Ehud Yaari is the Lafer International Fellow at The Washington Institute.
Articles & Testimony
A closer look at how Tehran plans to build (and hold onto) dual land corridors stretching across Iraq and Syria toward the Mediterranean.
For the last three years, Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani has been kept busy setting up the building blocks for at least one, but more likely two, land corridors across the Levant (one in the north and one in the south), linking Iran to the Mediterranean. These pathways would traverse a distance of at least 800 miles from Iran's western borders through the Euphrates and Tigris valleys and the vast expanses of desert in Iraq and Syria, providing a link to Hezbollah in Lebanon, and finally ending at the edge of the Golan Heights. The two corridors would serve as chains to move military supplies or militiamen when needed. The idea, according to several senior Iranian officials, would be to outsource the supervision of the corridors to proxy forces, such as Hezbollah and the various Shiite militias Iran sponsors in Iraq and Syria, in order to avoid using its own military forces to control the routes...
