General
Qasem Soleimani was like the George Washington of the Iranians and the people
of the Middle East. His assassination will have dire consequences for the U.S.

Donald Trump
has issued the order for the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani,
the revered Iranian commander, alongside his lifetime friend and comrade, Abu
Mahdi al-Muhandis.

To fully
understand the magnitude of what may come next for the western powers in the
Islamic world, it is vital to understand not only who the man was but also the
ideology behind him.

Gen. Soleimani
was dubbed as the “shadow commander” in the popular press around the world, Soleimani
spent his first years as a young commander in the IRGC on the
battlefields during the 1980s Iran-Iraq war.

The Iraq
dictator Saddam Hussein had the support of western and Persian Gulf Arab states.
Saddam planned to destroy the emerging Islamic uprising all over the region.

But it seems
that many scholars have forgotten his first major mission as commander of the
Quds force involved indirect coordination with the United States as the Bush
administration started its mission to invade Afghanistan in 2001.

The Taliban
fundamentalists were a mutual enemy at the time. Iran’s military aid ended in
2002 when the US president George W Bush famously
called Iran alongside Iraq and North Korea the “axis of evil”.

Years later, Soleimani
and the Axis of Resistance embarked on the mission to kick the US military out
of places like Iraq.

After having
spent trillions of dollars and enduring thousands of human casualties, Gen.
Soleimani came out of this battle victorious and the United States was forced
to withdraw from Iraq in 2011.

The Iranian
General had little time to celebrate his achievement and newly formed fame. His
attention was turned to containing the Persian Gulf Arab states’ intervention
in countries involved with the Arab spring. He helped the Syrian president,
Bashar al-Assad get on his feet again.

That
progress caused the creation of a wide-scale network of militias and guerilla
fighters numbering more than 100,000 men, 

unprecedented Russian
involvement in the region, forming the axis of resistance in the region, and
the transformation of Hezbollah into a force capable of operating covert
missions in Israel’s heartland.

In 2014, when
he singlehandedly blocked the Islamic State’s expansion throughout Iraq and
Syria, the brave commander was being seen as an international hero among Iraqis
and the Syrian people.

The same
response was evident in Iran, Afghanistan, Yemen, and even Saudi Arabia, where
he quickly became a household name.

So Donald Trump
and his Western allies have not merely assassinated an ordinary Iranian
military commander but also a highly popular figure. Even many people in the
west are now viewing him as the guardian of liberty and freedom.

The right-wing
propagandists in the west believe that his death was a huge blow to Iran’s
proxy capabilities and his message in the region and the west. But such a
perspective takes no notice of how the Iranian system works.

Soleimani’s
successor as Quds force commander was set forth only 12 hours after his
assassination. He was well aware of the dangers of the job, so martyrdom and
what comes after it was never far from his mind.

Indeed, the old
and experienced commander gave his younger lieutenants considerable operational
authority and autonomy.

So what comes
next? People in the region see Soleimani as an international hero and people in
the west are raging against their governments and their corrupt systems.

In
other words, Soleimani may, with his martyrdom, have already achieved the
greatest achievement of his lifetime, and without firing a single shot: namely,
his ultimate objective of ending the US military presence in the region and
showing the brutal nature of western powers to its people