One week after the Iranian Revolution declared victory on February 11, 1979, two photographs emerged from Tehran that, in retrospect, help explain many of the storms that would later sweep the Middle East, from Iran’s expanding regional influence to what the author calls “Sinwar’s Flood."
In the first image, two men sit side by side on a carpet. It is impossible to tell the story of the modern Middle East without dwelling on both of them. One is Ayatollah Khomeini, the architect of the Iranian Revolution. The other is Yasser Arafat, the founder of the modern Palestinian national movement.
Standing near Arafat are the Lebanese cleric Hani Fahs, the Iranian cleric Sadegh Khalkhali, and Ahmad Khomeini, the revolutionary leader’s son. Near Khomeini stand Mahmoud Abbas — today president of the Palestinian Authority — and Hani al-Hassan, a senior Fatah leader who would become the first Palestinian ambassador to revolutionary Iran.
In the second photograph, Arafat is shown addressing a crowd after the Palestinian flag was raised over the building that had housed the Israeli embassy in Tehran.
The symbolism of those scenes was profound. During his long years in exile in Najaf, Khomeini had understood that Palestine was the magic word that opened Arab and Muslim hearts. He may have believed that embracing the Palestinian cause would provide a passport for a Shiite revolution seeking entry into the vast Sunni world. It was natural that Tehran would celebrate Arafat, whose legitimacy was unrivaled after he had become the global symbol of the Palestinian struggle. It was equally natural that Arafat would welcome Iran’s dramatic shift from a state aligned with Israel to one proclaiming full support for the Palestinian revolution.
As always, Arafat lavished praise on his hosts. Yet experience had taught him not to surrender his cards to anyone. He had spent years dealing with powerful leaders who sought to use the Palestinian cause either to legitimize their own regimes or to project influence far beyond their borders.
Palestine was not Arafat’s only asset. He operated on Israel’s border through southern Lebanon, a frontier that had effectively become a Palestinian-Israeli border before eventually evolving into an Iranian-Israeli one. Although Lebanon at the time lay under the domination of Hafez al-Assad and the Syrian army — and despite Assad’s deep hostility toward Arafat — the Palestinian leader still controlled the decision of war and peace in southern Lebanon. That authority would later pass to Hassan Nasrallah, the late secretary-general of Hezbollah.
Arafat quickly grasped the sensitivities surrounding relations with Iran. Here was a Shiite revolution emerging in a predominantly Sunni world. The new regime’s commitment to “exporting the revolution” alarmed governments near and far. When the Iran-Iraq War erupted, Arafat attempted to play the role of mediator. He recalibrated his calculations, preserving room for strong relations with the Gulf Arab states, whose financial support remained indispensable to the Palestinian movement.
Any reading of 1979 must also account for another major development. That year Egypt completed its departure from the military front of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The process culminated in the signing of the Camp David Accords by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin under the sponsorship of US President Jimmy Carter. The agreement completed the geopolitical earthquake Sadat had triggered in 1977 when he traveled to Jerusalem and offered peace to Israel.
Egypt’s departure left a vacuum in the Arab world. That vacuum made it easier for Khomeini’s revolution to advance across the region.
Beginning in 1990, Iran would receive three major unintended gifts. The first came from Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait and redirected global attention toward the “Iraqi threat.” The second came from Osama bin Laden, whose attacks of September 11, 2001, focused the world on al-Qaeda terrorism. The third arrived when the United States toppled Iraq’s Baathist regime in 2003, allowing Iranian influence to flow into Iraq’s institutions and political structure.
What many overlooked was that Iran had already received two crucial gifts during the 1980s from Syrian President Hafez al-Assad.
The first came after Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Assad agreed to allow hundreds of members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps to enter Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley and train Lebanese Shiite Islamist groups seeking to organize resistance against Israeli occupation. From those groups, Hezbollah would eventually emerge.
The second gift arrived in the mid-1980s, when Assad decided to subordinate the Lebanese National Resistance Front — known by its Arabic acronym, Jammoul — to the Islamic resistance led by Hezbollah.
Elias Atallah, one of Jammoul’s coordinators, later recounted to Asharq Al-Awsat a dramatic meeting that preceded a series of assassinations targeting Communist Party leaders.
According to Atallah, Syrian intelligence chief in Lebanon Major General Ghazi Kanaan summoned him and Lebanese Communist Party Secretary-General George Hawi to an urgent meeting at a hotel in the Beqaa Valley.
Speaking on behalf of “Mr. President,” Kanaan bluntly informed them that Jammoul must coordinate its operations in advance with Syrian intelligence. He demanded more than that. Jammoul, he said, should coordinate with Hezbollah, or even merge with it.
The two men refused. Relations between the Communist Party and Hezbollah were already extremely tense. Kanaan abruptly ended the meeting with a warning: “You will pay a heavy price.”
A campaign of assassinations followed, targeting prominent communist figures. Kanaan scarcely concealed his satisfaction. At one funeral, he reportedly approached party members and remarked: “Is this better?”
