A shock wave crossed the Middle East when he woke up on the morning of Friday, January 3, after the targeted assassination by the United States of General Ghassem Soleimani, the architect of Iranian expansion in the region. The operation in Baghdad, on the orders of US President Donald Trump, sounds like a declaration of war on Iran. The epilogue of a rise in tensions triggered by the unilateral withdrawal of the Iranian nuclear agreement and the reinstatement of sanctions in 2018, it plunges not only Iraq, but the entire region, into uncertainty and fear of a devastating war between the two enemy powers.
Shortly after midnight local time on Friday, an American drone targeted a convoy of several vehicles of Popular Mobilization (MP) units, a government force dominated by Shiite militias close to Iran, leaving Baghdad airport. Led by MP number two, Abou Mahdi Al-Mohandes, and its head of public relations, Mohammed Reda, the convoy had just recovered General Soleimani, who arrived from Lebanon or Syria, according to an American official quoted by the agency. Associated Press. In the charred remains of the vehicles, the body in pieces of General Soleimani was recognized by his ring, while that of Mohandes was not found, according to MP officials. Three other men were killed alongside them.
National hero in Iran
The targeted assassination of General Soleimani is at least as important, in the eyes of experts, as that of the heads of Al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden, and the Islamic State (IS) organization, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. For two decades, sailing tirelessly between Tehran, Baghdad, Damascus and Beirut, the 62-year-old general, head of the Al-Quds force of the Revolutionary Guards – designated terrorist organization by Washington -, the entity responsible for the external operations of the Islamic Republic, has been the orchestrator of attacks and wars waged by Iran and its affiliates in the Middle East. Both a military strategist and a kind of proconsul of the Islamic Republic in the region, he has been with Iraqi Shiite militias against the American occupier since 2003, Lebanese Hezbollah against Israel in 2006, and forces loyal to the Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad facing the uprising since 2011.
A national hero in Iran, he became a cult object for his role in the fight against IS after 2014. "The Iranians have let Soleimani become the symbol of their power in the region, which also creates vulnerability. They lost a strategist who had the confidence of the supreme guide Ali Khamenei and could make decisions within a minute on his own. It's going to be difficult for them to replace him ”, Washington Institute for Near East Policy expert Michael Knights said. His disappearance is all the more likely to be felt in Iraq since the drone attack also killed his most loyal lieutenant, his transmission belt with the local Shiite militias, Abu Mahdi Al-Mohandes (" the engineer "). On Friday, the Iranian Supreme Leader appointed Esmail Qaani to succeed Gassem Soleimani at the head of the al-Quds force.
