It looks like a dozen separate enemies on a dozen borders. It is one network, funded, armed and directed from Tehran, built to encircle a single country.
When rockets come from Lebanon, missiles from Yemen, drones from Iraq and an invasion from Gaza, it is tempting to see unrelated conflicts. They are not. They are the spokes of one wheel. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, through its Quds Force, has spent decades and tens of billions of dollars building a ring of proxies, what Tehran itself calls the “Axis of Resistance,” for a single declared purpose: the destruction of Israel. Here is the network, and the money behind it.
Iran's crown jewel: a Shia militia richer and better-armed than the Lebanese state itself, built with a stockpile of well over 100,000 rockets aimed at Israel. It opened a second front the day after October 7.
Sunni Islamist movements, yet armed and bankrolled by Shia Iran against a common enemy. Hamas launched the October 7 massacre; Palestinian Islamic Jihad is even more directly an Iranian creation, near-wholly funded by Tehran.
Iran's newest long-range arm. From a thousand miles away they fired ballistic missiles and drones at Israel and choked global shipping in the Red Sea, all with Iranian weapons and targeting.
An array of Shia militias under the IRGC's wing (the “Islamic Resistance in Iraq”) that launched drones and rockets at Israeli and American targets, embedded inside Iraq's own security forces.
For years the spine of the network ran through Syria: under Bashar al-Assad, propped up by Iranian money and Hezbollah fighters, it was the corridor that smuggled Iranian weapons overland to Lebanon. Assad's fall in late 2024 severed that artery, a rare and serious blow to the project. Coordinating it all is the Quds Force, the IRGC's external arm, whose late commander Qassem Soleimani spent two decades stitching these fronts into one. The point of the architecture is that Tehran can wage war on Israel on every border at once while keeping its own hands at a distance.