The Syrian intervention dealt a devastating blow to the leftist resistance. Islamic resistance became the sole banner of armed struggle against Israel. Hezbollah reaped the benefits. In 2000, Israeli forces withdrew from southern Lebanon under fire and without extracting political concessions from Beirut. Iran now stood on Israel’s northern frontier through Hezbollah.
After the fall of Saddam Hussein, the road linking Tehran to Beirut through Baghdad and Damascus opened fully. What some called the “Axis of Resistance” and others the “Shiite Crescent” had taken shape.
At the beginning of the 1980s, many believed Saddam Hussein’s war had trapped the embers of Khomeini’s revolution within Iran’s borders. Then, in June 1982, an unexpected window opened.
Israel invaded Lebanon, besieged Beirut, and forced the Palestine Liberation Organization to leave the country. The image of Beirut bidding farewell to Yasser Arafat as he departed into another exile marked the end of an era.
Amid the invasion, George Hawi, Elias Atallah, Mohsen Ibrahim — the secretary-general of the Organization of Communist Action in Lebanon — and several comrades launched the Lebanese National Resistance Front against Israeli occupation. Their operations forced Israeli troops to withdraw quickly from Beirut.
At the same time, three Shiite Islamist groups inspired by Iran’s revolution entered discussions aimed at creating a unified resistance movement. The talks produced what became known as the “Document of the Nine,” which was taken to Tehran and received Khomeini’s blessing. He instructed the Revolutionary Guards to support the unity of these groups, which would eventually dissolve into Hezbollah.
Hezbollah’s current secretary-general, Naim Qassem, later recounted the organization’s founding in his book Hezbollah: The Method, the Experience, the Future. He identified the movement’s three pillars as Islam as a way of life, resistance to Israel as the highest priority, and allegiance to Wilayat al-Faqih as the ultimate reference point.
Hafez al-Assad often told visitors that the Iranian Revolution compensated for the strategic loss of Egypt. Those familiar with his thinking, however, suggest additional motives.
He was deeply hostile to Saddam Hussein. He also believed that Gulf Arab concerns about revolutionary Iran would make Syria indispensable to the Gulf states, bringing political and financial advantages. Allowing Hezbollah to grow in Lebanon fit neatly into that calculation.
Hezbollah was born under the mantle of the Wilayat al-Faqih and on the front line with Israel. It soon found itself on a front line with the United States as well.
In October 1983, a suicide bomber drove a truck packed with explosives into the US Marine barracks in Beirut, sending a convoy of coffins back to Ronald Reagan’s America.
Syria later played a crucial role in exempting Hezbollah from the disarmament provisions imposed on Lebanese militias after the Taif Agreement. Iran spared no effort in supporting the movement, enabling it to build a steadily expanding military and political force. Together, Tehran and Damascus also helped consolidate the Lebanese Shiite political order, bringing Hezbollah into partnership with the Amal Movement, led by Nabih Berri, who has served as speaker of parliament since 1992.
Old conflicts between Amal and Hezbollah gradually faded. Berri became a nearly permanent necessity for Hezbollah, helping shield it from political isolation, though never fundamentally altering its deeper ideological program.
The first decade of the twenty-first century produced scenes whose consequences extended far beyond their immediate settings. On April 9, 2003, an American armored vehicle pulled down Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad’s Firdos Square. The man whose statues inspired fear simply by their presence was denied the final showdown he had imagined. The army that had fought Iran for eight years evaporated before the American military machine.
Saddam was not far from Firdos Square when his statue fell. He chose resistance, badly misjudging both American power and the depth of Iraqi opposition to his rule.
Another defining image followed.
On December 13, 2003, Saddam was captured by US forces near Tikrit. Soldiers pulled him from a small underground hideout on a farm in al-Dawr. Television screens around the world carried the image of an American soldier inspecting the former Iraqi president’s mouth. He offered no resistance. Stories that he always carried a final bullet to avoid the humiliation of capture proved false.
Yet Saddam, obsessed with his place in history, succeeded in shaping part of his legacy. He denied the legitimacy of the court trying him and repeatedly insisted that he remained Iraq’s lawful president. Judge Raouf Rashid Abdel Rahman, who presided over the tribunal that sentenced Saddam to death, later told the author that “he was a difficult man, but he never asked for anything for himself.”
Saddam remained composed when the noose was placed around his neck.
The new Iraqi authorities made a grave mistake by scheduling the execution for December 30, 2006, the first day of Eid al-Adha. Another error followed. According to former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Saddam’s body was brought to his residence in Baghdad’s Green Zone after the execution, where Maliki briefly viewed it and reproached the dead man.
The images of Saddam’s capture, trial, and execution — combined with other factors — helped inflame Sunni-Shiite tensions inside Iraq and beyond. For many Iraqis, regardless of Saddam’s crimes, the execution appeared less like justice than revenge carried out on behalf of the United States, Iran, and Iraq’s pro-Iranian opposition.
Qassem Soleimani would soon devote himself to destabilizing the American military presence in Iraq, aided by Bashar al-Assad and Hassan Nasrallah.
Then another dramatic event emerged from Beirut.
On February 14, 2005, former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated in a massive explosion that tore through Beirut and scattered his body across the scene. The murder shook Lebanon like an earthquake. Huge crowds poured into the streets demanding the withdrawal of Syrian troops, which had been stationed in Lebanon since 1976.
