I have tried to give a voice to what Syrians, Iraqis, and Kurds felt about events as they unfolded around them. Their instincts, honed by decades of danger to themselves and their families, were often sharper, or at least different from mine. I always try to keep in mind the warning of an Iraqi friend who told me, as we drove through a particularly violent district north of Baghdad, “Take off your seatbelt—no Iraqi ever wears one and it identifies you as a foreigner.”
Canterbury14 January 2019
At the time of his assassination, General Qasem Soleimani’s strategy in Iraq and in other Middle Eastern countries with large Shia populations, had become counterproductive. He is now guaranteed the status of an Iranian and Shia warrior-martyr, in spite of the mistakes he made in the last years of his life, the effects of which may, to some extent, have been reversed by President Donald Trump’s decision to kill him. Beginning last October in Iraq, Soleimani orchestrated the violent repression of small-scale protests about social and economic grievances, which turned them into something close to a mass uprising by the Shia community. Iran and its proxies were blamed for the death of more than 500 protesters and injuries to 15,000 others; demonstrators chanting anti-Iranian slogans burned the Iranian consulates in the Shia holy cities of Karbala and Najaf. Later the same month in Lebanon, vast crowds filled the streets of Beirut, demanding an end to a political status quo that Hezbollah, Iran’s local ally, had fought for decades to create. In Iran itself, the government ruthlessly suppressed November protests over fuel price rises; according to Amnesty International 304 people were killed. At home and abroad, the Shia coalition, which Iran had built up with immense effort since the 1979 revolution, was falling apart; the Iranian state and its two most powerful regional allies, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Hashd al-Shaabi, or Popular Mobilisation Forces, in Iraq, were losing their legitimacy as defenders of their communities and the opponents of foreign interference in their countries.
The Iranian leadership faced a political crisis long before President Trump ordered the assassination by American drone of Soleimani at Baghdad airport on 3 January. Trump ignored the old military saying “Never interrupt your enemy when he is in the middle of making a mistake,” at a time when Soleimani, and those who thought like him in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon, had made a grave misjudgment in choosing violent repression to deal with opponents of the political status quo. As the largest crowds since the funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 filled the streets of Tehran and other cities to mourn Soleimani, senior members of the Iranian government appeared astonished by a renewed sense of national solidarity. Demands by demonstrators that the government stop wasting money on foreign adventures, like those organised by Soleimani, were replaced with cries for vengeance against the US. Since he withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, the purpose of Trump’s Iran policy and, crucially, the imposition of sanctions has been to ramp up popular pressure on the Iranian leadership, forcing them to give in to US demands if they want to stay in power. There was strong evidence that this approach was working until the Soleimani killing revived support for the government in Tehran.
But Trump is not the only leader who makes unforced errors. Just when the Iranian government was riding a wave of re-awakened nationalism, an Islamic Revolutionary Guard unit near Tehran airport shot down a Ukrainian passenger aircraft, killing all 176 passengers, including eighty-two Iranians and sixty-three Canadians. The Revolutionary Guards lied about their responsibility for the incident for three days until finally admitting that the crew manning the anti-aircraft missile battery had mistaken the civilian plane for a US cruise missile. Within hours, demonstrators were back in the streets of Tehran and other cities. But this time they were shouting anti-government slogans, demanding the punishment of the Revolutionary Guard commanders, and blaming the regime for everything that had gone wrong. Student protesters chanted: “Guards, you are our dictator. You are our Isis,” while others called for the resignation of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and an end to forty years of clerical rule. Iranians noted that their military had taken great care not to kill any Americans in retaliation for the death of Soleimani when they fired ballistic missiles on 8 January at US bases at Erbil and Ain al-Assad in Iraq. They asked why their generals did not pay equal attention to keeping their own people alive. Iran is a deeply polarised country of eighty-two million people, and though not all of them will have felt that way, the popular mood swiftly changed; a week that began with the government basking in new-found popularity ended with it being denounced for its incompetence, mendacity, and brutality. These feelings of outrage and contempt were expressed in an angry joke on Iranian social media: “The Revolutionary Guards have sent a message to the US that, if you attack us once again, we will level Iran to the ground.”
In Iraq, the effect of the assassination is less straightforward: protesters involved in the last round of demonstrations are not likely to shed tears for a man who has spent the last three months trying to kill them, and yet, perversely, his death does undermine the protests. The Iraqi political elite, that had begun to look as if it might buckle under popular pressure, can now claim that it is defending Iraqi independence, and that the greatest threat to Iraqi sovereignty comes from the US, and not Iran. Iraqi leaders sympathetic to the protesters will be more cautious: President Barham Salih, for instance, had rejected two interim prime minister nominees (to replace the discredited Adel Abdul-Mahdi) for being too close to the pro-Iranian camp. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, whose support or tolerance is essential for any Shia-dominated government in Baghdad, was backing fresh elections. These moves may continue, but in a less major key: “no Iraqi leader,” said one Iraqi commentator, “will want to open himself up to accusations of being too pro-American.” Already there are signs that Mahdi may stay on as prime minister. From the start of the protests, pro-Iranian paramilitary groups have claimed that the movement was a plot by the US, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia to stage a “velvet revolution” to overthrow the government. These conspiracy theories will be pushed harder and repression will intensify: On 5 January protesters in the southern city of Nasiriyah, who were refusing to take part in funerary rites for Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the Kata’ib Hezbollah leader who was killed alongside Soleimani, were shot at and their tents set ablaze.
Since Soleimani’s death, Trump and his cabinet have been demonising him as the terrorist mastermind responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American soldiers. On the contrary, in Iran and in Shia communities across the world, he has been presented as the supreme national and religious martyr who died for his country and his faith. The two narratives combine into a somewhat exaggerated picture of Soleimani’s significance. They distort the image of his twin-track role as the head of Quds Force, the foreign branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, carrying out covert operations and open diplomacy in parts of the Middle East with significant Shia populations: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Afghanistan, and the Gulf states. He certainly would have given the orders for the drone and missile attack on Saudi oil facilities at Abqaiq and al-Khurais last September, but he was also a highly visible regional politician. He manoeuvred and acted as an intermediary between different national, ethnic, and religious leaders. Iraqi Prime Minister Mahdi says that Soleimani had flown into Baghdad International Airport to discuss measures to reduce hostility between Iran and Saudi Arabia: “I was supposed to meet him in the morning the day he was killed; he came to deliver a message from Iran in response to the message we had delivered from the Saudis to Iran.” Trump, who wants to portray Soleimani as a monster, denies this, but it is highly likely that what Mahdi says is true.
The US has always been keen to hide the degree to which it has been Iran’s de facto partner, as well as its rival, in Iraq ever since Saddam Hussein (effectively