The leader of the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds force was a bearded icon of the Islamic Republic, arguably its second most powerful figure after the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Killing him was a blunt act of war against a substantial regional power. Its half-million-strong armed services are the most potent military force the US has faced since confronting the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army more than 60 years ago in Korea.
There was nothing inevitable about this conflict. Six years ago the legacy of loathing left by the Islamic Revolution began to fade. There was a multilateral agreement to curb Iran’s nuclear programme in 2015, and an unspoken mutual non-aggression pact with Suleimani during the shared campaign against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
“For a while when we were doing counter-Isis operations, we essentially had a gentleman’s agreement with him, that his forces wouldn’t target us and we wouldn’t target him,” said Kirsten Fontenrose, the former senior director for the Gulf in Trump’s national security council.
But with Trump’s abrogation of the 2015 nuclear deal and the collapse of the Isis caliphate, largely removing a common foe, it was Suleimani who emerged as the US’s arch-enemy.
“He was a target of opportunity,” Fontenrose said. “When you know a super-bad guy is going to be somewhere that you can strike and you know you won’t get the opportunity for another year.”
