TEHRAN – Iran this week honours military commander Qasem Soleimani, who was assassinated a year ago by arch-enemy the United States and is revered as a heroic warrior across the Islamic republic.
Since his death in a January 3 Baghdad drone strike that sparked mourning across Iran at mass funeral processions, the “martyr” Soleimani has entered the ranks of Iran’s glorious generals, immortalised in portraits, sculptures, ballads and an upcoming TV series.
The commemorations on Sunday come only weeks before US President Donald Trump, who ordered the killing, leaves the White House and Joe Biden takes over, offering hopes of a somewhat less bellicose relationship.
Soleimani’s killing at age 62 sharply heightened tensions between Washington and Tehran, whose decades-old animosity had deepened when Trump withdrew from Iran’s nuclear deal and launched a “maximum pressure” campaign to isolate Iran.
Within days, Iran retaliated to the killing of a military leader long deemed untouchable by firing rockets at Iraqi bases housing US forces, which claimed no lives but caused injuries and preceded a tragedy.
In the tense hours that followed the rocket strikes, when it appeared the conflict could escalate further, Iran accidentally shot down a Ukrainian passenger plane near Tehran, claiming the lives of all 176 aboard.
A year on, Iran is readying to honour Soleimani, whom the US had labelled a “terrorist” in 2005, but whose portrait has been displayed by supporters in Gaza, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Syria and Yemen.
The anniversary comes as sanctions-hit Iran remains in the grip of the region’s worst outbreak of the novel coronavirus, which has killed more than 55,000 out of more than 1.2 million people infected in the country.
Soleimani headed the Quds Force, the foreign operations arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which directly answers to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
A veteran of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, he went on to oversee Iran’s military operations in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere. – AFP, December 31, 2020
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