If you are among those mourning Khamenei this week and waving Iranian flags from the comfort of an Arab capital, consider the following inventory of what the regime you are celebrating has actually done to the Muslim world you claim to care about – not according to its enemies, but according to the historical record that no amount of “Death to Israel” chanting can erase.

If you are Afghan, your liberator-in-chief is the same Islamic Republic that provided intelligence to the United States during Operation Enduring Freedom in 2001 – handing the CIA maps of Taliban positions, suggesting optimal bombing targets, allowing American military personnel to operate alongside Iranian-backed Northern Alliance forces, and permitting US humanitarian shipments through Iranian territory. At the Bonn Conference that December, it was Iran’s envoy Javad Zarif who personally brokered the deal that installed Hamid Karzai as head of the US-backed interim government. Tehran did not resist the American invasion of Afghanistan. It facilitated it, served as its intelligence partner, and shaped its political outcome – then spent the next two decades arming Taliban factions through the IRGC’s Quds Force when it suited its interests to destabilize the very government it had helped create. Iran did not save Afghanistan. It helped destroy it twice, from opposite directions, depending on which destruction served Tehran’s agenda that year.

If you are Iraqi, the ledger is even bloodier. Iran did not oppose the American invasion of 2003; it benefited from it more than any other state on earth. The removal of Saddam Hussein – Iran’s existential enemy who had waged an eight-year war against the Islamic Republic – was a strategic gift that Tehran exploited with ruthless efficiency. As the Americans dismantled the Sunni-dominated Ba’athist state, Iran filled the vacuum with Shia militias, political parties, and intelligence networks that effectively converted Iraq into an Iranian client state. The Popular Mobilization Forces – the Hashd al-Shaabi – were built, funded, trained, and directed by the IRGC’s Quds Force under Qasem Soleimani, and their record against Iraqi Sunnis in Mosul, Fallujah, Tikrit, and Diyala constitutes a catalog of sectarian atrocities documented by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the United Nations. Iran did not liberate Iraq. It inherited the country the Americans broke and turned it into a province governed from Tehran.

If you are Syrian, Iran is the reason your country is a graveyard. When the Arab Spring reached Damascus in 2011, it was Tehran that made the strategic decision to keep Bashar al-Assad in power at any cost – dispatching IRGC advisors, Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon, Shia militias from Iraq, the Liwa Fatemiyoun recruited from Afghan Hazaras, and the Liwa Zainabiyoun drawn from Pakistani Shia communities. These foreign sectarian armies, fighting under the banner of Wilayat al-Faqih, helped Assad barrel-bomb Aleppo, gas Ghouta, starve Yarmouk, and displace twelve million Syrians – half the country’s pre-war population. Iran spent an estimated thirty billion dollars sustaining the Assad regime while its own citizens queued for bread under sanctions. The Islamic Republic did not defend Syria.  It occupied it by proxy........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)