More than 100 dead on Memorial Day: Who was Iran’s ‘shadow commander’ Soleimani?

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More than a hundred people were killed in a suspected terrorist attack in the Iranian city of Kerman on Wednesday. About 141 others were injured. Iranian media report this, citing the head of the emergency service of the city of Kerman.

The incident took place at the Martyrs’ Cemetery, where thousands of people attended the fourth anniversary of the death of General Qassem Soleimani (†62). Who was the man to whom such a large crowd wanted to pay tribute?

Powerful, more powerful, Soleimani

Soleimani, described as Iran’s ‘shadow commander’, led the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) from 1998. On January 2, 2020, he was killed by a drone on the orders of then US President Donald Trump. Trump had blamed Soleimani for several attacks. Soleimani was commander of the Quds Force, an IRGC branch tasked primarily with extraterritorial and covert military operations, and was considered the architect of Iran’s military operations in Iraq and Syria.

In his later years, some analysts considered him the right-hand man of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, 84, and described him as the second most powerful figure in Iran after Khamenei himself.

“Shadow Commander” had a hand in everything

During the Iraq War, the Quds Force was responsible for overseeing the manufacture and large-scale smuggling of improvised explosive bombs into Iraq. According to American estimates, these weapons were used by Iraqi insurgents against American troops, resulting in 500 deaths and more than 21,000 injuries among American soldiers.

In addition, the Quds Force played a coordinating role in Hezbollah’s defense against Israel during the 2006 Lebanon War, with Soleimani personally involved in these operations. Soleimani also supported Hezbollah in Lebanon and helped the Kurdish Peshmerga and Shiite militias in Iraq after the rise of Islamic State in 2014. The Iranians credit him with intervening in Iraq against Islamic State.

In 2012, in the midst of the Syrian civil war, Soleimani supported the Syrian government and President Bashar al-Assad, playing a key role in Iranian operations and organizing Russia’s military intervention in Syria, Time Magazine reported at the time.

Close ties to the Hamas leadership

In the 2010s, Soleimani and the Quds Force contributed significantly to the Iraqi government’s victory over Islamic State (2014–2017) and supported the Syrian government of Assad in key victories in the Syrian Civil War. He played a crucial role in securing Russia’s intervention in Syria in 2015, leading a commando operation to rescue a Russian pilot.

The ‘shadow commander’ also had to deal with the terrorist group Hamas, which rules in the Gaza Strip: High-ranking Hamas representatives credit Soleimani, along with Imad Mughniyeh († 46), a former high-ranking Hamas member, with the creation and maintenance of the extensive Hamas tunnel warfare network in the Gaza Strip.

Source: Blick