Qasem Soleimani

He quickly earned a reputation for bravery, and rose through the ranks because of his role in successful operations to retake the lands Iraq had occupied, and eventually became the commander of the 41st Tharallah Division while still in his 20s, participating in most major operations.

He was mostly stationed at the southern front.

He was seriously injured in Operation Tariq-ol-Qods.

Qasem Soleimani (11 March 1957 – 3January 2020) was an Iranian military officer who served in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Soleimani was born on 11 March 1957, in the village of Qanat-e Malek, Kerman Province.

He left school at the age of 13 and moved to the city of Kerman to work on a construction site to help repay his father's agricultural debts.

In 1975, he began working as a contractor for the Kerman Water Organization.

When not at work, he spent his time with weight training in local gyms, or attending the sermons of Hojjat Kamyab, a preacher and a protégé of Ali Khamenei, who according to Soleimani encouraged him to "revolutionary activities".

His family is of Lurs descent.

Soleimani joined the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) in 1979 following the Iranian Revolution, which saw the shah fall and Ayatollah Khomeini take power.

Reportedly, his training was minimal, but he advanced rapidly.

Early in his career as a guardsman, he helped to prevent a Kurdish uprising in northwestern Iran.

On 22 September 1980, when Saddam Hussein launched an invasion of Iran, setting off the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988), Soleimani joined the battlefield serving as the leader of a military company, consisting of men from Kerman whom he assembled and trained.

On 17 July 1985, Soleimani opposed the IRGC leadership's plan to deploy forces to two islands in western Arvand Rud, on the Shatt al-Arab River.

In a 1990 interview, he mentioned Operation Fath-ol-Mobin as "the best" operation he participated in and "very memorable", due to its difficulties yet positive outcome.

He was also engaged in leading and organizing irregular warfare missions deep inside Iraq by the Ramadan Headquarters.

It was at this point that Soleimani established relations with Kurdish Iraqi leaders and the Shia Badr Organization, both opposed to Iraq's Saddam Hussein.

After the war, during the 1990s, he was an IRGC commander in Kerman Province.

In this region, which is relatively close to Afghanistan, Afghan-grown opium travels to Turkey and on to Europe.

Soleimani's military experience helped him earn a reputation as a successful fighter against drug trafficking.

The exact date of his appointment as commander of the IRGC's Quds Force is not clear, but Ali Alfoneh cites it as between 10 September 1997 and 21 March 1998.

From 1998 until his assassination by the United States in 2020, he was the commander of the Quds Force, an IRGC division primarily responsible for extraterritorial and clandestine military operations, and played a key role in the Syrian Civil War through securing Russian intervention.

He was described as "the single most powerful operative in the Middle East" and a "genius of asymmetric warfare," and former Mossad director Yossi Cohen said Soleimani's strategies had "personally tightened a noose around Israel's neck."

In his later years, he was considered by some analysts to be the right-hand man of the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, and the second-most powerful person in Iran behind Khamenei.

During the 1999 student protests in Tehran, Soleimani was one of the IRGC officers who signed a letter to President Mohammad Khatami warning that if he did not suppress the protests, the military would, and suggesting Khatami would be deposed.

Following the September 11 attacks in 2001, senior U.S. State Department official Ryan Crocker flew to Geneva to meet with Iranian diplomats who were under the leadership of Soleimani with the purpose of collaborating to destroy the Taliban.

This collaboration was instrumental in defining the targets of air bombing operations in Afghanistan and in capturing key Al-Qaeda operatives, but suddenly ended in January 2002, when President George W. Bush named Iran as part of the "Axis of evil" in his State of the Union address.

Soleimani strengthened the relationship between Quds Force and Hezbollah upon his appointment, and supported the latter by sending in operatives to retake southern Lebanon.

For attacks orchestrated or attempted against American and other targets abroad, Soleimani was personally sanctioned by the United Nations and the European Union, and was designated as a terrorist by the United States in 2005.

He was considered one of the possible successors to the post of commander of the IRGC when General Yahya Rahim Safavi left this post in 2007.

The Quds Force also planned and orchestrated what is thought to be the "boldest and most sophisticated" commando raid against U.S. troops in Iraq, the January 2007 Karbala provincial headquarters raid, and played a coordinating role in Hezbollah's defense from Israel in the 2006 Lebanon War, where Soleimani was personally involved.

In 2008, he led a group of Iranian investigators looking into the death of Imad Mughniyah.

Soleimani helped arrange a ceasefire between the Iraqi Army and Mahdi Army in March 2008.

According to the former IRGC commander, Mohammad Ali Jafari, Soleimani also intervened in the 2009 protests to "control the insecurity and riots".

In 2009, The Economist stated on the basis of a leaked report that Christopher R. Hill and General Raymond T. Odierno (America's two most senior officials in Baghdad at the time) met with Soleimani in the office of Iraq's president, Jalal Talabani, but withdrew the story after Hill and Odierno denied the occurrence of the meeting.

In an interview aired in October 2019, he said he was in Lebanon during the 2006 Israel–Hezbollah War to manage the conflict.

During the Iraq War, the Quds Force oversaw the production and mass smuggling into Iraq of improvised explosively formed penetrator (EFP) roadside bombs, which, according to American estimates, were used by the Iraqi insurgency to cause 500 deaths and over 21,000 injuries to American soldiers.

The United States military assassinated Soleimani in a targeted drone strike on 3 January 2020 in Baghdad, Iraq.

Iranian government officials publicly mourned Soleimani's death and launched missiles against U.S. military bases in Iraq, wounding 110 American troops.

Iranian propaganda outlets subsequently represented Soleimani as a national hero.