Qassem Soleimani, the shrewd commander of the Quds Force - the division of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps tasked with expanding the Islamic Revolution - has been praised by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei for being “a living martyr of the Revolution”.
Soleimani is not a brash man and until recently refrained from being in the spotlight by not giving interviews to foreign media but he is no doubt one of the most dangerous men in the Middle East.
He was one of the IRGC officers who after the first Lebanon War in the eighties of last century founded Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite terror organization which is currently threatening Israel with approximately 140,000 missiles.
In 2011 he was designated a terrorist by the US Treasury Department over his role in a plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States and later again over war crimes committed in Syria during battles with rebels.
Soleimani oversaw virtually every major battle in Syria and Iraq during the civil wars there and later founded the Hashd al-Shaabi umbrella organization of predominantly Shiite militias in Iraq who were integrated into the Iraqi army at the beginning of 2018.
The commanders of Hash al-Shaabi take their orders from Soleimani, not from the Iraqi government and the Iranian-backed militias were more than instrumental in the battle which resulted in the re-conquering of territories lost to Islamic State.
Soleimani was spotted during the battles against ISIS in Tikrit, Ramadi, Fallujah, and Mosul which was retaken from the Islamic State Jihadist terror organization in the middle of 2017.
The Quds commander has also overseen the major battle against rebels in Aleppo, Syria and the Qalamoun offensive where Iran reportedly is running an underground nuclear facility in the vicinity of the town of Qusayr. READ MORE
