Assassination of Qasem Soleimani

On 3 January 2020, Qasem Soleimani, an Iranian major general, was killed by an American drone strike ordered by U.S. president Donald Trump near Baghdad International Airport in Iraq, while travelling to meet Iraqi prime minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi.

Soleimani was commander of the Quds Force, one of five branches of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which is designated as a terrorist organization by both the United States and European Parliament. Soleimani was considered the second most powerful person in Iran, subordinate to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, even being considered Khamenei's right hand man. Five Iraqi nationals and four other Iranian nationals were killed alongside Soleimani, including the deputy chairman of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) and commander of the Iran-backed Kata'ib Hezbollah militia, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. The Pentagon says Soleimani and his troops were "responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American and coalition service members and the wounding of thousands more". However, questions concerning the U.S. military command's level of attribution to the Quds Force for Iraq's domestic production of explosively formed penetrators, to the source of foreign production and "technology and the training on how to use it", and the level of transparency regarding this information at the time of accusation, were raised contemporaneously.

The strike occurred during the 2019–2022 Persian Gulf crisis, which began after the U.S. withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran in 2018, reimposed sanctions, and accused Iranian elements of fomenting a campaign to harass U.S. forces in the region in 2019. On 27 December 2019, the K-1 Air Base in Iraq, which hosts Iraqi and U.S. personnel, was attacked, killing an American contractor. The U.S. responded by launching airstrikes across Iraq and Syria, reportedly killing 25 Kata'ib Hezbollah militiamen. Days later, Shia militiamen and their supporters retaliated by attacking the U.S. embassy in the Green Zone.

U.S. officials justified the Soleimani strike saying it was necessary to stop an "imminent attack", though later clarifying the legal justification of the action as being taken "in response to an escalating series of attacks...to protect United States personnel, to deter Iran from conducting or supporting further attacks...and to end Iran's strategic escalation of attacks..." Some experts, including the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, considered the assassination as a likely violation of international law as well as U.S. domestic laws. Iran called the strike an act of "state terrorism". The Iraqi government said the attack undermined its national sovereignty and considered it a breach of its bilateral security agreements with the U.S. and an act of aggression against its officials. On 5 January 2020, the Iraqi parliament passed a non-binding resolution to expel all foreign troops from its territory while, on the same day, Iran took the fifth and last step of reducing commitments to the 2015 international nuclear deal.

Soleimani's killing sharply escalated tensions between the U.S. and Iran. Iranian leaders vowed revenge, while U.S. officials said they would preemptively attack any Iran-backed paramilitary groups in Iraq that they perceived as a threat. Many in the international community reacted with concern and urged restraint and diplomacy. On 8 January 2020, five days after the airstrike, Iran launched a series of missile attacks on U.S. forces based in Iraq, the first known direct engagement between Iran and the U.S. since the naval battle precipitating the Vincennes incident on 3 July 1988. That same day, the IRGC shot down a civilian airliner Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752. Following the shootdown, no additional military actions took place.

Background

Assassination as a policy consideration

The modern Middle East has seen a number of occasions in which the assassination of high-level government and military figures was attempted, or at least considered. Such instances include United States decapitation strike air raids targeting Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 1986 and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in 1991, 1998, and 2003, in addition to killings or attempted killings of non-state terrorist leaders such as Anwar al-Awlaki and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Governments conducting assassinations of foreign leaders and officials was largely frowned upon in prior centuries, but that norm has been weakening over time, especially since World War II. The effectiveness of anti-terrorist "leadership targeting" has become a subject of scholarly debate, especially with regard to whether such killings are actually beneficial to a country's foreign policy goals.

In the wake of the strike against Soleimani, both the topic of further eroding norms and questions regarding effectiveness were raised. The costs and benefits of foreign policy assassinations are difficult to compute, and decisions to go ahead with such actions often reflect the vague, and not always realized, hope that any successor to the targeted person will be less capable against, or will embody policies more favorable toward, the country taking the action.

U.S. and Iranian activities in Iraq since 2014

In 2014, the U.S. intervened in Iraq as a part of Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR)–an American-led mission to fight the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) terror organization–and have been training and operating alongside Iraqi forces as a part of the anti-ISIL coalition. In 2017, ISIL forces in Iraq were largely defeated amidst a civil conflict, with the help of primarily Iran-backed Shia militias—the Popular Mobilization Forces, reporting to the Iraqi prime minister since 2016—and the U.S.-backed Iraqi Armed Forces.

Political considerations

Concerning the 15-year Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action provisional nuclear deal with Iran, some critics of the treaty argued that Iran could make a nuclear bomb after expiry of the limited-term nuclear deal. U.S. president Donald Trump criticized the nuclear deal, particularly the Obama administration's debt clearance of $1.7 billion to Iran. Tensions rose between Iran and the U.S. in 2018 after Trump unilaterally withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions against Iran—which severely affected Iran's economy—as a part of his administration's strategy of applying "maximum pressure" against Iran for the purpose of establishing a new nuclear deal.

The Quds Force, which Qasem Soleimani led, has been designated a terrorist organization by Canada, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the U.S. Soleimani himself was sanctioned by the United Nations and the European Union and was on U.S. terror watchlists.

Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis was designated a terrorist by the U.S. in 2009. He was the deputy commander of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF). He also commanded Kata'ib Hezbollah, a 25,000-strong militia considered a terrorist organization by Japan, the United Arab Emirates, and the U.S.

Significance of the assassination of Soleimani

General Qasem Soleimani was considered the second most powerful person in Iran, behind Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and in his later years enjoyed a near unassailable heroic status, especially with supporters of Tehran's hard-line politics.

Ever since the Iran–Iraq War (1980–88), in which Iran was attacked by Saddam Hussein's Iraq with significant assistance of several Western countries siding with Hussein against Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's Islamic republic in Tehran, with notably the U.S. supplying weapons and intelligence to Iraq, Soleimani had developed into the architect of all of Iran's foreign policies in the Middle East and a key figure in all of Iran's foreign and defence policies. He provided crucial support to President Bashar al-Assad's regime during the Syrian Civil War. In his 2008 letter to the U.S. general David Petraeus, then commander of the Multi-National Force in Iraq, he asserted: "General Petraeus, you must know that I, Qasem Soleimani, am in charge of the Iranian policies concerning Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza and Afghanistan". Iran's alleged ties to the Taliban were cited as part of the justification for the assassination of Soleimani. That made his killing by the U.S. on 3 January 2020 a significant aggravation of the existing tensions between the U.S. and Iran.

In the days after the assassination of Soleimani, Iran's leaders vowed "shattering revenge" "on places and at times where the U.S. don't expect it".

Prior threats against Soleimani

Responses to Qasem Soleimani's perceived influence in Iraq and abroad had been a topic of debate amongst U.S. officials for many years. In August 2007, as U.S. military officials attempted to learn more about the leadership of the Iran-backed proxy groups operating in Iraq, they received a message relayed through the Iraqi Minister of State for National Security, that Soleimani wanted them to know that he was "the sole decision-maker on Iranian activities in Iraq".