Photo of Mohammad Reza Fallahzadeh after he was injured in Syria
While governor, Fallahzadeh was quoted in media reports suggesting that the 1980 Operation Eagle Claw, which was ordered by then-President Jimmy Carter to rescue the U.S. hostages, was a “divine miracle” to protect the Islamic Republic against the United States which he dubbed “the symbol of evil.”
After his governorship, which ended as Hassan Rouhani assumed the presidency, Fallahzadeh became the chief of Karbala Roads and Urban Development, a subsidiary of the IRGC’s Khatam al-Anbia Construction Headquarters. But following an only months-long tenure, Fallahzadeh was deployed by the IRGC to Syria. In 2016, Iranian media reports suggested he was injured during his deployment there.
Accounts of Fallahzadeh’s role in Syria indicate that he held a senior-level battlefield command in the area near Aleppo. Other sources suggest he was deployed at the eastern fronts, including Deir Ezzor, al-Raqa, al-Hasekeh, and the Badiya region. Some reports place him as the IRGC’s second-in-command in the country under Soleimani with control over 18,000 non-Iranian militants, most specifically the Afghan Fatemiyoun and Pakistani Zainabiyoun Brigades. But as scholar Ali Alfoneh notes, before his transfer to Syria, “Fallahzadeh admitted that he had no previous relationship” with Soleimani, only meeting him briefly in 1984. Thus Fallahzadeh’s parachuting into a leading role in the Syria conflict was a change after holding a governorship in Yazd and spending a stint in the IRGC’s provincial commands and construction conglomerate.
Fallahzadeh participated in the 2017 International Meeting on Syrian Settlement held in Astana - a high-profile diplomatic conference. He joined then Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister for Arab Affairs Hossein Ansari as a member of the Iranian delegation. Given the leading role played by the Quds Force in determining Iran’s regional policy compared with Iran’s Foreign Ministry, Fallahzadeh’s presence was significant and increased his visibility after operating in the shadows.