Gen. Qassem Soleimani, commander-in-chief of the Iranian Revolutionary GuardsÂ’ elite Al Qods Brigades, and senior officer of Iranian forces in Iraq, was seriously injured in a targeted attack by an ISIS suicide squad.
The attack took place near Samarra in central Iraq, after agents of the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant managed to infiltrate his command staff and get close enough to their target before blowing themselves up.
Soleimani, 58, who is a member of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali KhameneiÂ’s closest circle and a pivotal figure in Iranian military and intelligence, was rushed to hospital in Tehran.
For nine years, he has masterminded IranÂ’s military and political involvement in three conflicts, starting with the Hizballah-Israel war of 2006, the nearly four years of SyriaÂ’s bloody conflict and the war on ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
His latest project was a major effort to weld all of IraqÂ’s Shiite militias into a single popular army.
ISIS has managed to wipe out the forward command group of an Al Qods Brigades commando force killing its commander, Gen. Mehdi Norouzi.