What led to the US killing of top Iranian Commander Qasem Soleimani —and what lies ahead?

The assassination of Major General Qassem Soleimani, the Commander of the special unit of Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) responsible for operations outside Iran, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy-chief of Iraq’s Shi’ite paramilitary umbrella Popular Mobilisation Forces, on the instructions of President Trump marks a new inflexion point in the Iran-US tensions which began with the US announcement of ‘maximum pressure’ campaign early last year.

‘Maximum Resistance’ against ‘Maximum Pressure’

In February 2019, Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani, responding to President Trump’s threat of reducing Iran’s oil export revenue to zero took a hardline stance issuing thinly veiled counter-threats that “anyone who understands politics a little bit would never say that he/she would prevent exports of Iran’s oil. We have many Straits. The Strait of Hormuz is just one of them.” Soleimani, who rarely made public statements, praised President Rouhani for his timely, wise and correct comments, and underlined his preparedness to exercise any policy that is in the interest of the Islamic Republic. From May onwards a series of small-scale attacks targeted international oil shipping in the Sea of Oman and near the Strait of Hormuz and the September 2019 drone attacks targeting two major Saudi oil facilities deep inside Saudi Arabia, claimed by Yemeni Houthi movement, sent oil prices surging and caused serious escalation of tensions between Iran and the United States. Even as Washington blamed Iran for the attacks, it lacked the evidence to back its claims, and any military retaliation was averted. Against the US pressure, Tehran has brought to bear its own ‘maximum resistance’ by targeting oil interests of the US regional allies through its non-state actor allies. Working through proxies has allowed Tehran deniability and increased economic costs on Persian Gulf countries supportive of the US agenda on Iran and triggered diplomatic efforts by countries, such as Japan, whose energy security is periled by escalating tensions.

Iraq: A battlefield for Iran and the US

For over last two decades, Qasem Soleimani had been at the helm of Iran’s efforts to defend itself against the US threat by cultivating what it calls the ‘axis of resistance’ including Hezbollah in Lebanon, powerful militias in Iraq, Assad regime in Syria, and at times Hamas in Gaza. This network of powerful non-state and state actors across the region is Iran’s deterrence strategy, warning the United States and Israel of massive retaliation if they were to take serious military action against Iran. Tehran has justified its support to Hezbollah and Hamas, labelled as terrorist by the United States, as part of anti-Zionist resistance and financially backed and trained Shi’ite militias as en effective ground force in the fight against ISIS. But the rise of Iran’s influence in the Arab world, especially in Post-Saddam Iraq where its Shi’ite allies have been ruling the country for past sixteen years, has made its Arab Gulf neighbours see Tehran as ‘meddling’ in Arab affairs and a ‘destabilising’ force in the region.

As the attention of the international community remained focused on sabotage attacks on oil-shipping in the Persian Gulf, Iran-US tensions were also playing out in Iraq, where anti-government protests besetted the pro-Iran Shi’ite government. While the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pressurised the Iraqi Prime Minister Abdul-Mahdi by calling for ‘maximum restraint’ and that those who had ‘violated human rights’ should be held accountable, Iranian leadership saw a US hand behind the protests and firmly stood behind the beleaguered Prime Minister. In October 2019, when Muqtada al-Sadr reached out to his main political rival Hadir al-Amiri, whose alliance of the Iran-backed paramilitaries is the second-biggest bloc in the parliament after al-Sadr’s Sairoon alliance, to push out Abdul-Mahdi, Soleimani reportedly intervened by asking al-Amiri and his militia leaders to keep supporting the Prime Minister. Iraqi protesters blamed Iran for cultivating Iraqi Shi’ite parties and militias as a vehicle for its strategic and ideological influence, the survival of a friendly political elite in Iraq is a strategic priority for Tehran. In early December following weeks of low-intensity attacks on the bases housing the US forces in Iraq, Washington imposed sanctions on leaders of Iran-backed Iraqi militias including Qais-al Khazali of Asaib al-Haq, Abu Zaynab al-Lamiof Khataib Hezbollah. These militias played a crucial role in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and are still in the process of being regularised into the Iraqi army. The given justification for the US sanctions was these leaders involvement in ‘serious human rights abuses,’ it was clear that the real motive was to weaken Iranian influence in the country.

The End of US Presence in Iraq?

After a rocket attack on a base near Kirkuk in northern Iraq killed a U.S. civilian contractor, US forces carried out what they called ‘precision defensive strikes’ against three Kataib Hezbollah targets in Iraq and two in Syria, killing 25 fighters and injuring 51. Following US strikes, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the leader of Kataib Hezbollah, declared that the “blood of martyrs will not be in vain.” In the early hours of January 3, Al-Muhandis was at Baghdad airport to receive Soleimani when their convoy exiting from the airport became the target of the US drones strikes. Even as Washinton has justified the killing of the two leaders as ‘preemtive act of self-defense,’ it underlines the huge gap between the Amrican and Iraqi security objectives. The spiral of violence is set to intensify in Iraq, where the US military presence has now become untenable. Both Muqtada al-Sadr and Hadi al-Amiri, whose militias engaged in a bloodied anti-American insurgency until the US withdrawal of its troops in 2011 and have opposed limited US military presence in training and advisory roles, are threatening to use violence if politics fails to end the US presence in the country. Abdul-Mahdi, the care-taker Iraqi prime minister has called the double assassination a violation of Iraqi sovereignty and also of the conditions agreed for the anti-ISIS US military presence.

Will Anti-government sentiment turn into anti-Americanism?

In Iran, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed ‘harsh revenge’; President Rouhani has compared Soleimani’s assassination to the 1953 CIA engineered coup against the nationalist government of Prime Minister Mossadegh, a watershed in Iranian national history that created an anti-American construct in the popular imagination. Iran, even as it was following a strategy of controlled escalation to show strength in the face of the US maximum pressure, it was willing to talk with the United States on the condition that it lifts the sanctions against Iran. It was also seeking regional security dialogue with Persian Gulf states, based on what Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has described as security networking, “a non-zero-sum approach that accepts that security is indivisible, as opposed to alliance and blocks, which are fundamentally based on the defunct zero-sum approach of gaining security at the expense of insecurity of others.” But President Trump’s continued offensive against Iran after killing Iran’s top commander will strengthen the hardliners in Tehran, who see the United States as ‘global arrogance’ viscerally opposed to the Islamic Republic. The ‘martyrdom’ of Soleimani and al-Muhandis has incited popular passions in both Iraq and Iran, and it may steer anti-government sentiment seen in the protests over the previous months into a fresh tide of anti-Americanism.

Deepika Saraswat

Senior Adjunct Reseracher, AGA