3 years since the assassination of Soleimani

English - Sunday 22 January 2023 الساعة 05:03 pm
Sana'a, NewsYemen, exclusive:

 Early this month, Yemeni activists circulated on social media, a picture of a huge banner erected by the Houthi group on a street in Sana'a bearing a picture of two military commanders, one Iranian and the other Iraqi.

 The banner included a picture of the commander of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Qassem Soleimani, next to a picture of the deputy commander of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Militia, Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis, in commemoration of the third anniversary of their elimination by a missile fired by an American drone on their car near Baghdad Airport in January of 2020.

The strike ordered by former US President Donald Trump was described at the time as a violent earthquake that hit the Iranian regime and its aftershocks continue to this day, given what Soleimani represented to this regime based on the idea of exporting the Islamic revolution "led by the Guardian Jurist to the countries of the region, with the mantle of Shiite doctrine or politics.

 Within the framework of this mission, the Iranian regime led by the "Guide of the Revolution" Ali Khamenei tended to create arms from its armed militias in the region, and the beginning was early with the formation of Hezbollah during the Lebanese civil war in the early eighties, which became the spearhead of the Iranian project in the Arab region.  Khamenei assigned the task of reproducing the experience to the so-called "Quds Force" of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and appointed Soleimani at its head in 1998.

This was achieved with the fall of the Iraqi regime in 2003, when the country fell into the grip of the armed Shiite militias loyal to Iran, and its activities expanded with the Iranian intervention in favor of the Syrian regime against the armed opposition in 2011, to become 3 Arab countries under the influence of Iran, and Yemen joined them later after the fall of Sanaa in the hands of  Houthi group in 2014.

 A scene that made Soleimani become the second man after "Khamenei," as an Iraqi official said in a statement to "Reuters" after his assassination, where he said: Only the supreme leader (Khamenei) precedes him in the chain of command. When he needs money, he gets it, and when he needs ammunition, he gets it, and when he needs gear, he gets it.

Hence the danger that America will succeed in liquidating the second man inside Iran, which reflects the extent of exposure and infiltration that the Iranian regime suffers from, and this confirms the quality and number of operations that Israel carried out against it, from targeting its militia leaders and agents in some countries, to targeting its nuclear program.

 Some of these operations took place inside Iran with strikes by small drones to strike nuclear facilities, and it even came to the point that the Israeli Mossad orchestrated the operation to eliminate Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was described as the “engineer of the nuclear program,” and who was killed in a street in Tehran in late 2020 with a remotely controlled sniper weapon.  

The repercussions of Soleimani's killing did not stop at the Iranian regime's battle with the outside, but rather with its battle against the people at home. Among the dirty tasks assigned to the man by "Khamenei" is managing the liquidation operations of opponents at home and abroad and supervising the suppression of any popular movement against the regime, which is what explains the strength of the current protests, which have been hitting the cities of Iran for months.

The strength of these protests is represented in the volume of the loud voice against the Iranian regime and against its head represented by "Khamenei" in particular, and the chant of death to him, and the most prominent characteristic of these protests is that a number of Iranian youths dropped what is known as the turban from the heads of clerics in the streets, which represents a strong message to overthrow the religious legitimacy on which the system of the Guardianship of the Jurist is based.

The effect of Soleimani's disappearance from the scene can also be seen in the political defeats suffered by Iran's agents in both Iraq and Lebanon in the parliamentary elections that took place in the two countries last year, which reflected the growing popular discontent against Iran's agents, and the situation is no better than that of its agent in Yemen, which is represented by the Houthi group.  

Today, the group is living in a political, popular, and military dilemma. After 8 years of igniting the war in Yemen, it is now squeezed into a third of the country’s area and two-thirds of the population. It is begging the Omani mediator to obtain a face-saving deal, through which it obtains a share of the oil and gas revenues with  Lift restrictions on the airports and ports it controls.

 In return, the Houthi group offers to grant Saudi Arabia security guarantees that amount to carving out hundreds of kilometers of its stronghold in Saada on the border with Saudi Arabia as a demilitarized zone, 9 years after its militia threatened to invade Riyadh and overthrow the Saudi regime.