The United States, in an act which is set to have far-reaching consequences, has assassinated Iran’s top military commander, Qassem Soleimani, who was the leader of the Revolutionary Guard’s elite Quds (Jerusalem) Force, apart from being the second most important man in Iran after the Ayatollah, and a potential future President. As the person heading Iran’s intelligence gathering machinery and external covert military operations, he was also someone who was setting Iran’s “foreign policy” agenda, with the focus on establishing his country’s influence in the Middle East, and thus countering the United States and Israel. According to the US and its allies, particularly Israel, as a commander of the Quds, Soleimani was responsible for the deaths of American soldiers, apart from being the brain behind innumerable terrorist attacks that, as President Donald Trump said, took place from “London to Delhi”. Soleimani was declared a terrorist and a supporter of terrorism and was sanctioned by the United Nations. It is a different matter that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards too, a legitimate military force, have been declared as a terrorist organisation. Whatever be Soleimani’s misdeeds, and there must have been many, the problem starts when the US uses different yardsticks for different countries guilty of the same sin, if not more. If Qassem Soleimani was a terrorist, by that yardstick, the whole of Pakistani ISI is a terrorist organisation as well as the whole of Pakistan’s armed forces. According to the US, Iran has been spending nearly $1 billion annually to “support terrorist groups that serve as its proxies and expand its malign influence across the globe”. If Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism, what is Pakistan? After all, according to a study, Pakistan poses three times the risk Syria does to humanity because of terrorism—Pakistan, which is home to the maximum number of UN-proscribed terrorist organisations in the world; Pakistan, whose own Prime Minister admits that at any given time, 30,000-40,000 terrorists are roaming free in his country; Pakistan, which has perpetrated the worst terror attacks against US interests but is now dictating US’ Afghanistan policy; Pakistan, which continues to be US’ “Major Non Nato Ally” in spite of being on the grey list of FATF for sponsoring terror across the globe. And all this is just the tip of the iceberg of Pakistan’s misdeeds. It is being said that Soleimani was inciting trouble in Iraq and the recent attack on the US embassy in Baghdad was sponsored by him. But by assassinating him when he was at the airport of a country he was visiting, the US not only violated all international norms, but also the sovereignty of Iraq. Of course it did not help Soleimani’s case that he was one of the main backers of the Bashar Assad regime in Syria—Assad, whom the US has been trying to topple for years now and failing, but in the process has ensured that Syria and its neighbourhood remain roiled in a state of constant war. The fact of the matter is that Soleimani was primarily responsible for eradicating the ISIS from Iran and Syria, even though the US has been taking credit for that deed. The assassination of Soleimani, one of the most important faces of a Shia nation, will now escalate the sectarian violence between Shias and Sunnis in the Middle East. The attack will also give a Sunni and US-friendly Saudi Arabia a free hand to rule over the Islamic ummah, at a time when attempts are being made to carve out a separate Islamic power bloc, with Turkey, Qatar and Malaysia at the centre of it and with Iran as one of the main backers of it. It is a different matter that it’s Saudi Arabia that birthed the most radical and toxic ideology of Wahhabism, which is at the core of Wahhabi terrorism, something that Pakistan has made its hallmark.
Questions are bound to arise about the timing of the attack, especially since Iran is a bogey that successive US Presidents have been serving to their people and it is perhaps not a coincidence that Trump is seeking re-election this year. But through this rather intemperate and foolish act of aggression on one of a sovereign nation’s most important faces, Trump has dangerously escalated tensions in that region. Iran is not going to sit quietly. It will hit back and chances are that things will spiral out of control and there will be major international ramifications.