DECEMBER 2, 2015
WASHINGTON, DC
10:09 A.M.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is gathering enemies.
But this time, they are fellow Muslims.
The ISIS threat is being discussed six thousand miles away from the Middle East. The House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs is meeting in Room 2172 of the Rayburn House Office Building. It is almost three weeks since the Paris terror attacks shocked the world, spreading fears of ISIS predation. The men and women in this room have been thoroughly briefed about the Islamic State and well know its lethal ways. Al-Baghdadi has killed more than 1,200 people in terror attacks this year—and this figure does not include the thousands of casualties in Iraq and Syria.
But even though Paris is still very much at the forefront, attention is also being focused on another terrorist organization—one considered far more lethal than al-Baghdadi and his thugs. Today’s congressional session will zero in on a fifty-eight-year-old Iranian general named Qasem Soleimani, leader of the largest terrorist outfit in the world: the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
“Iran and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard have really been on a roll,” committee chairman Ed Royce states, setting the tone for the proceedings. “This is the subject of our hearing today …
“From nuclear proliferation to support of international terrorism, to human rights abuses, the IRGC has made Iran the global menace it is today. The IRGC is responsible for squashing democracy movements at home, for spreading the Iranian regime’s revolutionary ideology abroad, and for sparking turmoil throughout the Middle East. Its forces operate independent of Iran’s regular army.”
The mysterious leader of the IRGC is the handsome and conniving Soleimani, a former construction worker who has risen through the ranks to become the most feared man in the Middle East. The name “Qasem” means “divider”—and Soleimani has done just that, serving as a divisive presence around the world to further Iranian interests.
“Baghdadi became Baghdadi because he is a reasonably good tactical leader—and a reasonably good figurehead for the ISIS movement,” one American politician will point out.
“But Baghdadi is a knucklehead,” the official will add. “Soleimani is, in another lifetime, somebody who would run Microsoft. He is brilliant.
“When Baghdadi gets replaced, it’s going to be a temporary step backwards. When Soleimani perishes, the loss of leadership and intelligence will be unrecoverable.”*
The policy of Iran has always been to contain Sunni Muslims living in Iraq. Because the ISIS terrorists are Sunnis, the predominantly Shia nation of Iran sees them as enemies and is not pleased by their success in establishing a caliphate on Iraqi soil.
Nine months ago, in March, General Soleimani launched an attack on the ISIS stronghold of Tikrit. More than twenty thousand Shia military fighters, trained and armed by Iran, pummeled the city—capturing first the suburbs and then working their way into the town center. There was nothing al-Baghdadi’s forces could do to stop them.
Tikrit had been in ISIS hands since June 2014. Losing the battle was a huge symbolic blow to the group. The city of a quarter million residents is not large, yet it is the birthplace of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, one of the most powerful Sunni leaders in modern history. His tomb has already been flattened in the fighting, and his corpse stolen.
In addition to its symbolic significance, Tikrit is tactically important, perched on the banks of the Tigris River, halfway between Baghdad in the south and Mosul in the north. Its capture by a Shia force from Iran has again fueled the centuries-old rivalry between the two sects of the Islamic world.*
In March 2015, al-Baghdadi’s soldiers are using the former palaces of Saddam as their headquarters. The ISIS fanatics have also booby-trapped the city, placing bombs and snipers throughout its labyrinth of ancient streets. Roads are mined. As they await the arrival of the Iranian forces, the sky is ablaze from rockets and explosions launched by Soleimani and his soldiers. The Iranians fire Soviet-made weapons. ISIS must overcome long odds to maintain control of Tikrit, as there is every likelihood it will fall; the outmanned ISIS fighters number just four thousand, against twenty thousand Iranians.†
Then, more bad news for the ISIS defenders: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is driving toward the western Iraqi town of Ba’aj in a three-vehicle caravan. The region is rugged and wild, a Sunni tribal homeland known for its smuggling culture. The United States paid little attention to the area during the war with Iraq due to its lack of tactical significance. Therefore, al-Baghdadi thinks he is safe making the journey in daylight.
Suddenly, missiles strike the convoy. An American Predator drone, firing from an altitude five miles above the vehicles, attacks al-Baghdadi. Three of his cohorts are killed, but he survives. Al-Baghdadi’s wounds are not life threatening. However, he suffers a severe spinal injury that forces him to hand over day-to-day operational leadership to his top deputy, the Iraqi-born Abu Alaa al-Afri, a charismatic former physics teacher who excels in battle strategy.
General Soleimani and his Iranian forces are obviously benefiting from America’s stepped-up fight against ISIS. Ironically, after his initial reticence, President Obama has now ordered the US military to wage war from the skies, sending jets to bomb the ISIS-held city of Kirkuk. The operation is conducted in coordination with Turkish Kurd ground forces.
The Tikrit and Kirkuk fronts against the forces of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi are active simultaneously, less than a hundred miles apart. General Soleimani despises the United States. The feeling is mutual: America refuses to expand its air strikes to Tikrit until Iranian forces leave the battlefield. The Obama administration hopes Iraqi security forces in the region will do some actual fighting and deny Iran credit for the victory.*
General Soleimani’s hatred of America escalated when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 in order to remove Saddam Hussein. Even though the Iranians loathed Saddam, they did provide materials to the Iraqis for use in attacking US forces. Armor-piercing bombs were embedded in roadways by Iranian forces to destroy American vehicles, and rockets were launched at US bases. Soleimani oversaw all of this as his power grew inside the Iranian government.
Soleimani’s authority in Iraq is so great that he bullied Iraqi leadership into refusing to let American troops remain in the country. The general has also ordered the construction of a highway from Tehran to Lebanon, by way of Iraq, in order to open a desert link between the two nations for transporting supplies to the terrorist group Hezbollah, whose members are funded and trained by Iran.
