“Some will celebrate, some will mourn, some will seek revenge,” said an Iraqi official as word spread in Baghdad on Thursday night that the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani had been killed in an American airstrike. But there is little question, the official added, that U.S. relations with Baghdad are in “real jeopardy.”
The consequences may not come quickly or directly. But they could be enormous. At their most dire, this strike may be the beginning of a much wider war in the Middle East—perhaps even the all-out war with Iran that Trump has said he wants to avoid.
In a tweet early Friday, Trump sounded a bellicose note: “Iran never won a war, but never lost a negotiation!”
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Later in the day, Trump insisted the point of the hit was to stop a war, not to start one. But the strike against Soleimani could also write the end to one chapter of the American saga in Iraq that began with the U.S.-led invasion that overthrew the tyrant Saddam Hussein in 2003, while starting a new one where the Americans are permanently unwelcome.
“Operation Iraqi Freedom,” as it was called, opened the door for Iran’s Islamic regime—which had fought against Saddam in open warfare and had supported many of the Shiite players who quickly took power once he was gone. Ever since, despite the trillions of dollars spent by Washington and the thousands of lives lost, efforts to limit Tehran’s growing power in Iraq have faltered. Iranian sympathizers and agents are deeply embedded at almost all levels of the government. That won’t change with the demise of Soleimani.
The Iraqi government invited the Americans out in 2011 by refusing to sign a status-of-forces agreement, then invited the U.S. back in when the American-trained Iraqi army collapsed in the face of the so-called Islamic State. But most of the heavy fighting against ISIS on the ground in Iraq was done by the Iranian-backed Shiite militias coordinated by Soleimani.
Over time, indeed, Soleimani became Tehran’s de facto proconsul in Iraq, which is why the many Iraqis sick of Iran’s influence were happy to see him eliminated. But the militias Soleimani helped build and support were fiercely loyal to him, and their revenge—with Iran’s blessing—is likely to be bloody.
Gen. David Petraeus, who led U.S. forces in the surge of 2007 against both Sunni and Shiite uprisings, told The Daily Beast it is “almost impossible to overstate the importance” of Soleimani’s termination. “There inevitably will be consequences in various locations, and it sounds as if we are posturing for them.”
“The ball is in Tehran’s court,” says counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen, who worked closely with Petraeus during the surge. Iran’s options “include a wave of rocket attacks on Israel, Saudi, possibly the UAE, etc., and a surge of ground attacks on troops and bases in the region.” There is also the possibility, Kilcullen told The Daily Beast, of “more asymmetric or unconventional style hits in Europe, Africa, South America, and/or the continental U.S.” Other analysts have raised the possibility of cyber attacks, a capability Iran has been developing for some time.
Under the Obama administration, one reason Soleimani was not targeted was the perception that he exercised a significant level of control over the militias that answered to him, and could, if he would, restrain their most radical elements.
Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and former president of the National Iranian American Council, warned on Twitter that the “biggest risk for the U.S. may not be the Iranian response to Soleimani’s assassination. It may be that other elements, who Iran may not control, may start targeting the U.S.”
Among the Iraqis themselves, the passions on the street visible among those who have been protesting against Iran’s influence—those who celebrated Soleimani’s demise—and those seeking revenge for his death could plunge the country into a new era of savage civil war. Memories of the carnage in 2006 and 2007 and the ferocious onslaught of ISIS in 2014 are still fresh. Iraq's second biggest city, Mosul, remains largely in ruins thanks after the campaign to drive ISIS out in 2017.
When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was on television Friday suggesting that Iraqi officials denouncing the U.S. breach of their country's sovereignty were privately pleased that Soleimani was dead, he was doing them no favors. As it is, the earlier protests led to the resignation of the prime minister, Adil Abdul-Mahdi, who now runs a mere caretaker government. As the maelstrom approaches, the question of who is really in charge will grow more urgent, and perhaps more unanswerable by the day.
The Iranians will always be next door, while the United States, especially under Donald Trump, appears to have no long-term commitment to Iraq’s future. Trump has said repeatedly he intends to end America’s “endless wars.” His actions in Syria and Afghanistan have underscored that position, and undermined confidence in American staying power.
Little is known about Soleimani’s early life, but he rose to prominence as a commander during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, where he forged crucial relationships with the cadre of senior officers who would go on to lead the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and take an outsize role in ruling Iran after the conflict ended.
His most important assignment came in the late '90s when the IRGC assigned him command of the IRGC’s Quds Force, which serves partly as Iran’s covert-action arm and also as a special-forces unit building up proxy militias to help Iran spread its influence across the region. Many of those militias, most famously Lebanon’s Hezbollah, also carry out terrorist operations with Iran’s blessing and direction.
While the Quds Force represents only a small part of IRGC forces, its role as the tip of the spear in external operations made it the most notorious and well-known component of the IRGC.
For much of his tenure as Quds Force commander, Soleimani labored in relative obscurity, but after ISIS swept through Iraq threatening Iran’s borders and its allies in Baghdad, he branded himself as the very public face of the wars in Iraq and Syria, as he posed for selfies on his Instagram account and instigated an unlikely publicity campaign for an officer whose responsibilities often lay in the covert world. Often, he seemed to be daring the Israelis, if not the Americans, to take him out.
Soleimani’s tenure in the Quds Force was shaped more than anything by confrontation with the U.S. The war on terror ousted the Taliban and Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath party, two regimes that Iran itself had sought to unseat. But it also brought a larger U.S. military presence to Iran’s doorstep, commanded by an administration that branded the Islamic Republic as part of an axis of evil.
In Iraq, Soleimani armed and trained an array of Shiite militias to attack the U.S.-led coalition with the aim of installing a government pliant to Iran’s wishes and pressuring the U.S.to leave. With the help of armor-piercing explosive projectiles, Iranian-backed forces killed 603 Americans in Iraq, making that war the bloodiest confrontation between the two countries, if only indirectly.
But as the U.S. war in Iraq wound down and the Arab Spring took hold, Soleimani and the Quds Force would take on a new and unlikely role as counterinsurgents, as well as insurgents. From 2011 onward, the Quds Force invested most of its time and energy helping the Assad regime crush protesters and rebels in Syria and, later, buttressing its allies in Iraq against the onslaught of the Islamic State.
At the same time, Soleimani’s cult of personality continued to grow.
Hooman Majd, an Iranian-American author and commentator, says Soleimani was “probably the second most important person in Iran” behind Ayatollah Khamenei. While seen as a villain by the U.S. for the past 15 years, Majd said, Soleimani commanded nationalist respect across Iranian factions as a hero fighting Iran’s enemies rather than directing domestic repression.
“He’s way more popular than any reformist,” Majd said, and that would include President Hassan Rouhani.
It’s not clear how carefully the Trump administration calculated the repercussions of killing such a figure, but those who follow the region closely are concerned about what lies ahead.
“We need to get ready for a major pushback,” says Sen. Lindsey Graham, a staunch Trump ally. “Our people in Iraq and the Middle East are going to be targeted. We need to be ready to defend our people in the Middle East. I think we need to be ready for a big counterpunch. This was a defensive act. If Iranian aggression continues, we need to put their oil refineries on the target list. Iran needs to understand that we mean it. You’re not going to come after our people.”
Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM) said bluntly that “President Trump is bringing our nation to the brink of an illegal war with Iran without any congressional approval as required under the Constitution of the United States.”
Udall added, “Congress must step in immediately to reclaim its constitutional war powers.”
But it may be a little late for that.
