How Iran and Qassem Soleimani shaped the fight against ISIS, according to an aid worker who saw it first-hand
Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/AP
Qassem Soleimani, then chief of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps' Quds Force, at a meeting of Revolutionary Guard commanders with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran.
- Christa Waegemann worked for humanitarian aid NGOs in Iraq in 2016 and 2017 and witnessed how the fight against the terror group ISIS gripped the country.
- While the Iraqi army and US, European, Canadian, and Australian troops fought in the official anti-ISIS coalition, Shia militias like Hasd al-Shaabi, the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), took on ISIS too.
- As Waegemann tells Business Insider, everyone in Baghdad knew who was behind the rise of these Shia militias: Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps' Quds force.
- Visit Business Insider's home page for more stories.
"My favorite moments were driving around the city, feeling its heartbeat," she tells Business Insider. "Traffic jams allowed me to people-watch and observe the street life of the city. Baghdad was crumbling everywhere but still had a charm and sometimes a cosmopolitan air."
Yet working as country director for the local Iraqi organization Mercy Hands for Humanitarian Aid (HM) in 2016, Waegemann spent most time confined to her office/home for security reasons. Then at 29, and the first expat at HM, she lived outside the Green Zone, in the upper middle-class district Karrada.
"All you need is one person who gets it in their head to kidnap you," Waegemann says, "or one person to pass information onto ISIS."
SABAH ARAR/AFP via Getty Images
An Iraqi policeman uses a K-9 sniffer dog to check for explosives in Baghdad's Karrada district on August 24, 2016.
The terror group never conquered the capital, but it had a grip on the city nonetheless. On July 3, five months after Waegemann's arrival in Iraq, an ISIS suicide truck slammed into the popular Hadi Center in Karrada. The blast killed 324 people. Waegemann lived just a few streets away.
"Hearing the explosion, I sat up in bed thinking 'that was a bomb,'" she remembers, "and then I promptly went back to sleep. I had gotten too accustomed to Baghdad's regular bomb and mortar noises."
Once a Christian neighborhood, Karrada had become more and more Shia over time. ISIS, claiming to be Sunni, defined Shia members, the smaller of the two main confessions in the Muslim world, as heretics and targeted them viciously.
But in Karrada, the Shia organized its counterstrike - with the help of Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Iranian Quds force who was killed by an US airstrike in Baghdad on January 3.
How Soleimani orchestrated the Shia fight against ISIS in Iraq
In 2016, Karrada became a recruiting ground for the Shia militia Hasd al-Shaabi, the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF).
Thomson Reuters
Shi'ite Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) celebrate on the outskirts of Kirkuk, Iraq, October 17, 2017.
The PMF's main supporter, though, was Soleimani: From an early stage his Quds forces trained and coordinated the Shia militia's fighters and delivered weapons and equipment to Iraq.
In July 2016, the Al-Jadriya area, a slightly more posh district within Karrada, was crawling with PMF recruiters, remembers Waegemann: "Driving down Jamia Street, one would pass poster after poster with pictures of men dressed in military uniforms, with guns and slogans about Hussein - recruitment advertisements for the Shi'a militias that even included their Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook pages to follow."
Indeed, by August 2016, just a short time before the start of the battle to liberate Mosul from ISIS, Pentagon officials estimated there were between 80,000 and 100,000 Iranian-backed Shia fighters on the ground in Iraq.
And on August 6 that year, a spokesman for the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Front announced that Soleimani is in Iraq to oversee the retaking of Mosul: "General Soleimani is in Iraq at the invitation of the Iraqi government to provide military counseling to the Iraqi forces."
Soleimani's presence in Iraq during the battle of Mosul was never verified. But even before then, the Iranian general became known under a now infamous term: "The Shadow Commander."
At UN meetings in Iraq, the PMF was a solemn topic
Reuters
Shi'ite Popular Mobilization Forces members with an ISIS flag they pulled down in Tal Afar, Iraq, August 27, 2017.
In December 2016, the war against ISIS has surrounded, yet not quite reached, Mosul. Worn down by the constant fear for her life and safety in Baghdad, Waegemann has resettled to Kurdistan, working as country director for the French NGO La Chaine de L'espoir (CDE) in the cities of Dohuk and Erbil.
The fighting is just 60 minutes away, but most roads to Mosul are closed. Safe routes for humanitarian aid workers through the war zone change on a daily basis. An assignment in late December took Waegemann to a field hospital in the town of Hamam al-Alil, which had just been retaken from ISIS.
Waegemann, her Kurdish colleague, and an Iraqi-French surgeon approached the town in a dust storm.
"The road was destroyed. A large long ditch ran parallel to it, where ISIS had been fighting. Along the way were shells of remaining suicide bombers' cars, all twisted and rusted," she remembers. "Most houses along the road were in heaps of rubble. A couple shepherds tended their herds in the thick dust, letting the sheep wander. Almost no one was on the road except a few military vehicles, blaring their lights in the storm."
Hamam al-Alil had been liberated by a combination of elite Iraqi forces and the Iraqi police. Yet when Waegemann left the town, rumors spread that ISIS would return in the night to retake it. Protracted fighting like this dominated the battle for Mosul for months on end. Iraqi forces fought alongside troops from the international coalition - with the Iranian-backed Popular Mobilization Forces always part of the equation.
Waegemann remembers meetings of the UN health cluster group in Kurdistan in which the fighting of the PMF was discussed. While the coalition forces held back on the battlefield to evacuate civilians, the Shia militias would not. Because areas controlled by the PMF were not accessible for humanitarian workers, no one really knew about conditions and casualties there.
Soleimani is gone, but Iran's agenda in Iraq hasn't changed'
Associated Press
Worshippers at Friday prayers in front of a banner of Soleimani and Iraqi Shiite senior militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, killed in Iraq in a US drone strike in Iraq on January 3, at Imam Khomeini Grand Mosque in Tehran, January 17, 2020.
Waegemann left Iraq on August 1, 2017. Being of American-German citizenship, she now lives in Berlin, working for an organization that supports humanitarian work in Syria
On January 3, the day a MQ-9-Reaper drone struck Soleimani's convey outside the Baghdad airport, Waegemann didn't check the news before she arrives at work at about 8:45 a.m. When she heard of Soleimani's death, when the messages from former coworkers and friends in Iraq started coming in, some optimistic, some fearful, she was shocked.
"We all know Soleimani was responsible not only for the deaths of many Americans but also the deaths of many Iraqis and Syrians. But, ultimately, I was wondering what this will bring - en escalation of anti-Americanism, danger for Americans working in the Middle East, war?" she says.
Waegemann isn't convinced that Soleimani's killing was well thought out.
"Soleimani was instrumental in the design of the Hasd al-Shaabi but also in proxy militias from Lebanon to Yemen. And though he is now gone, it doesn't mean Iran's agenda or strategy in the region has changed," she says. "If anything, his killing added fuel to the fire."