The US killed Iran's most powerful and respected military
official
last Friday, in a move that has the potential to escalate the
Trump-provoked tensions that have been mounting between the two
nations into a full-scale war.
Major general Qassem Soleimani was assassinated via a US drone
strike at Baghdad International Airport on 3 January. He was the
head of the Quds Force, an elite unit of Iran's Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps, as well as being a renowned veteran of
the 1980s Iran-Iraq war.
The air attack also caused the death of Iraqi-Iranian military
commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who was the deputy commander of
the Iran-backed Iraqi militias known as the Popular Mobilisation
Forces (PMF), which are said to have been
instrumental in the defeat of ISIS.
