How Qassem Suleimani became more powerful than a president
Qassem Suleimani started his working life as a skinny, impoverished child construction labourer, and ended it as the most influential military commander in the Middle East.
Through intellect, ruthlessness, courage and a dose of luck that finally ran out this week, he rose to become Iran’s second-most powerful man, official commander of Iran’s elite Quds forces and unofficial commander of a proliferation of proxy militias and allied politicians across the region.
He was killed by US drone strikes in Baghdad early on Friday morning, in the country that had been shaped as much by him as perhaps any other single individual since the fall of Saddam Hussein. He formed governments, directed policy, and for years attacked and undermined the US military.
Over a decade ago he had boasted in a text message to the newly appointed top US commander in Iraq of his power. “Dear General (David) Petraeus. You should know that I…control the policy for Iran with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, and Afghanistan.”
At the time, Syria was not on that list, but the country’s long, brutal civil war that began a few years later would help pull Suleimani out of the spymaster shadows where he once operated, into the global spotlight as a critical figure keeping embattled President Bashar al Assad in power.
He was also thought to have had a role in a string of terror attacks and assassinations around the world, from the 2005 killing of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and to bombings of Israel’s embassy and a Jewish centre in Buenos Aires in the 1990s, which together killed over 100 people.
His actions aimed to build, shape and bolster a Shiite axis of influence across the Middle East, to defend Iran’s revolutionary government against a world he saw as hostile. [Continue reading…]