When Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini announced his vision of exporting the Islamist revolution to the region, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) developed the winning strategy of sponsoring Shiite militias to act as proxies. In 1982 the IRGC created Hezbollah in Lebanon, a model proxy. After the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the IRGC and its foreign operations branch, the Quds Force (QF), set up a large number of Shiite militias under the umbrella of the Hashd al Shaabi, the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF). The Iranian influence became so pervasive that Qassem Suleimani, the QF chief, became known as the “viceroy of Iraq.”