Iranian general Qassim Suleimani

was showing up everywhere —

in Aleppo, Baghdad, Beirut,

with Iran’s leader, with Iraq’s former prime minister.

It wasn’t always this way.

For years, Suleimani was an under-the-radar operator

in the Middle East.

He ran an elite military unit called the Quds Force.

It’s an arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps

that works to expand Iran’s influence in the Middle East

using covert military and intelligence tactics.

But in 2014, things started to change.

The elusive commander was spotted in the public eye

more often.

We started seeing him with militias,

on battlefields, at funerals.

He even had his own Instagram.

We combed through hundreds of images and videos,

many of them propaganda from Suleimani’s

early military days to his recent stint

as a social media sensation.

These appearances help paint a more complete picture

of how the Quds Force operates,

through a network of proxy forces,

or local militias, along a key corridor

that Iran calls the “axis of resistance.”

It stretches through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon.

Let’s start in Lebanon.

These are rare images that appear to have

been taken very recently.

They show Suleimani with Hassan Nasrallah, who

is the leader of Hezbollah, a Lebanon-based militant group.

Hezbollah is the archetype for how the Quds Force operates.

They helped found the group and fund it to this day.

This support fueled Hezbollah’s rise

as a political party, and as a military threat

to Israel, Iran’s archenemy.

These are Hezbollah fighters posing with Iranian weapons.

and here’s a video of Suleimani

with a senior commander of Hezbollah.

The group gives Iran a key foothold

in the region, along this corridor we told you about.

This photo from 2013 reveals just how strong the bond is

between these two groups.

It shows a prominent Hezbollah member

at a funeral for Suleimani’s mother in Tehran.

Two years later, that Hezbollah member died,

and Suleimani himself made the trip to Beirut

to pay his respects.

He’s seen here praying at his grave.

Now let’s look at how Suleimani

took the Hezbollah playbook and mimicked it in Iraq.

Here, too, sightings of Suleimani

help tell the story.

Here he is in 2015 with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis,

the leader of an Iraq-based militia

called Kataib Hezbollah, also known as K.H.

Over the last few years, the two

were seen frequently together, and the bond

is strong here, too, judging by this propaganda video.

Similar to Hezbollah, K.H. is active in politics

and helped push Iran’s interests in Baghdad.

And it runs military operations.

Suleimani’s team trains and arms them,

and one of their main targets over the years

has been American forces.

We found propaganda footage of K.H. attacks

on American bases in Iraq.

And K.H. also joined the fight against ISIS, which Iran

considered a major threat.

In fact, Suleimani even shows up

at victories against ISIS in Iraq.

These were brutal campaigns, where civilians were often

collateral damage.

K.H. would later be seen during the recent attack on the

U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

That episode led up to Suleimani’s killing,

and the other senior commander to die in the attack

was none other than K.H.’s leader: Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.

The next place we see Suleimani

is Syria, the missing piece in Iran’s strategic corridor.

The militias we just told you about,

Hezbollah and K.H., here they are

in Syria, fighting to help Syrian President Bashar al-Assad

stay in power.

Syria was also the only place we actually

saw Iranian operatives besides Suleimani in action.

Here, one of them describes how they train fighters in Syria.

But this video wasn’t meant to be released.

The footage was captured and leaked

by Syrian opposition forces.

Remember, it’s all part of the playbook.

Iranian Quds Force fighters rarely

appeared in any of the videos we found.

They stay under the radar and do most of their work

through proxies.

But we still see Suleimani.

Here he is near Aleppo in 2015.

The eventual fall of Aleppo became a key turning point

for Assad, with devastating consequences for civilians.

One big winner in all this bloodshed

was Iran, which kept its foothold in Syria.

There’s another place on the map, Yemen,

where Iran is active, but we don’t see Suleimani here.

Why?

Because Iran doesn’t want to be linked directly

to the conflict.

We do see other clues.

These are Iranian weapons being used by a group called

the Houthis.

They’re fighting against forces

backed by Iran’s great rival, Saudi Arabia.

And Suleimani’s lack of public profile

here tells us one final thing about the Quds Force:

controlling whether they come out of

or remain in the shadows is all part of their game.