They had come to pay their last respects to a fallen comrade. The force is the sharp instrument of Iranian foreign policy, roughly analogous to a combined C. Shateri had spent much of his career abroad, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, where the Quds Force helped Shiite militias kill American soldiers. Shateri had been killed two days before, on the road that runs between Damascus and Beirut.
Was this an act of war? At the funeral, the mourners sobbed, and some beat their chests in the Shiite way. Mughniyeh was assassinated in , purportedly by Israeli agents. In the ethos of the Iranian revolution, to die was to serve. It was Suleimani who had sent Shateri, an old and trusted friend, to his death. As Revolutionary Guard commanders, he and Shateri belonged to a small fraternity formed during the Sacred Defense, the name given to the Iran-Iraq War, which lasted from to and left as many as a million people dead.
It was a catastrophic fight, but for Iran it was the beginning of a three-decade project to build a Shiite sphere of influence, stretching across Iraq and Syria to the Mediterranean.
In Syria, the project hung in the balance, and Suleimani was mounting a desperate fight, even if the price of victory was a sectarian conflict that engulfed the region for years. The U. Department of the Treasury has sanctioned Suleimani for his role in supporting the Assad regime, and for abetting terrorism.
And yet he has remained mostly invisible to the outside world, even as he runs agents and directs operations. He sits over there on the other side of room, by himself, in a very quiet way.
