Iranian officials insisted on Monday that Esmail Qaani, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force, is in “good health.” Qaani has not been heard from since Israel’s airstrikes on Hezbollah in Beirut last week.
Qaani is the successor to Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the Quds Force commander who was liquidated by a U.S. airstrike ordered by President Donald Trump in January 2020. Soleimani was in Baghdad organizing terrorist attacks against Americans and trying to arrange an assault on the U.S. Embassy, at the time of his death.
The Quds Force is Iran’s cross-border dirty tricks squad, charged with organizing, training, and funding terrorist proxies to conduct deniable attacks on Tehran’s orders.
Soleimani was, by all accounts, very good at his job and difficult for Iran to replace. He was noted for having particularly close relations with Shiite militias in Iraq, which have conducted numerous attacks against American positions since another Iranian proxy, Hamas, launched the Gaza war by attacking Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023.
Tehran settled for Qaani, 67, as Soleimani’s replacement, in 2020, bumping him up from deputy commander of the Quds Force, a position he held since 1997. Qaani took the job boasting that he would “remove American from the region” to get revenge for the U.S. killing “martyr Soleimani.”
Qaani’s actual job performance has been well short of what Soleimani delivered, as he lacks the connections Soleimani spent decades building, apparently has much less charisma than his camera-hogging predecessor, and does not even speak Arabic. It might also be mentioned on his next job review that Israel has systematically dismantled Hezbollah and Hamas, two terrorist proxies Iran spent decades building up.
Qaani always kept a lower profile than Soleimani, but he dropped completely out of sight after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) conducted an intensive bombardment of Beirut’s southern suburbs on Thursday with the goal of taking out the new leader of Hezbollah, Iran’s terrorist proxy in Lebanon.
The new Hezbollah leader, Hashem Safieddine, was chosen after Israel eliminated Hezbollah’s autocratic ruler of three decades, Hassan Nasrallah, with a bunker-busting precision airstrike last Saturday.
Safieddine has not been seen or heard from since the attack, but the IDF said on Monday that it cannot yet confirm his death. Lebanese security sources said Safieddine has been “unreachable” since the Israeli strikes.
Saudi Arabian media reported on Monday that Saffiedine is dead, and several Iranian IRGC officers and Hezbollah field commanders were killed alongside him, possibly including Qaani. Senior Iranian officials on Sunday confirmed that Qaani was in the Beirut suburbs at the time of the Israeli strike, but they claimed he was not there to meet with Saffiedine, and was not in the new Hezbollah leader’s bunker when the IDF destroyed it.
“When we have more specific results from that strike, we will share it. There are a lot of questions about who was there and who was not,” Israeli military spokesman Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani said on Sunday.
