|
2021-01-03 Syria-Lebanon-Iran
|
|
Hassan Danaeifar follows in Qasem Soleimani’s footsteps
|
|
Loooong backgrounder on Hassan Danaeifar, Iran’s big man in Iraq, most particularly long time beloved friend of Iraqi Kurdistan. He is currently is secretary of the Committee to Develop Iranian Economic Ties with Iraq and Syria. Some key bits: [Rudaw] Clear skies reigned when two veteran officers from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) visited the Kurdistan Region of Iraq’s second city of Sulaimani in December 2019.
The officers had come to attend a congress of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), Sulaimani’s dominant party and a regional ally of Iran. The congress had long been delayed, a reflection of the lethargy the party had suffered since the death of its charismatic leader and co-founder. The PUK hoped that the congress would see it regain an edge in Kurdish and Iraqi politics.
One of the visiting IRGC officers was Hassan Danaeifar, Iran’s former ambassador to Baghdad and now the top Iranian economic official in Iraq. The 57-year-old is a veteran of Iraqi Kurdish politics with nearly four decades of experience that began with clandestine operations against the Baathists, with the help of Peshmerga commanders now sat at the pinnacle of power in Kurdistan. Danaeifar, who speaks fluent Kurdish, is on a first name basis with Kurdistan Region officials. He feels more at home in Sulaimani than in his hometown of Shooshtar, an ancient riverside city in southwest Iran.
Continued from Page 2
On the afternoon of December 21, the two officers were leaving the house of a senior PUK official when Danaeifar received a frantic phone call from a superior, who had received a tip about an operation unfolding in the skies over Sulaimani. The superior warned him that a US drone was tracking them from above.
Danaeifar had evaded American capture on a number of occasions since Iraq was invaded in 2003. To do this, he relied on the assistance of a wide network of contacts within the Iraqi and Kurdish elite. They helped him willingly, because he had shown in the 1980s while working with the Iraqi opposition against Saddam Hussein’s US-backed regime that he could be trusted.
The superior who had warned Danaeifar issued quick instructions for both officers to immediately leave the Kurdistan Region and cross back into Iran, just a short drive away. "If you’re on the road, enter the first shopping center you find, change your car, and leave the area in disguise," he told them.
That superior was none other than General Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian official in charge of the IRGC Quds Force handling operations in Iraq and several other Middle Eastern countries. Unlike Danaeifar, Soleimani was answerable to no one — no one except Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei
...the very aged actual dictator of Iran, successor to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini...
, Iran’s ultimate decision maker. "With his intervention and the arrangements he made, he practically saved us," Danaeifar recalled on Iranian TV in October.
Solemani was a long-term friend of Danaeifar, the two growing close since they began working with each other in the early 1980s. Danaeifar was a top intelligence officer for operations and in charge of reconnaissance on front lines drawn all over the Iran-Iraq border area, including Kurdish areas. He was adept at surveying the Iraqis and sneaking behind their frontlines, escaping capture and slipping away. Soleimani relied on officers like Danaeifar to move around Iraq and the wider Middle East. He knew he could rely on Danaeifar to report for duty at any given time.
Soleimani was unique in how he dealt with heads of state and foreign counterparts, say those who worked with him.
"Haj Qasem [Soleimani] had so much power," recalled Mahmoud Cheraghi, who headed Quds Force artillery batteries in Syria. "Whenever we expressed our needs, he would call the defence minister in Iran
...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for spontaneously taking over other countries' embassies, maintaining whorehouses run by clergymen, involvement in international drug trafficking, and financing sock puppet militias to extend the regime's influence. The word Iran is a cognate form of Aryan. The abbreviation IRGC is the same idea as Stürmabteilung (or SA). The term Supreme Guide is a the modern version form of either Duce or Führer or maybe both. They hate Jews Zionists Jews. Their economy is based on the production of oil and vitriol...
from Aleppo to say we need this kind of ammunition sent to us. It didn’t matter what time of day or night it was — he spoke to officials of the country in a way as if they were under his command".
