Daily Times

General Qassem Soleimani was widely popular among Iranians. His supporters viewed him as a “selfless hero fighting Iran’s enemies” and his status was that of a national icon. He was designated as a ‘terrorist’ by the United States and the European Union. The entity he led, the Quds Force, part of the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), is considered a terrorist organisation by Canada, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United States. Soleimani was martyred in a targeted US drone strike on January 3, 2020 in Baghdad. The attack was approved by Donald Trump on the grounds that Soleimani posed an “imminent threat” to American lives.

General Soleimani was born on March 11, 1957, in the village of Qanat, Kerman. After he finished school, he moved to the city of Kerman and worked on a construction site to help repay his father’s agricultural debts. In 1975, he began working as a contractor for the Kerman Water Organisation. When not at work, he spent his time weight training in local gyms or attending the sermons of HojjatKamyab, a preacher and a protege of Ali Khamenei, who according to Soleimani spurred him to “revolutionary activities.”

Soleimani joined IRGC in 1979 following the Iranian Revolution, which saw Reza Shah Pahlavi fall and Ayatollah Khomeini take power. Soleimani’s training was minimal but he advanced rapidly. Early in his career as a guardsman, he was stationed in north-western Iran, and participated in the suppression of a Kurdish separatist uprising in West Azerbaijan province. America entered the Iran-Iraq war on a fifteen-day mission and ended up staying until the end. Soleimani was young and wanted to serve the revolution.

When Saddam Hussein launched an invasion on Iran, setting off the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), Soleimani joined the battlefield serving as the leader of a military company consisting of men from Kerman whom he assembled and trained. He quickly earned a reputation for bravery, rose through the ranks because of his role in successful operations to retake the lands Iraq had occupied, and eventually became the commander of the 41st Tharallah Division while still in his 20s, participating in most major operations. He was mostly stationed at the southern front.

Soleimani was seriously injured in the Operation Tariq-ol-Qods. In 1990, he said that the Operation Fath-ol-Mobin as “the best” operation he had participated in and that it was “very memorable” due to a positive outcome despite many difficulties. He was also engaged in leading and organising irregular warfare missions deep inside Iraq by the Ramadan Headquarters. It was at this point that Soleimani established relations with the Kurdish Iraqi leaders and the Shia Badr Organisation, both opposed to Iraqs Saddam Hussein.

On July 17, 1985, Soleimani opposed the IRGC leadership’s plan to deploy forces to two islands in the western ArvandRud, on the Shatt al-Arab River. After the war, during the 1990s, he was an IRGC commander in the Kerman province. From that region, relatively close to Afghanistan, Afghan-grown opium travelled to Turkey and Europe. Soleimani’s military experience helped him earn a reputation as a successful fighter against drug trafficking. During the 1999 student revolt in Tehran, Soleimani was one of the IRGC officers who signed a letter to President Mohammad Khatami. The letter stated that if Khatami did not crush the student rebellion the military would, and it might also launch a coup against Khatami.

Trump wants to contest the 2020 election with an anti-Iran slogan, and the martyrdom of Soleimani is the beginning of his election campaign

Soleimani was appointed as the commander of IRGC’s Quds Force on September 10, 1997. He was considered one of the possible successors to the commander of IRGC when General Yahya Rahim Safavi left the post in 2007. In 2008, Soleimani led a group of Iranian investigators looking into the death of Imad Mughniyah.

Soleimani helped arrange a ceasefire between the Iraqi army and the Mahdi army in March 2008. Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, senior US State Department official Ryan C Crocker flew to Geneva to meet Iranian diplomats who were under the direction of Soleimani;it was for the purpose of collaboration to destroy the Taliban. That collaboration was instrumental in defining the targets of bombing operations in Afghanistan and in capturing key Al-Qaeda operatives, but it abruptly ended in January 2002,when President George W Bush named Iran as part of the “Axis of evil” in his State of the Union address.

Soleimani strengthened the relationship between the Quds Force and Hezbollah upon his appointment and supported the latter by sending in operatives to retake southern Lebanon. In October 2019, he was in Lebanon during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war to oversee the conflict.

In 2009, Soleimani met with Christopher R Hill and General Raymond TOdierno, America’s two senior most officials in Baghdad. They met in the office of Iraq’s President Jalal Talabani. Hill and Odierno denied the occurrence of the meeting.

On January 24, 2011, Soleimani was promoted to Major General by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Khamenei was saidto have a close relationship with him, calling him a “living martyr” and helping him financially. Soleimani was described by an ex-CIA operative as “the single most powerful operative in the Middle East today” and the principal military strategist and tactician in Iran’s effort to combat western influence and promote the expansion of Shiite and Iranian influence throughout the Middle East. In Iraq, as the commander of the Quds Force, he was believed to have strongly influenced the organisation of the Iraqi government, notably supporting the election of the previous Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Al-Maliki.

Soleimani is considered a hero and a martyr in Iran. He was the first man to be honoured with a multi-city funeral in the history of Iran; his funeral procession was said to be the second largest after that of Ruhollah Khomeini. On January 7, 2020, a stampede took place at the burial procession of Soleimani in Kerman, attended by hundreds of thousands of mourners, killing 56 and injuring 212 more. The funeral has lessons and messages for anti-Iran powers.

In attacking Soleimani, the ‘international establishment’ has started a new game of political chess in the Middle East and the Oman Gulf. Trump wants to contest the 2020 election with an anti-Iran slogan, and the martyrdom of Soleimani is the beginning of his election campaign. In the name of US-Iran tension,USaircraft carriers are present in the Gulf. The consequences of Soleimani’s assassination could be dire.

The writer is a book ambassador, columnist, political analyst and author of several books. He is based in Islamabad