Loss of revered Quds Force commander and his aides has derailed country´s momentum in regionIn the early hours of 3 January, Iraq´s prime minister, Adel Abdul Mahdi, frantically phoned his advisers. `Something big has happened,` he said, summoning them to a meeting in his office. `You need to come now.`Like their boss, the advisers had heard the boom of the explosions that crunched into the airport road just after 1am, and their phones had been ringing incessantly. Each call had brought the unthinkable closer to shocking reality: Qassem Suleimani, the revered commander of Iran´s Quds Force and the most powerful man in Iraq, had been killed, and so had nearly all of his closest aides. Throughout 17 years of post-Saddam Hussein bedlam across the Middle East, there had been little to rival this moment.Qassem Suleimani, killed by a US drone strike in Baghdad, had become well known among Iranians and was sometimes discussed as a future president. Many considered Suleimani to have been the second most powerful person in Iran, behind supreme leader of Iran Ali Khamenei, but arguably ahead of President Hassan Rouhani. He was commander of the Quds Force, the elite, external wing of the Iran´s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which the Trump administration designated as a terror organisation in April last year. (December 28, 2019) Continue reading...
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