Facing a Big Test, Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance’ Flails

Iran united militias to take on Israel, but as the Israelis pummel one, Hezbollah, the rest have so far largely failed to come to its aid.

The idea was simple: When a big war with Israel broke out, all the members of the Iranian-backed network of militias in the Middle East known as the “axis of resistance” would join the fight in a coordinated push toward their shared goal of destroying the Jewish state.

Iran came up with the strategy and invested tremendous resources to build each group’s fighting abilities and connect them to one another.

But the axis’s response as Israel has pummeled Hezbollah in Lebanon in recent weeks — killing many of its commanders and assassinating its leader — has so far been feeble, suggesting that the axis is weaker and more fragmented than many in the region had expected and that Iran feared that widening the war could cause Israel to turn its firepower on Tehran.

“The so-called axis of resistance from its very beginning was more or less a propaganda fiction created to enhance the prestige of the Islamic Republic,” said Ali Alfoneh, a senior fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.

In recent years, Mr. Alfoneh said, the network’s members had chalked up some small military victories, “but when it comes to more serious adversaries, or a state actor like Israel, it is a different game.”

Iran cobbled together the axis out of armed groups that shared antipathy toward Israel and the United States but until then had been fighting more local battles. The United States classifies most of them as terrorist organizations.

Hamas, whose members are predominantly Palestinian refugees or their descendants, had been fighting Israel directly for decades, most recently in Gaza.

In Syria — the only state member of the axis besides Iran — the government of President Bashar al-Assad had maintained an official state of war with Israel but kept their disputed border quiet.

Iran also supported anti-Israel militias in Syria and in Iraq, where the Iranians equipped some of the groups that fought the United States after its 2003 invasion and later fought the Islamic State. When those groups gained political power, they gave Iran a stake in Iraq’s domestic politics.

But it is Hezbollah, formed in Lebanon with direct Iranian guidance in the early 1980s, that has long been the axis’s senior member, and its recently assassinated leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was the linchpin who helped hold it all together. Because of its long history and intimate connections to Iran, where many of its commanders have received training, Hezbollah has better tactical battle skills and superior weaponry like guided missiles.

And unlike the Iranians, the Lebanese fighters speak Arabic, allowing Hezbollah to dispatch its experts to share skills with the other groups, enhancing Hamas’s ability to build tunnels, for example, and the Iraqis’ and Houthis’ missile and drone capabilities. Mr. Nasrallah also forged personal ties with the other groups’ leaders, serving as an adviser and role model.

That is why Israel’s swift series of attacks on Hezbollah over the last two weeks — detonating thousands of its pagers and walkie-talkies, killing many of its top commanders and assassinating Mr. Nasrallah with huge bombs south of Beirut — have shaken the other members of the axis so badly. They seemed to have been unprepared for the possibility that Hezbollah could suffer such crippling losses.

It remains unclear why they did not come to Hezbollah’s aid in the weeks when Israel was ramping up its assault or in the days since Mr. Nasrallah was killed, but it appears that there was a deep-seated belief among them that Hezbollah could hold its own against Israel. And Iran’s reticence about directing an immediate response — at least so far — left them unclear about the next military steps.

Mr. al-Assad in Syria waited two days after Mr. Nasrallah’s death to issue a statement mourning him, even though Hezbollah had sent thousands of fighters to beat back rebels threatening his government just a few years ago.

Hamas is too degraded from nearly a year of war with Israel in Gaza to do much.

The Houthis in Yemen and militias in Syria and Iraq have launched attacks aimed at Israel or American military bases in the Middle East, but these have largely been repelled.

Even Iran itself, the founder of the axis, has so far taken no clear action to save Hezbollah or join the fight. The country’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, told world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly last week that his government wanted to defuse tensions and get along with the West. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, suggested that Hezbollah had to chart its own way forward.

“All of the forces in the resistance stand by Hezbollah,” Mr. Khamenei said. “It will be Hezbollah, at the helm of the resistance forces, that will determine the fate of the region.”

Tehran appears to be torn between a desire to retaliate against Israel and fear that doing so might lead Israel to attack Iran directly.

“They are in a strategic bind, because if they do nothing it will further weaken them and weaken their credibility and their deterrence,” said Kawa Hassan, a nonresident fellow at the Stimson Center’s Middle East and North Africa Program. But if the Iranians respond, he said, that would risk provoking Israel at a time when it appears “really ready to go after them.”

Experts offered various explanations for the weak response — so far at least — from Hezbollah’s regional allies.

The alliance was always loose, with Iran largely leaving axis members free to make their own decisions, even when that meant starting battles that gave Iran headaches. The Houthis went against Iran’s advice and tried to take over all of Yemen, and Hamas did not coordinate with Iran before launching the Oct. 7 assault on Israel that started the Gaza war.

Since Mr. Nasrallah’s death on Friday, the commanders of two armed groups in Iraq have told The New York Times that they had received no instructions from Iran on how to respond. Speaking on the condition of anonymity so as not to anger their patron, one said that everyone was still in shock at Mr. Nasrallah’s killing.

Thomas Juneau, who teaches public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa, said that as long as the violence between Israel and its foes was low-level, Iran could maintain the “perception that the axis of resistance was, if not winning, at least scoring important points.”

But once Israel brought the full weight of its military and technological superiority to bear, it overwhelmed Hezbollah. “We are in conventional warfare, and Israel’s significant and clear domination now is manifest,” Mr. Juneau said.

Experts warned, however, that the network’s members remained important regional players. Even if its members have struggled in recent months to inflict grave harm on Israel, Iranian patronage has significantly enhanced their military know-how, increasing their ability to exercise power in Israel’s neighborhood.

The most dramatic example is the Houthis, who transformed from a ragtag militia into a force that is able to disrupt maritime traffic in the Red Sea and that terrorized Saudi Arabia for years with its missiles, even though the kingdom had spent billions of dollars on American weapons.

Moreover, while Israel has struck deep blows against Hezbollah, the region’s history is rife with examples of such groups roaring back in ferocious ways, as Hezbollah did after its last war with Israel, in 2006, and Hamas did when it stunned Israel with its Oct. 7 attack.

And Israel’s military operations in Gaza, the West Bank and now Lebanon are likely only to fuel the anger that drives people to join these groups, said Dalia Dassa Kaye, a senior fellow at the University of California Los Angeles Burkle Center for International Relations.

“There will be plenty to attract continued support and recruits for the resistance,” she said.