Major General Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the notorious Quds Force division of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), has reportedly been seen in Iraq advising Shiite militias in their attack on the Kurdish Peshmerga, a major U.S. battlefield ally against the Islamic State.
Soleimani was involved in talks between Iran-backed “Popular Mobilization Forces” (PMF) militia units and Iraqi Kurds on Sunday, not long before the first reports of armed clashes between the PMF and Peshmerga. Soleimani’s Quds Force, which Iran employs to destabilize adversary governments across the Middle East, was instrumental in training and arming the Shiite-dominated militia groups against the Islamic State (ISIS), which is organized around a version of Sunni Islam.
Soleimani reportedly “arrived in the Iraqi Kurdish region on Saturday and visited the tomb of former Iraqi president and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party leader Jalal Talabani, who died on October 3 after years of poor health,” according to a report at the National.
The sincerity of this apparent gesture of respect to the Kurds is debatable since it wasn’t long before fire was exchanged between the Kurds and PMF. National University of Singapore Senior Research Fellow Fanar Haddad suggested to the National that Soleimani’s public appearance might be better interpreted as a demonstration of Iranian influence, saying, “It seems that whenever Iraq approaches breaking point, as happened in 2014 and now in 2017, Iran sends its man in Iraq to try to sort out the situation.”
