Although little noticed in the western media, Qassem Soleimani wasn’t the only senior Iranian terrorist to perish in Thursday’s U.S. drone attack. Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis died alongside him.
While it appears that al-Muhandis wasn’t directly targeted, his demise is good news for America.
A longtime terrorist, the Iraqi-born al-Muhandis led the Kata’ib Hezbollah militia group, a proxy for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps which launched dozens of rocket attacks on U.S. interests in Iraq over the past few months. One such attack last week killed an American contractor and precipitated the U.S. retaliation against five of the group’s compounds, killing around two dozen of its fighters.
All of this is down to Soleimani and his puppet, al-Muhandis.
The two men had a longstanding relationship not only in life but also in death. The ingredients for their friendship were established early on with al-Muhandis role in a series of 1983 bombings against various targets in Kuwait, including the U.S. Embassy. Having established himself as a loyal servant of Iranian revolution, al-Muhandis managed to secure Iranian citizenship and took an influential role in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. He was an ideologue with a penchant for organization, reliability, and aggression — a worthy ally to the Iranian regime’s revolutionary cause.
But perhaps al-Muhandis’ most important role was as Iran’s interlocutor in Iraq. He served as deputy leader of the Popular Mobilization Forces militia command, an organization formed and largely shaped by Iran to defeat ISIS, its Sunni terrorist rival, in Iraq. Men like al-Muhandis helped preserve and guarantee the militia’s continued loyalty to Iran — a necessity as Tehran seeks to restrain the rise of anti-Iranian populism across Iraq.
Like Soleimani, al-Muhandis had a lot to answer for in terms of his demonstrated threat to American security and human morality. His rendezvous with annihilation was overdue, but better late than never.
