General Discussion

The killing on Friday of General Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran's elite Quds Force, signals a radical escalation in Washington’s stand-off with Iran, one some analysts warn could endanger US troops and their allies in Iraq, Syria and beyond.

https://www.france24.com/en/20200103-a-more-dangerous-world-usa-killing-soleimani-stokes-fears-regional-conflict-iran-iraq-trump



Issued on: 03/01/2020

Iran has vowed to avenge the death of the 62-year-old general, who was assassinated as he left Baghdad airport alongside key members of local Iran-backed militias early on Friday in a drone strike ordered by US President Donald Trump. General Soleimani was widely regarded as the second-most-powerful figure in Iran behind Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, who warned that "severe revenge awaits the criminals" behind the attack. Soleimani had assembled a network of powerful and heavily armed allies stretching all the way to southern Lebanon, on Israel's doorstep. His targeted killing has caused alarm around the world, amid fears that Iranian retaliation against American interests in the region could spiral into a far larger conflict.

"We have woken up to a more dangerous world," said France's deputy foreign minister, Amélie de Montchalin. Russia, a key ally of Iran in the Middle East, blasted “an adventurist step that will increase tensions throughout the region". The assassination marks a major escalation in the stand-off between Washington and Iran, a relationship that has lurched from one crisis to another ever since Trump pulled the US out of a landmark Iranian nuclear deal negotiated by his predecessor. “What the Trump administration has done is rewrite the rules of engagement with Iran,” said Ellie Geranmayeh, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.



“Up until now, the military action on both sides had been mostly covert, without taking responsibility. But now the US has gone ahead and publically announced it assassinated one of the top figures in Iran’s political and military establishment,” Geranmayeh told FRANCE 24. “Therefore this opens up a whole new space for Iran to take retaliatory actions against senior American personnel in the Middle East or elsewhere,” she added. As Ian Bond, the director of foreign policy at the London-based Centre for European Reform, argued in a Twitter post, targeting non-state terrorists such as al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden or the Islamic State (IS) group’s Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is “v[ery] different from killing [a] senior official of [an] internationally-recognised state”. The brazen strike marked a “big escalation by Trump, & a lawless step that increases risk to US & allies,” Bond added.

Link to tweet

“It’s very difficult to overstate just how important this killing is,” stressed FRANCE 24’s correspondent in Lebanon, Leila Molana-Allen, describing the strike as “the equivalent of assassinating the head of the CIA on foreign soil”. She added: “This is a hugely humiliating blow for Iran, given that Soleimani was such an important and such a popular figure – they will be forced to retaliate.” Iran's Supreme National Security Council said it in a statement Friday that it had held a special session and made “appropriate decisions” on how to respond. But just what those decisions involve in practice is anyone's guess. Analysts say the slain commander's Quds Force, along with its stable of paramilitary proxies, has ample means to launch a multi-pronged response.

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