telephone, TV and satellite communication facilities across the Lebanon.
The general also launched a real-estate company to buy land, sometimes whole villages, from Christian and Druze minorities. The areas thus obtained helped Iran establish territorial contiguity from the Bekaa Valley on the Syrian border to Beirut and thence to the demarcation line with Israel in the south. This has created a seamless Shi’ite-majority entity in the very heart of Lebanon.
The business empire controlled by Shateri in Lebanon includes banks, shopping malls, hotels, transport companies, radio and TV networks, newspapers and travel agencies.
The general became a star in Tehran when he succeeded in ousting the US-backed government of Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri in 2011, replacing it with that of Najib Miqati — with Hezbollah in effective control.
The anti-Assad uprising in Syria posed a new challenge to Shateri. For the past two years, he has helped recruit and train special units to fight for Assad. He brought in some 400 Revolutionary Guardsmen from Iran to run the scheme with help from Lebanese Hezbollah fighters.
Shateri also secured “mooring rights” for the Guard’s navy in the Syrian port of Tartus, where Iran is building military and civilian “facilities.”
It is not clear whether the Guard’s Iranian personnel have been directly involved in fighting against Syrian rebels. Tehran denies any involvement, but there is some evidence that some of Shateri’s Lebanese men have died fighting for Assad in Syria. Anti-Assad forces claim that Iran and Hezbollah are both involved in Assad’s massacres of civilians across of Syria.
Shateri is the highest-ranking Guard officer ever killed outside Iran. His death is likely to renew debate within the Tehran leadership regarding the future of the Assad regime.
“Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei has vowed to prevent Assad’s fall. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on the other hand, has tried to distance Iran from Assad in the hope of preventing the emergence of a new anti-Iran bloc led by Turkey and Egypt backed by Saudi Arabia.