General Soleimani was the commander of the Quds Force, an external unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, whose primary activities were outside Iran’s borders. He was particularly adept at creating militias manned by recruits from across the Middle East and South Asia. The model was Hezbollah in Lebanon, where in the early 1980s Iran organized the local Shiite community and created a lethal terrorist organization that would commit acts of violence on its behalf. This policy had 2 major advantages. First, it gave Iran a unique ability to assert its influence over disorderly politics in Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria while maintaining a kind of plausible deniability. Second, it allowed Iran to wage through proxies a campaign of violence responsible for the deaths of 100s of US troops during the civil war in Iraq. Iran’s position in all those countries was already precarious. The regime could ill afford the vast imperial project that it undertook since the US invasion of Iraq. It is struggling to meet its domestic budgetary needs and has been reducing its subsidies to its militias. The assassination of Soleimani is unlikely to reverse any of those trends.

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