At the time of his assassination, General Qasem Soleimani’s strategy in Iraq and other countries in the Middle East with large Shia populations had become counterproductive. He is now guaranteed the status of a great Iranian warrior and a Shia martyr, in spite of the mistakes he made in the last years of his life. The violent repression, orchestrated by Soleimani, of small-scale protests in Iraq last October provoked something close to a mass uprising by the Shia community. Iran and its proxies were blamed for the deaths of more than five hundred protesters and injuries to another fifteen thousand; demonstrators chanting anti-Iranian slogans burned the Iranian consulates in the Shia holy cities of Kerbala and Najaf. Later the same month in Lebanon, vast crowds filled the streets of Beirut, demanding an end to a political status quo that Hizbullah, Iran’s local ally, has fought for decades to create. In Iran itself, protests over fuel price rises were ruthlessly suppressed in November: according to Amnesty International 304 people were killed. At home and abroad, the Shia coalition built up by Iran with immense effort since the revolution of 1979 was falling apart; the Iranian state and its two most powerful regional allies, Hizbullah in Lebanon and the Hashd al-Shaabi (the Popular Mobilisation Forces) in Iraq, were losing their legitimacy as defenders of their communities and opponents of foreign interference in their countries.
