Who Was Qasem Soleimani? Iranian General Killed By US Airstrike Was Elusive, Deadly, Powerful Figure
January 3, 2020
Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian general who was killed by a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad on Thursday, was considered a heroic figure in Iran and the second most powerful man in Teheran after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Soleimani, born to a peasant family in Kerman, in southeastern Iran and without much formal education, rose in 1998 to become the chief of the feared Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force, a military unit that runs Iran’s overseas operations and which has been condemned as a terrorist organization by the U.S.