JULY 25, 2018
HAMADAN, IRAN
DAY
General Qasem Soleimani is also being hunted.
But unlike al-Baghdadi, he is not hiding.
The general has traveled three hours from his simple home in Tehran to deliver today’s political address. “The Shadow Commander,” as he is nicknamed, is normally averse to public speaking. His soft tenor voice does not lend itself to dramatics. Most everything about Soleimani is mysterious—and he prefers it that way. Movies have been written about his life and pop songs praise his name. Yet the most famous man in Iran is so private that he will not release the name of his wife to the public. The Tehran Times is not sure whether he has four children or five.* Some say he even has a black belt in karate. But Soleimani will neither confirm nor deny a single fact about his life.
Yet now is the time for Soleimani to come out of the shadows. The general and the ayatollahs who run Iran are involved in a heated controversy with President Donald J. Trump. On May 8, Mr. Trump ended the Iranian nuclear treaty, despite global fears that Iran will accelerate its weapons program. The president has threatened war if it does.
Qasem Soleimani has been chosen to deliver Iran’s response. His words must be forceful and specific.
A male-only crowd packs the auditorium at the Hamadan air base. They wear Western-style clothing and all but a few sit on the floor, legs crossed. Many cover their heads with an araqchin, the traditional Muslim skull cap. They are keen to hear the great general’s response to the hated Americans—gaping as if they are in the presence of a great celebrity.
General Soleimani steps to the microphone. He wears a green uniform with a beige-and-black kaffiyeh draped over his epaulets. He refers to himself as “the smallest soldier,” having long ago come to terms with his short stature. He often prays that he be allowed to martyr himself in the name of Islam and Iran. So, the general does not fear President Trump, nor the potential deadly outcome of the speech he is about to give—even though it could cost him his life.
The general begins calmly. “The US president, in response to statements by our president, made some idiotic comments on Twitter. It is beneath the dignity of the president of the great Islamic country of Iran to respond, so I will respond, as a soldier of our great nation.”
Qasem Soleimani invents his own legend of humble origins and commitment to toughness. And it begins with karate, all those years ago.
Soleimani wants the world to believe he was once obsessed with the sport.
Nineteen seventy-eight. The workday is over. Along with his cousin, Ahmad, he rides his secondhand bicycle through the streets of Kerman to the mosque. He knows religious education is important but would much prefer they head to the dojo, where the art of karate awaits. His small stature is a source of irritation to the young man, and he feels that these workouts elevate him in the eyes of others.
The young Qasem is the oldest son and second child of a fruit grower. But his father, Hassan, has taken out an agricultural loan from the government and gone heavily into debt. So, at age thirteen, Qasem leaves the family village in Qanat Molk, where the Soleimanis have lived for two centuries. He takes a job at a construction site to help his parents. He has little formal education and soon leaves that job for employment with a local water district, rising to the role of supervisor in a few short months. “At night, we couldn’t fall asleep with the sadness of thinking that government agents were coming to arrest our fathers,” he will write of his desperation to raise the 900 toman—about $100—needed to repay the family debt.
Once inside the Kerman mosque, the young man feels at home. He attends sermons preached by Seyyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei, a radical imam. Soleimani himself is becoming radicalized. The pull of religion and self-mastery learned in the dojo give him enormous inner strength.
Iran is now caught up in a religious revolution pitting the longtime monarchy, led by the shah, against the exiled Muslim cleric, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.* Qasem sympathizes with the ayatollah. His father’s debts were brought on by the shah’s monetary policies, plus the shah is supported by the despised United States of America. Qasem Soleimani admires the discipline of the Shia holy men and their patriotic desire to make Iran an unrivaled Middle Eastern power. In 1979, shortly after the shah flees into exile, Qasem chooses to become a soldier.
Life in the Revolutionary Guard suits the young man. He proves himself adept at command. His karate skills and muscular physical appearance are noticed. Soleimani is invited to an elite training camp for deep indoctrination into the new Iran’s political, religious, and military policies. He excels, showing his toughness by refusing to take sick leave, even after being accidentally shot in the arm by a fellow recruit. His peers are awed at the sight of the injured Qasem firing an AK-47 one-handed.
But it is the war with Iraq that is the making of Qasem Soleimani. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invades Iran shortly after Soleimani completes his elite training. The date is September 22, 1980. Iraqi fighter jets cross into Iranian airspace in a surprise attack. One day later, ground troops loyal to Saddam sweep over the border. The Iraqi army seems to be everywhere along the four-hundred-mile front, easily overwhelming the defending Iranians.
