Qassem Soleimani

Qassem Soleimani (born March 11, 1957, Qom?, Iran [see Researcher’s Note]—killed January 3, 2020, Baghdad, Iraq) Iranian major general and commander of the Quds Force (1997/98–2020), a wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) responsible for IRGC foreign operations.

Soleimani grew up in a poor rural family, indebted by loans from Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi’s modernization program, in the province of Kermān in southeastern Iran. He worked from a young age in effort to help pay off the family’s debt. After the Iranian Revolution (1978–79), he joined the IRGC. His first deployment was to Mahābād, a predominantly Kurdish city in northwestern Iran, where he helped suppress Kurdish separatists.

Military achievements

He fought throughout the long Iran-Iraq War (1980–88), including along the front lines, and trained battalions. After the Iran-Iraq War, he gained the rank of brigadier general and led a division in a campaign to secure southeastern Iran from drug cartels. As the Taliban emerged in neighbouring Afghanistan in the mid-1990s and began to take control of the country, he aided Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance in its resistance against the faction. By March 1998 he was appointed commander of the Quds Force.

Under Soleimani’s leadership the Quds Force developed into an elite military unit for covert and expeditionary warfare and the driving force behind Iran’s geopolitical influence, stretching from Iraq across the northern Levant. The unit not only continued its patronage of Hezbollah in Lebanon, which it helped establish in 1982, but it also lent support to Palestinian resistance groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. A key opportunity arose with the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, allowing Soleimani to establish a network of connections in Iraq. When the Arab Spring protests made their way to Syria in March 2011, Soleimani, now a major general, met with Syrian officials to coordinate the uprising’s suppression; the Quds Force lent vital support to Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, when that crackdown turned into a civil war. By the mid-2010s Soleimani, through the Quds Force, commanded an influential presence in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon—what Iran termed its “Axis of Resistance.”

Assassination

Soleimani and the Quds Force were instrumental in the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL; also known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria [ISIS]), working closely with the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF; also called al-Hashd al-Shaabi) in Iraq. After the defeat of ISIL, the Quds Force remained highly influential in Iraq. In October 2019, Iraqis took to the streets in frustration with the struggling economy, government corruption, and persistent lack of improvement and called on the government to resign. After Soleimani met with Iraqi officials to prevent the ouster of Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi, Iraqi protesters began demonstrating against Iranian interference in Iraqi politics, going so far as to burn down the Iranian consulate in Najaf in late November. On December 27 a militia from the PMF coalition attacked an Iraqi base housing U.S. troops, setting off a series of events that escalated tensions between the United States and Iran. On January 3, 2020, Soleimani arrived at Baghdad International Airport, where he was greeted by the PMF deputy commander, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. They were both killed, along with five others, when a U.S. drone fired missiles at their convoy.

In March 2019 Iran’s leader Ali Khamenei had awarded Soleimani the medal of the Order of Dhū al-Faqār, making him the first military commander to receive the honour since the 1979 revolution. He was posthumously promoted to the rank of lieutenant general.