Later that month, the author met Bashar al-Assad in Damascus and repeatedly asked whether Syrian security services had been involved.
Assad categorically denied any connection.
“Not from near or far,” he insisted.
Yet questions multiplied. Had he spoken with such certainty because he knew who was responsible?
The international investigation wandered through years of political interference, misinformation, and false witnesses. Eventually, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon indicted members of Hezbollah.
The case generated enduring questions. Was Hariri killed on the fault line between Sunnis and Shiites? Was he eliminated because of regional rivalries? Was he seen as an obstacle to a broader strategic project? Was he punished for trying to restore Lebanon as a normal state rather than leave it a missile platform in the conflict with Israel?
Hariri’s assassination transformed both Lebanon and Syria.
Bashar al-Assad was forced to swallow the bitter pill of withdrawing Syrian troops from Lebanon, a country his father had dominated for decades. Hafez al-Assad had bent much of Lebanon’s political class to his will and established the rules of the Syrian era. Governments bore the fingerprints of Syrian intelligence officers. Parliament was summoned and complied.
That era exiled General Michel Aoun and imprisoned Samir Geagea.
One major figure remained: Rafik Hariri. He had accepted operating under the Syrian umbrella but never abandoned his dream of rebuilding a functioning Lebanese state. His growing domestic, Arab, and international stature worried the narrow circle around Assad, and later worried Hezbollah as well.
Syria lost its Lebanese foothold, a platform that had amplified its influence and enriched many of its officers.
What followed was a Syria trapped within its own borders, relying on coercion and burdened by economic failure, while Lebanon became polarized between the March 14 movement and the March 8 alliance led by Hezbollah.
Many believe these developments helped set the stage for the July 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel, a conflict in which Qasem Soleimani played an active role behind the scenes.
After the war, Bashar al-Assad openly emphasized the importance of Syria’s strategic depth for Hezbollah. He even acknowledged that Syrian soldiers in civilian clothing had transported missiles to the movement and sometimes all the way to southern Lebanon.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701 ended the war, deploying the Lebanese Army alongside UNIFIL forces in southern Lebanon. The conflict partially altered the political landscape created after Hariri’s assassination and gave Hezbollah another justification for retaining its arsenal.
Many Lebanese politicians fundamentally misunderstood Hezbollah and its weapons. They assumed that Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon should have been enough for the movement to disarm, just as other militias had done after Taif. They overlooked the regional dimension of Hezbollah’s arsenal and its connection to Iran’s broader project.
In May 2008, Prime Minister Fouad Siniora’s government challenged Hezbollah’s private telecommunications network, declaring it illegal. The response was swift. Hezbollah turned its weapons inward and effectively seized control of Beirut, sending a clear message: the arsenal was here to stay.
The episode inflicted a deep wound on relations between Hezbollah’s community and many other Lebanese groups.
When the first spark of the Arab Spring erupted in Tunisia on December 17, 2010, Bashar al-Assad felt little concern. He believed Syria was different. More likely, his confidence reflected faith in a vast security apparatus whose brutality would deter dissent.
On March 15, 2011, Assad’s security services dealt with the children of Daraa according to that same doctrine of repression. Protests spread and became a nationwide uprising.
Assad showed little genuine interest in compromise. His generals viewed the revolt through the lens of minority insecurity and foreign conspiracy. The regime escalated from repression to barrel bombs and chemical weapons.
As opposition forces approached Assad’s presidential palace, two men rushed to his rescue: Qassem Soleimani and Hassan Nasrallah.
Iran had no intention of allowing Syria — the central link in its regional axis — to be torn away.
Soleimani persuaded Russian President Vladimir Putin to commit Russian air power to Assad’s defense. Hezbollah deployed fighters into Syria in 2013, while militias organized by Soleimani poured into the battlefield.
The regime survived. The cost was enormous.
The intervention deepened Sunni-Shiite wounds that remain visible today, not least in the rhetoric that dominates Syrian social media.
Years later in Paris, after defecting from Bashar al-Assad’s regime, former Syrian Vice President Abdul Halim Khaddam remarked that Hafez al-Assad could never have imagined Iranian influence in Lebanon growing to such an extent, or that his son would one day depend on pro-Iranian militias, including Hezbollah, to save his rule.
By then, Hezbollah was widely described as a regional force too large to fit within Lebanon’s political equation.
The author recalls a conversation with former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh before the end of the decade. In his characteristic style, Saleh asked: “Why is Hezbollah taking young Houthis to Damascus, sending them on to Lebanon without passport stamps, and training them in camps in the Bekaa Valley?”
The question hinted at a wider regional project already taking shape.
When Hezbollah launched its support front for “Sinwar’s Flood,” and later its support front for Iran itself, many Lebanese were reminded that their country had been living under the echo of Iranian power since the 1980s.
By the second decade of the twenty-first century, talk circulated within the so-called Resistance Axis of a coming “major blow” - a strike that many believed Yahya Sinwar dreamt of delivering through a rain of rockets and drones launched from multiple fronts across the region.