The roots of the war are religious: Iran’s revolution has placed the Shia cleric Ayatollah Khomeini on the throne. There is a sizable Shiite population in Iraq. Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim, claims he fears Khomeini will foment religious revolution in Iraq and overthrow his regime.
The United States is secretly aligned with Saddam, providing F-14 Tomcat aircraft and the latest technology in tanks and artillery. The fighting is reminiscent of World War I, with trench warfare and poison gas. Qasem is wounded several times but always returns to the front. The Iran-Iraq War instills two key principles into young Soleimani: Iraq must never again be a threat to Iran. And the United States must be destroyed at all costs.
Soleimani’s karate training has shown him that a smaller opponent can overwhelm and defeat a larger foe through well-directed blows and strategic patience.
This is how Qasem Soleimani will eventually wage war against America.
Thirty-eight years later, General Soleimani is on the warpath again.
“It has been over a year since Trump became US president, but that man’s rhetoric is still that of a casino, of a bar. He talks to the world in the style of a bartender or a casino manager,” Soleimani tells his audience. “One feels that a gambler is talking.”
The men laugh, stunned to hear the general speaking so defiantly. Soleimani’s face remains impassive, but it is clear he relishes this intended response. The general then speaks directly to the American president.
“Know this: not a night goes by without us thinking of you. Hereby, I am telling you, the gambling Mister Trump. Be aware that we’re close to you where you can’t even imagine. We are beside you. We are the nation of martyrdom.… Come, we are waiting for you. We are the man of this battlefield for you. You know that this war would mean the destruction of all you possess.”
General Soleimani’s words are incendiary, but his tone is measured.
“You shouldn’t insult the Iranian nation,” Soleimani tells Trump, speaking to the most powerful man in the world as if they are equals. “You shouldn’t insult our president. You must be careful.”
Every man in the hall understands the provocation. But the crowd does not seem to fear Soleimani himself—despite rumors about torture in the general’s prisons. Those descriptions include reports of pepper-spraying genitals, waterboarding, and the “chicken kebab,” in which a man’s arms and legs are trussed behind his back as he’s dangled above the ground on a skewerlike pole. Also, every Iranian knows that a reason can be found to arrest anyone.
Amazingly, one lone individual shouts from somewhere in the crowd, interrupting the general. The audience is tense as Soleimani pauses for a moment. His eyes seek out the violator. But he is aware of the cameras filming him and the optics of responding angrily. Instead, the general patiently wags a finger and gently scolds the man into silence. The waiting police stand down.
The audience once again gives Soleimani its complete attention. But should anyone in the crowd be arrested for disrespect, it will not be the general who oversees the inevitable prison torture. That duty will fall to Sohrab Soleimani, the general’s younger brother, a brutal man whose very name does inspire fear.
It is November 29, 1981, and the Soleimani brothers are enduring a rainy night fighting the Iraqis. This is Operation Path to Jerusalem, and company commander Soleimani is leading Iranian troops through minefields. Among the soldiers in his battalion are his brother and his cousin Ahmad.
The battle goes well at first, the Iraqi forces taken completely by surprise. Ahmad suffers a leg injury and is forced to remain behind as the Soleimani brothers push farther into Iraq. Sohrab is just seventeen. Qasem left home while his brother was still a young child. But now they are reunited in the Revolutionary Guard, Sohrab learning the rigors of warfare from Qasem. The brothers grow closer by fighting together.
Ayatollah Khomeini will one day call Path to Jerusalem a great victory. But for Qasem Soleimani, the battle will almost cost him his life. A shell strikes him hard in the torso, tearing open his chest, leading to a great loss of blood. Qasem is evacuated to one hospital and then another for emergency surgery. He survives, but just barely.
It is while he is convalescing that Qasem Soleimani has time to reflect on his career path. He commits his life to Iran and service as a soldier. Returning to the front lines as soon as he is able, Qasem pursues that calling with an even greater passion. He commands the 41st Tharallah Division, which fights in several major battles, among them the crucial siege of Basra through January and February 1987.
The war ends in deadlock, with more than one hundred thousand men killed on both sides. A cease-fire ends hostilities in 1988, but tension between the two nations remains high. An actual peace treaty is not signed for two more years.
In the mind of Qasem Soleimani, the war continues. Iraq must never threaten Iran again.