"Everyone listened to him because he was the Islamic Theocratic Republic ’s field commander, and also Hazrat Agha [the Supreme Leader] firmly supported him... Haj Qasem would take advantage of this support to execute the objectives of the Islamic Theocratic Republic of Iran in the field."
As commander of the IRGC Quds Force since 1997, Soleimani had been proving himself for decades. He had been on many tours of the Middle East. His growing public presence saw his return to the front lines, and photos taken of him strategising with commanders of all stripes against the Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not really Moslems....
(ISIS). Though the exposure put him at more risk, many believed Soleimani was, and would continue to be, untouchable.
But the events unfolding across the Middle East at the end of 2019 were different, the constant skirmishes in the region growing out of control. Unknown aircraft, believed to be Israeli, struck Iran-backed militias across Iraq during the summer of 2019. A few weeks later, Iran’s allies in Yemen
...an area of the Arabian Peninsula sometimes mistaken for a country. It is populated by more antagonistic tribes and factions than you can keep track of...
, the Iran's Houthi sock puppets
 ...a Zaidi Shia insurgent group operating in Yemen. They have also been referred to as the Believing Youth . Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi is said to be the spiritual leader of the group and most of the military leaders are his relatives. The legitimate Yemeni government has accused the them of having ties to the Iranian government. Honest they did. The group has managed to gain control over all of Saada Governorate and parts of Amran, Al Jawf and Hajjah Governorates. Its slogan is God is Great, Death to America™, Death to Israel, a curse on the Jews They like shooting off... ummm... missiles that they would have us believe they make at home in their basements. On the plus side, they did murder Ali Abdullah Saleh, which was the only way the country was ever going to be rid of him...
s, launched a brazen attack on Saudi oil facilities, striking out half of Soddy Arabia
...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual hajj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. When the oil runs out the rest of the world is going to kick sand in the Soddy national face...
’s oil production.
The situation was unstable, the possibility of full-blown war not far off, and no country was more afraid of that possibility than Iraq. Militias had established a state within a state, difficult for the government to control. A schism was already developing between different sections of the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF, or Hashd al-Shaabi in Arabic), its pro-Iran factions versus those more loyal to Iraq and the Marjaiya, the Shiite clergy based in Najaf. The gap between Iraq and Iran-backed militias too was big — a year earlier, Iran had reportedly deployed short-range ballistic missiles to its allies in Iraq in anticipation of a war.
Danaeifar grew up in a large, traditional, religious family, the son of a carpet merchant well known in Shooshtar. He became active against the Shah's rule when he was a teenager, an Islamic revolutionary in the mostly Arab province of Khuzestan, also populated by ethnic Bakhtiaris, who are close to Kurds in both tradition and the language they speak. Danaeifar, neither Arab nor Bakhtiari, managed to learn the languages of both, making it easy for him to later learn Kurdish.
He left at the age of 18 for the Iran-Iraq front line, where he would fall under the authority of Soleimani, who at 24 was already a senior IRGC commander. Though the young commander was inexperienced, he was prepared to take risks, especially with the lives of guardsmen. Some of those men and boys were as young as 15; some were Afghan refugees, secretly deployed to the front line to bolster the war efforts.
Danaeifar quickly rose through the ranks, acting as Soleimani’s top reconnaissance man during the Fath al-Mobin operation in March 1982 which laid the groundwork for the expulsion of Iraq’s forces from Iranian territory — with thousands of Iranian troops killed in the process. 
|
Posted by trailing wife 2021-01-03 01:34||
||
Front Page|| [14 views ]
Top
File under: Govt of Iran
|
|
Posted by NN2N1 2021-01-03 05:36||
2021-01-03 05:36||
Front Page
Top
|
|
Posted by Frank G 2021-01-03 06:07||
2021-01-03 06:07||
Front Page
Top
|
|
Posted by Boss Elmorong2601 2021-01-03 08:47||
2021-01-03 08:47||
Front Page
Top
|
|
Posted by Lord Garth 2021-01-03 10:43||
2021-01-03 10:43||
Front Page
Top
|
|
01:07 Grom the Reflective
00:28 Angealing+B.+Hayes4677
|
