# Quds Force The Quds (Jerusalem) Force is the elite expeditionary and clandestine arm of the [[Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps]], responsible for Iran's operations beyond its borders. It is the instrument through which Tehran builds, arms, trains, finances, and coordinates the [[Axis of Resistance]] — the regime's primary tool of regional power projection. ## Mission Where the regular IRGC defends the revolution at home, the Quds Force exports it. Its portfolio spans military advising, weapons smuggling, financing and standing up proxy militias, intelligence operations, and on occasion direct action and assassination abroad. It answers, in practice, to Supreme Leader [[Ali Khamenei]] rather than to Iran's elected government — making it the sharp end of a foreign policy run largely outside civilian control. ## The Soleimani Era The force is inseparable from [[Qasem Soleimani]], who commanded it from 1998 until his death in 2020 and turned it into one of the most consequential paramilitary organizations in the world. Under Soleimani the Quds Force deepened ties with [[Hezbollah]], built and directed the [[Iraqi PMF]] and other Shia militias after the 2003 US invasion, propped up the Assad regime during the [[Syrian Civil War]], and armed the Houthis in Yemen. Soleimani became a celebrity-strategist who made Iran the dominant external power across a broad arc of the Middle East. His assassination by a US drone strike at Baghdad airport in January 2020 was a watershed — removing the network's irreplaceable coordinator and marking a major escalation in the US-Iran confrontation. ## Why It Matters For the vault, the Quds Force is the organizational heart of Iran's "forward defense" doctrine and the engine of the [[Axis of Resistance]]. It explains how a sanctioned, conventionally weak state projected outsized influence for two decades — and its dependence on a single irreplaceable figure in Soleimani helps explain why the network has proven so brittle since his death and the broader degradation of the Axis through 2024. *See also: [[Iranian History Hub]], [[Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps]], [[Qasem Soleimani]], [[Axis of Resistance]]*