The killing on Friday of General Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran's elite Quds Force, signals a radical escalation in Washingtons stand-off with Iran, one some analysts warn could endanger US troops and their allies in Iraq, Syria and beyond.
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Iran has vowed to avenge the death of the 62-year-old general, who was assassinated as he left Baghdad airport alongside key members of local Iran-backed militias early on Friday in a drone strike ordered by US President Donald Trump.
General Soleimani was widely regarded as the second-most-powerful figure in Iran behind Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the countrys supreme leader, who warned that "severe revenge awaits the criminals" behind the attack.
Soleimani had assembled a network of powerful and heavily armed allies stretching all the way to southern Lebanon, on Israel's doorstep. His targeted killing has caused alarm around the world, amid fears that Iranian retaliation against American interests in the region could spiral into a far larger conflict.
"We have woken up to a more dangerous world," said France's deputy foreign minister, Amélie de Montchalin. Russia, a key ally of Iran in the Middle East, blasted “an adventurist step that will increase tensions throughout the region".
The assassination marks a major escalation in the stand-off between Washington and Iran, a relationship that has lurched from one crisis to another ever since Trump pulled the US out of a landmark Iranian nuclear deal negotiated by his predecessor.
“What the Trump administration has done is rewrite the rules of engagement with Iran,” said Ellie Geranmayeh, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
“Up until now, the military action on both sides had been mostly covert, without taking responsibility. But now the US has gone ahead and publically announced it assassinated one of the top figures in Irans political and military establishment,” Geranmayeh told FRANCE 24.
“Therefore this opens up a whole new space for Iran to take retaliatory actions against senior American personnel in the Middle East or elsewhere,” she added.
As Ian Bond, the director of foreign policy at the London-based Centre for European Reform, argued in a Twitter post, targeting non-state terrorists such as al Qaedas Osama bin Laden or the Islamic State (IS) groups Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is “v[ery] different from killing [a] senior official of [an] internationally-recognised state”.
The brazen strike marked a “[b]ig escalation by Trump, & a lawless step that increases risk to US & allies,” Bond added.
No doubt #Soleimani was v bad actor, w much blood on his hands. But killing non-state terrorists eg bin Laden or Baghdadi v different from killing senior official of internationally-recognised state. Big escalation by Trump, & a lawless step that increases risk to US & allies.
— Ian Bond (@CER_IanBond) January 3, 2020
“Its very difficult to overstate just how important this killing is,” stressed FRANCE 24s correspondent in Lebanon, Leila Molana-Allen, describing the strike as “the equivalent of assassinating the head of the CIA on foreign soil”.
She added: “This is a hugely humiliating blow for Iran, given that Soleimani was such an important and such a popular figure – they will be forced to retaliate.”
Iran's Supreme National Security Council said it in a statement Friday that it had held a special session and made “appropriate decisions” on how to respond. But just what those decisions involve in practice is anyone's guess.
Proxy forces
Analysts say the slain commander's Quds Force, along with its stable of paramilitary proxies, has ample means to launch a multi-pronged response.
While Irans conventional military has suffered under 40 years of American sanctions, its elite forces have built up a ballistic missile programme and can strike asymmetrically in the region through proxy militias like Lebanons Hezbollah and Yemens Houthi rebels – a network Soleimani spent the past two decades building, training and arming.
As the head of the Quds, Soleimani led all of its expeditionary forces and frequently shuttled between Iraq, Lebanon and Syria, where he played a key role in turning the tide of the countrys civil war in favour of Bashar al-Assad.
Soleimani then rose to even greater prominence by coordinating the Shia militias that bore the brunt of the fighting against the Islamic State (IS) group in Iraq.
US officials say the Quds Force under Soleimani also taught Iraqi militants how to manufacture and use deadly roadside bombs (improvised explosive devices, or IEDs ) against US troops after the invasion of Iraq – allegations Iran has denied.
The slain general, who also cultivated ties with Hamas and other hardline Palestinian factions, was regarded as a particular threat by Israel, Washingtons main ally in the region.
“Among the pro-Iranian factions across the region – in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and even Afghanistan – he was viewed as a hero, and there is going to be a lot of pressure in those factions to avenge his death,” said Borzou Daragahi, international correspondent for UK daily The Independent, in an interview with FRANCE 24.
The leader of Lebanon's Hezbollah was among the first to call for Soleimani to be avenged.
"Meting out the appropriate punishment to these criminal assassins… will be the responsibility and task of all resistance fighters worldwide," Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said in a statement.
Gaza-based Hamas official Bassem Naim wrote on Twitter that the assassination "opens the doors of the region to all possibilities, except calm & stability. USA bears the responsibility for that".
In Baghdad, the commander of a major Iran-backed militia urged all Iraqi factions to join forces and expel foreign troops from the country.
"We call on all national forces to unify their stance in order to expel foreign troops whose presence has become pointless in Iraq," said TV Hadi al-Amiri, who heads the Badr Organisation militia and also leads the second-largest bloc in Iraqs parliament.
US troops in harms way
Daragahi said it was unlikely Iran would respond in a way that risks sparking a full-blown war the Iranian military would be ill-equipped to fight.
“If they do respond in a military way it will be in a clandestine and asymmetric way that is deniable – unless this assassination is such a game-changer that it even changes those rules,” said Daragahi.
In interviews with US media, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the administration had taken steps to fortify its assets in the region and was prepared for any possible retaliation, including a cyberattack.
But Daragahi warned that US troops in the region remained dangerously exposed.
“The problem is that US troops are in harms way across the Middle East, and its not clear yet whether the US administration has gamed out what it was going to do in response [to Iranian retaliation],” said Daragahi.
“US troops in Syria are looking increasingly vulnerable – theres a few hundred of them in isolated bases; US troops in Afghanistan already are coming under near-regular assault by the Taliban and Iran could help in those attacks; and US forces in Iraq already under pressure from Shia militia and ISIS [IS group] remnants could also come under sustained attack.”
Military personnel are not the only US citizens at risk. US nationals working for foreign oil companies in the southern Iraqi oil city of Basra were rushing to the airport on Friday, the countrys oil ministry said, hours after Washington urged its citizens to leave Iraq “immediately”.
The State Department said the US embassy in Baghdad, which was attacked by Iran-backed militiamen and other protesters earlier this week, remained closed and all consular services had been suspended.
Precipitating a US exit from Iraq could be part of a more long-term Iranian strategy in response to Fridays strike, said Geranmayeh of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Such a strategy would involve “changing the tide against the United States in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, where local actors may now more forcefully demand that US military personnel withdraw from these countries”, she explained, noting that “this is already a hot topic of debate” in Iraq.
The killings of Soleimani and his Iraqi ally Mahdi al-Muhandis, a prominent Iraqi militia leader involved in the attacks on the US embassy, have further strained US relations with Iraq's government, which is regularly torn between its alliances with Washington and Tehran.
Adel Abdul-Mahdi, the countrys caretaker prime minister, condemned the strike as an “aggression against Iraq” and a “blatant attack on the nation's dignity”.
Lamenting "a dangerous escalation" that threatRead More – Source
