No Holds Barred: Soleimani was the man responsible for Iran’s operations in Syria, which he oversaw in person through dozens of visits. His goal: to keep Assad in power at any human cost.
By SHMULEY BOTEACHMOURNERS ATTEND a funeral procession on Sunday for Iranian Maj.-Gen. Qasem Soleimani and Iraqi militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.(photo credit: REUTERS)
While many Iranian officials have threatened genocide, Qasem Soleimani was actually tasked with it.As an architect of Bashar Assad’s genocidal war against the Syrian people, he was one of the guiltiest men on earth. As the Godfather of Iran’s global terrorist network, he was also one of the most dangerous.Still, he roamed the earth freely, a merchant of death in gold and green fatigues. Though his prints were lifted from every scene of mayhem raging across the Middle East, his crimes were consistently swept by the world powers under a diplomatic Persian rug.His terrorist world tour was finally cut short last Friday by a precision airstrike, in what was arguably US President Donald Trump’s boldest and most presidential move thus far. Soleimani was identified only by his hand, itself identified by a red-stone ring he was known to wear.Soleimani was the cold-blooded commander of Iran’s hot-blooded Quds Force. Named after Jerusalem, which its officers swear to liberate, this special-ops directorate was responsible for subverting Iran’s enemies while extending the Islamic revolutionary influence throughout the world. During his years at its helm, Soleimani earned a reputation for covertly killing rivals, coordinating violent attacks, and arming, training and directing Iran’s proxy legions throughout the Middle East.Most importantly, Soleimani was the man responsible for Iran’s operations in Syria, which he oversaw in person through dozens of visits. His goal: to keep Assad in power at any human cost.Directing thousands of Iranian and Hezbollah soldiers “spread out across the entire country,” Soleimani was said by one American defense official in 2013 to have been “running the war [in Syria] himself.” In the end, Assad would maintain his throne as more than half a million Syrians were brutally murdered, barrel-bombed, tortured or even incinerated, or they just disappeared, in the longest and largest genocide of our century. Soleimani, more so than perhaps any other man on earth with the exception of Assad, directed the offensives that incurred those shocking tolls.Syria was by no means his only assignment. According to Gen. David Petraeus, Soleimani claimed to “control the policy for Iran with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza and Afghanistan.” It’s no coincidence that the four countries he mentioned are also some of the world’s most turbulent and war-torn nations. Where Soleimani went, bloodshed seemed to follow.In Iraq, he supplied and trained the Shi’ite bomb makers who made “IED” the most dreaded acronym in the American military. More than 600 American servicemen were killed as a result of his efforts, and thousands more were maimed and wounded. In Lebanon, Soleimani funded, trained and armed tens of thousands of Hezbollah thugs holding Lebanon hostage, as they point hundreds of thousands of rockets toward Israel, whom Soleimani wished to annihilate. In Gaza, he worked to perpetuate Hamas, Islamic Jihad and their endless wars against the Jews.Within Iran as well, Soleimani is considered the man most responsible for the brutal crackdown late last year that saw more than a thousand protesters murdered, scores of them gunned down while they trudged through a wetland marsh into which they were herded.
Soleimani’s crimes against the Iranian people aren’t limited to this last round of brutal repression. In fact, he literally signed his name onto Iran’s policy of murdering protesters. During the 1999 student revolt in Tehran, Soleimani signed a letter to president Mohammad Khatami warning him that if he did not crush the student rebellion, the military would step in and perform the task itself.Soleimani’s reach, moreover, went far beyond the Middle East. He orchestrated attacks in places as far-flung as Thailand, New Delhi, Lagos and Nairobi, and even tried to hire a Mexican drug cartel to blow up the Saudi ambassador to the US inside a restaurant in Washington, DC.Already in 2011, following the exposure of the bomb plot, two former American officials told a congressional committee that Soleimani should be assassinated. “Soleimani travels a lot,” one said. “He is all over the place. Go get him. Either try to capture him or kill him.”That those words were uttered before Soleimani’s involvement in Syria underscores just how badly this man had to go. Still, out of fear of escalation with Iran, the administrations of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama would refuse to target the man – neither for murdering American troops nor even for genocide. Throughout all of the decade, he would roam freely and with impunity, surfacing regularly in Syria in boldface mockery of the very value of human life.AS I watched this, I thought back to the genocide that befell our own people 75 years ago.Throughout the Second World War, only one serious attempt was made by Germans on Hitler’s life. It occurred on 20 July, 1944, at the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s forward command post in modern-day Poland, when Claus von Stauffenberg tried to plant a bomb in a bunker where Hitler was having a meeting. If Hitler had died that day, hundreds of thousands of Jews and perhaps millions of soldiers would have been saved. If a successful attempt had been made a few years earlier, millions of Jews would most probably never have been murdered. But through tiny turns of fate, Hitler would not die then. Minutes before the daily military update – at which Stauffenberg planned to strike – began, the meeting was moved out of the concrete bunker and into an open room, softening the impact of the bomb. Worse, a German general unknowingly pushed the briefcase containing the bomb behind a thick leg of the table, inadvertently shielding the Führer from the blast and saving the monster’s life.Like Hitler, Soleimani had a knack for survival. He was reported killed in 2006, 2012 and 2015 – only to show up, time after time, alive and well with a sinister grin. Would yet another practitioner of genocide be allowed to live, into the second decade of the second millennium?He would, but only for a mere few days. His being considered the second-most powerful man in Iran wouldn’t stop Trump from imposing the most basic law of human justice – that there’s a death sentence for those who engage in genocide.IN KILLING Soleimani, Trump has finally managed to do what no American president has managed to do before: put Iran on notice that it’s not primarily ordinary Iranians who will suffer for the crimes of their leaders, but, rather, the leaders themselves would pay the ultimate price. The corrupt Iranian mullahs who slaughter their own people, steal their wealth, and bring terrorism and mayhem to the world are now on notice that they are squarely in American sites for justice.In his lifetime, Soleimani sought to prove that evil and brutality will ultimately triumph over goodness and mercy. With Soleimani’s death, Trump has proven that those tactics are no match for God’s cosmic force of justice.Martin Luther King, the greatest American of the 20th century, put it best: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”The writer, whom The Washington Post calls “the most famous rabbi in America,” is the international best-selling author of 33 books, including the upcoming Holocaust Holiday: One Family’s Descent into Genocide Memory Hell. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @RabbiShmuley.
