To what extent former Quds Force head Qassem Soleimani’s spectacular demise at the hands of the Americans affected Iranian capabilities to hurt the United States and its allies is still debatable, but not so for the lessons of his fast-fading memory despite the Iranian regime’s efforts to maintain it.
Analyzing the contours of the memory of Soleimani clearly shows that most of the Iranian population is neither interested in his assassination nor in his “revolutionary” legacy.
As the general and mastermind of the most powerful force behind Iran’s export of its revolution and the creation of the Shi’ite crescent of proxy militias in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon, his fading memory is clearly a reflection that Iran’s population does not support these policies and most probably the regime behind it.
These indelible and undisputed facts are drawn from an analysis of Google trends that record searches of terms and personalities. Searches on Google are not only a reflection of interest but in the popularity of the terms or personalities being searched.
By far the greatest indication of Soleimani’s scant popularity, dead or alive, lies in the relatively little interest he evokes in Iran itself compared to the arenas within which he operated. Just over a half a year after Soleimani’s assassination, his bio was searched 50 time more often (relative to the population) in Lebanon than in Iran itself, and nearly 100 times more in Bahrain, where the Shi’ite majority chafes under a Sunni-minority regime backed to a hilt by Iran’s archrival, Saudi Arabia.
Not only does this reflect paltry identification with Soleimani in Iran as a whole, but the pattern of searches within Iran is problematic to the regime. The most searches took place, unsurprisingly, in Kerman Province, where he was born and raised. Worrisome for the regime, searches in Tehran Province, the political, economic and demographic center of the country, were only one-eighth the rate of searches in Kerman, relative to the population.
The same pattern is true of other personalities and terms venerated by the Iranian regime and, of course, Soleimani himself, including the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ruhollah Khomeini, his successor Ali Khamenei, and revolutionary terms such as vilayat el-feqih, the “rulership of the supreme spiritual leader,” a key concept behind the Iranian theocracy. The inhabitants of Tehran have little interest in these personalities, their ideological concepts or in exporting revolution and Iranian domination, which was Soleimani’s domain.
EVEN WHERE Soleimani and the Quds Force operated with their local proxies, the analysis of the pattern of searches reflects support in the wrong places. In Lebanon, a clear and positive correlation exists between the relative number of searches on Soleimani and the preponderance of Shi’ites in one of Lebanon’s six provinces. He evokes least interest in the almost exclusively Sunni northern province of Tripoli and the highest in Nabatiyeh, in southeast Lebanon where Shi’ites form the sizeable majority.
There is, however, one major exception to this correlation: Beirut. In sparsely populated Nabatiyeh, Hezbollah’s real stronghold, searches for Soleimani are at least 20 times higher relative to the size of the population than in Beirut, which includes the al-Dahiya conglomerate of Shi’ite neighborhoods in southern Beirut.
Al-Dahiya is home to Hezbollah headquarters and to the bunker in whose leader, Hasan Nasrallah, resides. Media sites also usually add the word “stronghold of Hezbollah” to designate the area. But how much support do Dahiya’s Shi’ites really give to Hezbollah if despite being over 60% of the city’s population, Google records so few relative searches for Soleimani, Nasrallah’s close ally?
This finding jives well in my searches of Hezbollah “martyrs” to see from where Hezbollah recruits its fighters. I found, (albeit from a very small sample due to Hezbollah censorship techniques) that the organization recruited mostly form the periphery – the Lebanese South and Nabatiyeh, and only marginally from al-Dahiya, where the overwhelming percentage of Shi’ites now live.
In the periphery, where there are no jobs except for Iranian largesse, you stand to be recruited. In Beirut, where there were opportunities to make a living other than fighting the Syrian dictator’s battles, Shi’ite youth look elsewhere.
These patterns add up to a much larger picture. Iran, more than 40 years after the revolution, is going the way of the Soviet elite: lots of violent force at its disposal but precious little and declining legitimacy. And just as the Soviet Union projected power abroad only to lose the home front, so have the Iranian ayatollahs succeeded in giving the impression, at least, of growing regional power and declining support on the home front.
Yet even at this point, Soleimani’s death might be instructive. His assassination was a remarkable display of US military and technological capabilities at beheading its enemy. Is Soleimani’s demise and fast-fading memory the first sign of a war that presumably led to the end of the Soviet Empire?
The writer is a professor in the Political Studies and Middle Eastern Studies departments at Bar-Ilan University, and a senior research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.