Crash and burn

American occupation saga in West Asia has finally approached another tipping point with the killing of Soleimani, their latest misadventure in the region

- Saeed Naqvi

The assassination of Major General Qassem Soleimani by US airstrikes in Iraq brings West Asia nearer the precipice. By this action, President Trump, who cannot get out of Afghanistan, has got himself deeper into the West Asian quagmire. Americans know power and strategy. They don’t understand a quantity called the people. This gap in their makeup has been their undoing in every outing since Vietnam.

Soleimani was the author of growing Iranian influence in the region Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. In Iraq, he was supported by Hashd al Shaabi and Kataib Hezbullah. Their leaders were iconic figures too. Soleimani was a regional hero who not only helping defeat Daesh (ISIS), AlQaeda and Jabhat al Nusra but also managed to push the US, Israeli, Saudi combine onto defensive footing. He did this by building local forces in all the countries under his influence. He had paid special attention to Iraq, particularly after the appearance of the Islamic State in Mosul in 2014, from where it began to hurtle down towards Baghdad with the explicit purpose of effecting regime change in the Iraqi capital. This, in effect, meant the removal of the Prime Minister, Nouri al Maliki, whom the Americans labelled as a ‘fundamentalist’ who was augmenting Shia influence in Iraq at the expense of Sunnis who, though a minority, wielded great influence as Saddam Hussain’s Ba’athist Revolutionary Guards, army, intelligence and bureaucracy.