CONCEPT – US KILLS IRANIAN COMMANDER SOLEIMANI

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 CONCEPT – US KILLS IRANIAN COMMANDER SOLEIMANI

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• Who he was: Major General Qassem Soleimani was the commander of Iran’s "Quds Force", and was killed in a U.S. air strike in Baghdad. He had been a spymaster and a military strategist for many decades. He was a defender of the 1979 Islamic revolution.
• Close to top leader: Major General Soleimani was close to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Soleimani joined the Iranian Army immediately after the revolution, and was on the frontlines during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. His commanders at the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) were impressed by his bravery during the war, and quickly promoted him.
• Rising through the ranks: In 1990, he was named the IRGC commander of Kerman Province, which was a hostile region. Iran started cultivating deep ties with the Shia population across the region. The main job of the Quds Force (the foreign operational wing of the IRGC) was to build a network of operatives, organisations, militias and parties under Iran’s influence.
• Head of Quds forces: Soleimani was appointed the head of the Quds Force in 1998, and Iran by then had already established a network of resistance. His job was to take it to new levels. He was a hardliner among the hardliners, who had the 1999 students protests crushed via police.
• The 2010s: Iran rapidly expanded its presence in both Iraq and Syria in the 2010s, and ties between Tehran and Washington deteriorated after 2017. In this backdrop, Soleimani was in focus. In 2018, he responded directly to a warning from President Donald Trump against the Iranian President. 
• The I.S. challenge: The main challenges Soleimani faced in the last few years were (a) the threats from the U.S., (b) the civil war in Syria and (c) the rise of the Islamic State (IS). In 2011-13, the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad kept losing territories to the rebels. Mr. Assad’s Syria was the only national ally of Iran in the region and is also a critical link between itself and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Soleimani's mission was to stop Syrian regime from collapsing. "The Syrian Army is useless" was his understanding. So, he trained Shia militias and sent them to Syria to fight the rebels.
• Hezbollah: He coordinated with Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, in strategising the war. In 2013, the regime troops, Shia militias and Hezbollah fighter were able to win Qusayr, a town on the Syria-Lebanon border, from the rebels, which was one of the early victories of the Assad regime in the civil war.
• The Russians: The Russian intervention in 2015 actually turned around the conflict (in favour of Assad), but the ground support was always Soleimani's.
• Fighting the IS in Iraq: He applied the same strategy in Iraq in the war against the IS. Iran trained the militias were in the forefront of the war against the IS. Soleimani ’s men fought in the battlefield along with the Kurdish Peshmerga militia and the Iraqi Army while the U.S. provided air support.
• Killed: The IS Caliphate is now destroyed. The Syrian regime has survived the civil war. But the man who played a pivotal role in both these feats has been assassinated by the U.S. A precision drone strike struck two cars belonging to Iraq’s Hashed al-Shaabi, a paramilitary force with close ties to Iran, as they drove away from Baghdad International Airport. This actually may lead to a full-scale war in middle east. A furious Iran has threatened to avenge the U.S. strike. The Pentagon had already said that U.S. President Donald Trump had ordered Qasem Soleimani’s “killing” after a pro-Iran mob recently laid siege to the U.S. Embassy in the Iraqi capital. More than 5000 US troops are in the region.

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