Major General Qasem Soleimani , the commander of Iran’s Quds Force who was killed in a U.S. air strike in Baghdad on Friday, had an illustrious career as a spymaster and military strategist and a celebratory status in Iran. Always a defender of the Islamic revolution, Soleimani reported directly to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and, of late, was the main architect of Iran’s recent foreign interventions, mainly in Iraq and Syria. He was so close to Khamenei that the Supreme Leader, the commander of Iran’s armed forces, once called him “the living martyr of revolution”. For the Iranian revolutionaries, martyrdom is service. As the Supreme Leader once said about another fallen soldier, in the end, Soleimani “drank the sweet syrup of martyrdom”.
