Qassem Soleimani
The shadowy Quds Force commander who ran Iran's proxy wars for two decades, until a US drone killed him in Baghdad in January 2020.
For two decades, the most consequential general in the Middle East commanded no front line and gave few interviews. Qassem Soleimani ran Iran's wars abroad from the shadows, and most of the world learned his name only on the morning of January 3, 2020, when a US drone killed him beside a highway at Baghdad's airport. He was sixty-two, and by many accounts the second most powerful man in Iran after Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. For most of his career he had cultivated that invisibility, rarely photographed and almost never quoted, even as he directed conflicts that shaped four countries.
The architect of Iran's proxy empire
Born in 1957 to a peasant family near Kerman, Soleimani came of age in the trenches of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), where he built a reputation for cold nerve. Around 1998 he took over the Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and turned it into the instrument of Iranian power beyond its borders. His method was not to send Iranian armies but to build, arm, and direct other people's. He knitted together a network that ran from Lebanon's Hezbollah to Shia militias in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen, and Palestinian factions, giving Tehran the ability to strike its enemies without ever crossing a border itself. Western officials came to see him as the single most dangerous operative in the region.
Syria, ISIS, and the making of a legend
Soleimani's defining campaign was Syria. When Bashar al-Assad's regime teetered in 2012 and 2013, it was Soleimani who organized the militias, Hezbollah fighters, and Iranian advisers that kept Assad in power, reshaping the war and locking Iran into the Levant. When ISIS swept across Iraq in 2014, he coordinated the Shia forces that helped stop it, appearing on battlefields from Tikrit to Aleppo. To his enemies he was the puppeteer behind roadside bombs that killed hundreds of American troops in Iraq. To many Iranians he became a folk hero, the austere warrior who defended the nation, and his image spread across billboards and social media.
The strike and its echo
President Trump ordered the killing after months of escalation, including a rocket attack that killed an American contractor and a mob assault on the US embassy in Baghdad. The same strike killed Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the commander of Iraq's Iranian-backed militias. Iran declared days of mourning; millions filled the streets for his funeral, where a stampede killed dozens. Tehran retaliated by firing ballistic missiles at Iraqi bases housing US troops, and in the tense hours that followed, jittery IRGC air defenses mistakenly shot down a Ukrainian airliner, killing all 176 people aboard. The two countries stepped back from the brink that January, and the man who had spent twenty years as the invisible hand of Iranian strategy became, in death, its most visible martyr. The step back did not hold. Six years later the same escalation ran to its conclusion: on February 28, 2026, American and Israeli strikes killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei himself, along with several of the commanders who had inherited pieces of Soleimani's network, and the open war both sides had avoided in 2020 began.