Wages of aggression

The impact of Iran’s counter-attack following Qassem Soleimani’s targeted assassination has not been so light as the U.S. wants the world to believe.

- JOHN CHERIAN

MORE FACTS AND DETAILS ARE EMERGING about the motivation behind the targeted killing on January 3 of Iran’s top general, Qassem Soleimani, on the orders of United States President Donald Trump. It now emerges that Trump had taken an executive decision to kill the leader of the Quds Force much before the rocket attack on the K-1 Iraqi military base in Kirkuk, which U.S. soldiers shared with Iraqi troops. Trump was only waiting for a pretext, and a routine targeting of an Iraqi army base in the last week of December provided the flimsy excuse. The Iraqi government’s intelligence service is now convinced that the rockets fired on the base came from remnants of the Daesh (Islamic State). The firing injured six people and killed one U.S. civilian contractor. The dead contractor was an Iraqi who was working as a translator for the U.S. forces and had only recently received U.S. citizenship.

According to Iraqi government sources, the rockets were fired from a Sunni-dominated area in Kirkuk, still under the influence of the Daesh. According to them, the Kataib Hezbollah, the Shia militia accused by the U.S. of carrying out the act, has not had a presence in the area since 2014. The remnants of the Daesh, on the other hand, were active and had staged three attacks in the days prior to the attack on the Americans. In Kirkuk province, the Daesh carried out daily attacks in the last year. According to Iraqi officials, the attack on the Iraqi base was launched from a single pick-up truck from a location where the Daesh used to carry out executions.