The Shadow Commander

Abstract

When the ominous hashtag started trending globally, it was evening in New York on January 2, 2020, and already the morning after in the Middle East. The new decade was off to a stormy start. The social media craze had been caused by an American drone strike on Iraq’s capital, Baghdad. Killing military opponents in the Middle East was hardly a rare event but this wasn’t just any strike— and the main man it had killed wasn’t just any opponent. At around 12:47 a.m. local time, US Predator B drones fired several missiles at two vehicles leaving Baghdad International Airport. They killed ten people in the convoy, including the top intended target, Iran’s Major General Qassem Soleimani. Initial rumors about his death were confirmed when pictures were published of his severed arm, his digitus medicinalis adorned with a signature amulet ring. Soleimani was gone. The world panicked and many didn’t know how to react. Like a mythical bandit in a folktale, Soleimani had been larger than life. The commander of the Quds Force—the external operations branch of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC)—ruled over a global army of tens of thousands of Shia Muslim fighters. He moved seamlessly across borders, as if he could be present in more than one place at the same time. The shadow commander had been a man without a shadow. But now he was merely a mutilated corpse. His last hours fit his reputation. Barely seven minutes prior to his death, he had touched down in Baghdad on a flight from Damascus