Meanwhile, the IRGC leader’s actions against American troops have pretty much signed his death warrant, as US intelligence designates the general a top counterterrorism assassination priority.
Qasem Soleimani had no military training when he joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps at the age of twenty-two in 1979. He was quickly ordered to the front during the Iran-Iraq War, dubbed “the Sacred Defense” by the Iranian mullahs. The gruesome confrontation between two neighboring Middle Eastern powers with different religious ideologies impressed upon Soleimani the notion that Iraq must always remain weak, never again to threaten Iran. This philosophy has spilled over: Soleimani is now intent on ensuring not only Iraqi weakness but that of every other nation-state in the region. The general has spent more than three decades expanding Shia power against Sunni rivals such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia, as well as Western powers like the United States.
The rise of Soleimani coincided with Iran’s campaign to destabilize the entire Middle East. The general quickly upgraded an elite Iranian unit known as the Quds Force. This organization was charged with defending the nation’s Islamic way of life.
For more than 2,500 years, Persia—as Iran was formerly known—was ruled by monarchs. But in 1979, the shah of Iran, sympathetic to Western countries, was overthrown by the ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a fanatical Islamic cleric who quickly militarized the country in order to solidify his power.
Khomeini realized he needed a unique military force all his own to maintain his hold on power. Thus was born the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, formed to serve as a balance between military and religious forces. It was ordered that the traditional Iranian army would protect Iran’s borders, and the guard would enforce Islamic tenets within them.
But by 2015, Soleimani’s crew has grown to more than 190,000 members and maintains a navy and air force rivaling those of the traditional Iranian forces. And the border is no longer the threshold; the IRGC has expanded its interests to encompass any nation at odds with Iran’s interests. In this way, the fundamentalist Islamic clerics who have ruled the nation for almost four decades maintain their tight grip on power, despite growing unrest among those Iranian citizens clamoring for democracy. Soleimani assists in suppressing this resistance, imprisoning, torturing, and even executing voices of dissent.
In 1997, Soleimani was given command of a special intelligence arm of the Revolutionary Guard known as the Quds Force. With this new power, Soleimani became able to wage secret “wars” on a number of fronts. The Quds Force is active throughout Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. Its focus is insurrection through recruitment and training of terror factions—all under the watchful eye of General Qasem Soleimani. The general’s forces lent support to Muslim factions in the Bosnian war. In Palestine, Quds offers training and arms to the terror organizations Hamas and Islamic Jihad (which is different from ISIS). Also, to gain greater control in Syria, Soleimani props up the failing regime of key Iranian ally President Bashar al-Assad by flying in Afghanistani and Pakistani fighters to wage war. He supports the Houthi militants in Yemen, who are battling a Saudi Arabian force that has intervened in a domestic conflict.
Finally, using his Quds Force, he is trying to destroy the state of Israel and has set up the Hezbollah terrorist organization in Lebanon for that purpose.* He is also working with the Taliban in Afghanistan to kill Americans in that country.
Through it all, the general has remained a mysterious sphinx. “Soleimani is the single most powerful operative in the world today,” former CIA officer John Maguire stated in 2013, “and no one’s ever heard of him.”
But, along with his power, the general’s desire for self-promotion grows with each success. He actually wrote to General David Petraeus, commander of US forces in Iraq: “I, Qasem Soleimani, control the policy for Iran with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, and Afghanistan.”
Finally, as the battle for Tikrit rages, Qasem Soleimani comes out of the shadows. For the first time, he allows himself to be photographed and to be seen as the face of Iranian power. His image soon graces Twitter and Instagram.
But the general is quirky. He prefers pictures of himself on the battlefield, wearing the fatigues of a soldier but the epaulets of a general. Nothing in the photographs hint at his short five-foot-nine stature, just as the images are unable to capture his habit of rarely raising his voice. Social media takes note of his handsome, unlined face. He presents an image of being religious and kind, alternately appearing stern and impish, ascetic and philosophical. Soleimani is photographed kneeling in prayer in the middle of the desert, midbattle. He affects a gentle smile, his dark eyes hooded by black eyebrows, gray beard neatly trimmed. This vanity campaign is so effective that the visage of General Soleimani soon grows popular not just in Iran but throughout the entire Middle East.
It would seem unlikely to the casual observer that Soleimani would even be capable of terrorism. He lives in Tehran with his wife, rising at four o’clock every morning. He has trouble with his prostate and takes pills for a sore back. Soleimani is a disciplinarian to his five children—three boys and two girls. Sometimes, when the general appears in public, it is not uncommon for citizens to clamor for the privilege of kissing his hand.
Meanwhile, the general is successfully launching a new wave of terror attacks in Somalia, India, and Thailand. Thousands die as a result. And his forces in Tikrit are behaving no differently than ISIS—kidnapping and executing civilians, raping women, setting homes ablaze.
In Washington, DC, that December, it is 12:13 p.m. when the Committee on Foreign Affairs adjourns. In the two hours of discussion, Soleimani’s name has come up just twice. With ISIS now out of Tikrit, the general has once again disappeared from public view. The congresspeople are told there are even rumors of his death.
So it is that General Qasem Soleimani returns to the shadows, allowing the retreating Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and ISIS to once again seize the spotlight. This very afternoon, in San Bernardino, California, a married couple of Pakistani heritage, inspired by ISIS, will open fire with assault rifles at a local health department building. Fourteen Americans will be murdered.
Thousands of miles away, both al-Baghdadi and his enemy, Qasem Soleimani, will be highly pleased.