(CNN) — After three difficult years, armed groups loyal to Tehran appear to be bouncing back across the Middle East, reinforcing Iran’s leverage in its war with the United States and Israel.
For decades, experts say, these groups played a key role: acting as a powerful deterrent against direct attacks on Iran. The “Axis of Resistance” – an anti-Israel and anti-Western alliance of regional militias backed by the Islamic Republic – was, however, significantly weakened by Israel’s large-scale military response to the 2023 Hamas attack and the regional repercussions that followed.
It was when this axis was in a weakened state that direct conflict between Israel, the US and Iran erupted. Today, however, several armed groups allied with Tehran are back to pressuring Iran’s foes by opening new fronts that complicate the war and threaten to choke the global economy.
“The Axis (of Resistance) worked very well for more than two decades, helping ensure there was no attack on Iran while these groups extended their influence within their own territories,” Trita Parsi, executive vice president of Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told CNN. “Once they were weakened, Iran paid the price by having both the US and Israel attack it.”
Iran’s reaction to this was not to abandon the forward defense, but to reinvest in it, Parsi said.
A wide-scale decapitation campaign
Tehran has long pursued a pan-revolutionary strategy, exporting the values born of its 1979 revolution to neighboring countries and territories, including Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Gaza.
After the 2023 Hamas attack, Israel embarked on a decapitation campaign against several Iranian allies, killing – among others – Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, one of the masterminds of the October 7 raid, and Hassan Nasrallah, a Hezbollah leader with huge influence in the Middle East.
It also ramped up its attacks on Iran-backed militias in Iraq and exchanged fire with Yemen’s Houthis. Israel even went after Tehran’s own leaders – killing former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – in the hope of triggering regime change, which has so far failed.
Three years later, and after a full-blown war, Tehran’s regional allies once again appear to be active, adjusting to the new battlefield landscape in a way that is significantly boosting Iran, experts say.
The Axis of Resistance is “still alive,” said Danny Citrinowicz, former head of the Iran branch of Israeli military intelligence. “It is not disappearing, but it is changing,” he told CNN.
Shared interests
While those allies are back serving Tehran’s interests, they are not without political motivations of their own.
“Iran’s relationship with these groups is more complex and multifaceted than the common media practice of referring to them as ‘proxies’ suggests,” Ali Ahmadi, a fellow at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy and Middle East Institute Switzerland, told CNN.
“These groups each have their own identity and interests but also (are) interwoven with Iran because (they have) deeply shared interests that are both ideological and geopolitical,” he added.
Some depend on Iran more than others, Ahmadi said, adding that currently Yemen’s Houthi rebels are likely the most independent.
In recent days, Yemen’s Houthis have opened another front to the Iran war, taking on Saudi Arabia, a key US ally.
Earlier this month, the group accused Saudi Arabia of striking the airport in Yemen’s Houthi-held capital, Sanaa, to prevent a plane carrying a high-profile Houthi delegation from landing as it returned from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s funeral in Iran. Yemen’s Saudi-backed government said its own forces carried out the strike.
That flight was an attempt by the rebels to break a years-long restriction on Sanaa’s air links by resuming direct flights with Tehran for the first time since a Saudi-led coalition entered the country’s civil war in 2015.
Over the weekend, the Houthis fired missiles at two Saudi oil complexes on the Red Sea coast. Satellite images and geolocated video suggest extensive damage to one of those facilities, at Jazan near the border with Yemen.
The missile strikes followed Houthi attacks on two Saudi tankers in the Red Sea after the group announced a blockade of Saudi shipping transiting the Bab al-Mandeb chokepoint.
That reflected “the increasingly coordinated use of the Axis of Resistance to transform periods of confrontation into opportunities to consolidate gains, reshape facts on the ground, and strengthen Iran’s regional leverage,” wrote experts Nadwa Al-Dawsari and Arman Mahmoudian for the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC, on Monday.
For Iran, Houthi influence was re-exerted. The rebels, meanwhile, saw a golden opportunity to reopen an airspace long shut by Saudi Arabia.
A coordinated win-win
In a show of loyalty to Hezbollah, Iran has made a cessation of Israeli attacks in southern Lebanon as a key condition in the memorandum of understanding with the US.
“These groups were never eliminated, and Hezbollah in particular has bounced back much faster than Israel predicted,” Parsi said.
Over the weekend, Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, reaffirmed the country’s support for Hezbollah in a letter addressed to its leader Naim Qassem. He described the group as being at the forefront of Iran’s resistance to Israel, adding that defending Hezbollah remained one of the Islamic Republic’s strategic policies.
Ultimately, Iran’s allies are adjusting to the new terrain, Citrinowicz said, adding: “the axis is not going anywhere.”
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