Soleimani’s cousin Ahmad dies in battle in 1984. Qasem weeps at the loss but rejoices that Ahmad died a martyr, a death for a righteous cause being considered “soothing and pleasant.” But Sohrab survives the war, never far from his brother’s side.*
The general’s popularity and power rise greatly after the Iran-Iraq War. He becomes the subject of pop songs, with Iranian television documentaries about his life telling the story of how a boy born into an impoverished farm family, with little education, grew into one of the world’s sharpest tactical masterminds. “To Middle Eastern Shiites,” one CIA analyst writes, “he is James Bond, Erwin Rommel, and Lady Gaga rolled into one.”
A former deputy Iraqi prime minister is more succinct in his description of Soleimani’s broad appeal, which spills over the border into his own country: “All of the important people in Iraq go to see him. People are mesmerized by him—they see him like an angel.”
An angel of death.
The general’s rise to power complete, he once again shows his deep loyalty to family: he hands power to his brother Sohrab by granting him control over the entire Iranian prison system.
Soon, Sohrab turns brutal, jailing innocent citizens, allowing guards to torture and beat the arrested, and holding men in prison for years without charges. All this is condoned by Qasem. Foreign journalists and tourists thought to be spies are at the top of the list for incarceration. Rumors leak out of the prisons about torture methods and other acts of brutality, like having prisoners run down a narrow hallway through a gauntlet of guards who beat them with clubs.
The situation becomes so bad that Sohrab is investigated by Amnesty International for human rights abuses. But in Iran that does not matter. As long as General Qasem Soleimani remains in power, so will Sohrab.
And so it is that the general’s speech comes to a close at the Hamadan air base. By threatening the American president, he has greatly enhanced his reputation in the radical Muslim world.
But in Washington, DC, Qasem Soleimani’s threatening message is received much differently: he has just signed his own death warrant.
President Donald Trump stands in the White House Diplomatic Reception Room. This oval-shaped space on the ground floor is where a visiting head of state is normally received following arrival ceremonies on the South Lawn. But today’s diplomacy is not of a welcoming kind. Knowing his actions might lead to conflict, Mr. Trump nonetheless announces he is taking harsh measures against Iran. He is going to blow up the so-called Iran nuclear deal.
“This is a horrible, one-sided deal that should never have been made,” the president tells reporters. “It didn’t bring calm. It didn’t bring peace. It never will.”
Under President Barack Obama, the United States and its European allies agreed to lift $110 billion in economic sanctions against Iran in exchange for a limitation of uranium enrichment by that country. But verification measures in the arrangement were weak.
Mr. Trump has long scorned the deal as a farce. It is well known that Qasem Soleimani and the Revolutionary Guard control Iran’s nuclear facilities. The mullahs have continuously sought weapons of mass destruction. President Trump believes the Obama deal assists that ambition.
However, others say the end of the treaty is a precursor to war.
Minor hostilities have already begun. Under Soleimani’s command, Iranian naval vessels consistently harass US merchant vessels and warships in the Persian Gulf. That action is a legitimate threat: Iran possesses the Seersucker antiship missile, which is capable of sinking an American destroyer.
Donald Trump doesn’t want war with Iran. He just wants a new deal—a better deal, one that makes it impossible for the Iranians to build nuclear weapons. The United States soon reimposes tough economic sanctions meant to bring Iran back to the bargaining table. Israel and Saudi Arabia, two nations that would become immediate targets if Iran does develop a nuke, support Trump’s action.
Predictably, Iran chafes, particularly when the US sanctions prevent it from selling Iranian oil to European countries.
In fact, Iranian president Hassan Rouhani issues a threat. “Don’t play with the lion’s tail. America should know that peace with Iran is the mother of all peace, and war with Iran is the mother of all wars.”
President Trump’s Twitter response to Rouhani is sent in capital letters: “NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE.
“WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!”
General Qasem Soleimani’s hatred for America grows ever stronger. He is using the tension to gain even more power. Quietly, Soleimani is making plans to run for the Iranian presidency. He knows that he will have the support of Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, who has become a friend. But no matter what happens in politics, Soleimani now has complete freedom to do whatever he pleases in the name of his nation.
Wasting no time, the general begins to accelerate a terror campaign against America and Israel.
In Washington and Jerusalem, the threat from Iran is becoming clear as intelligence reports pinpoint Soleimani as a “present danger.” The US State Department declares the Quds Force a foreign terrorist organization.
“With this designation we are sending a clear signal to Iran’s leaders, including Qasem Soleimani and his band of thugs,” now–Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announces, “that the United States is bringing all pressure to bear to stop the regime’s outlaw behavior.”
President Donald Trump does not need any more convincing—to him, the situation has become personal.
Very personal.