The U.S. and Iran’s Ballistic Exchange in Iraq: An Explanation
U.S. soldiers and journalists inspect the rubble at a site of an Iranian bombing in Ain al-Asad air base, Anbar, Iraq, Monday, Jan. 13, 2020. Ain al-Asad air base was struck by a barrage of Iranian missiles on Wednesday in retaliation for the U.S. drone strike that killed a top Iranian commander Gen. Qassem Soleimani, whose killing raised fears of a wider war in the Middle East. (AP Photo/Qassim Abdul-Zahra)
In the early hours of Jan. 3, Iranian General Qassem Soleimani was killed by missiles shot from American drones, triggering a harrowing escalation of tensions between the United States and Iran.
The week-long crisis after Soleimani’s death made global headlines before de-escalating on Jan. 9. Here’s a breakdown of the crisis from start to finish.
What caused this series of events?
According to NBC News, President Donald Trump authorized the killing of Soleimani seven months prior in June 2019.
At that time, Trump specified Soleimani would be killed by the U.S. if Iran killed an American in the following months. Trump also specified he would have to personally approve of any specific operations to kill Soleimani.
In mid-October, Soleimani met with Iraqi militia leaders allied with Iran, where he instructed his allies to step up attacks on U.S. targets in Iraq, according to Reuters.
The group of Iraqi militia leaders who attended the October meeting with Soleimani included Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the then-commander of Kata’ib Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Iraqi militia.
On Dec. 27, 2019, Kata’ib Hezbollah fired approximately 30 rockets at an Iraqi base in Kirkuk, Iraq, which housed U.S. troops.
Several American troops were wounded in the attack, and one U.S. civilian contractor for Valiant Integrated Services LLC, 33-year-old Nawres Hamid, was killed.
Originally from Iraq, Hamid became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2017 and worked as an Arabic interpreter for U.S. forces in Iraq.
Pentagon officials offered Trump a list of options to retaliate against Iran for their involvement in the attack that killed Hamid.
These options included launching strikes on Iranian ships, missile facilities, Iranian-backed militias like Kata’ib Hezbollah and the option of Trump’s earlier proposal to kill Soleimani. The inclusion of this last option by Pentagon officials was mainly to make other options appear more reasonable, according to The New York Times.
Two days later, on Dec. 29, the U.S. launched airstrikes at five locations associated with Kata’ib Hezbollah. Three strikes hit positions in Iraq and two hit positions in Syria, killing 25 and wounding 55, according to Asharq Al-Awsat, an Arabic international newspaper.
In response to these strikes, thousands of Kata’ib Hezbollah’s supporters in Iraq stormed the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad on Dec. 31, demanding all U.S. diplomats and troops in Iraq immediately leave the country.
Guards inside the embassy fired tear gas on the protesters who had managed to break into a guarded reception area and had set several rooms and their contents on fire, according to The Washington Post.
After viewing footage of the embassy protests, Trump took the extreme option offered to him by Pentagon officials and authorized a drone strike to kill Soleimani.
Soleimani arrived at the Baghdad International Airport by plane around 1 a.m. local time on Jan. 3, where he met with al-Muhandis before departing in a sedan, their entourage piling into a minivan.
Shortly thereafter, four Hellfire missiles were launched at the vehicles, killing Soleimani, al-Muhandis and the entirety of their entourage.
Who was Qassem Soleimani?
In the late 1990s, Soleimani was appointed chief of the Quds Force, a special operations force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a branch of Iran’s armed forces tasked by the Iranian constitution with protecting Iran’s Islamic government, BBC reports.
In an October 2019 study conducted by the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, Soleimani was the most popular Iranian public figure among the approximately 3,000 Iranians polled — eight in 10 Iranians viewed the general favorably.
Soleimani cultivated a powerful image among Iranians by consistently resisting the U.S. presence in the Middle East, corresponding with Shiite militias and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the AP reports.
Soleimani was widely perceived to be the second most powerful political figure in Iran behind Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Hosseini Khamenei, being described as such by Senator Chris Murphy and by regional analysts according to CNBC.
What happened in the aftermath of Soleimani’s death?
Soleimani was buried in his hometown of Kerman, featuring the largest procession since the funeral of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989.
According to Iranian state television courtesy of NPR, a stampede broke out at Soleimani’s funeral, injuring 48 and killing 35.
After nearly a week of back and forth between Trump and Iranian officials on social media, Iran announced their plan of retaliation for the strike that killed Soleimani, launching more than a dozen missiles at Iraqi bases housing U.S. troops on Jan. 8.
Iran dubbed the retaliation “Operation Martyr Soleimani,” according to Asia News. While no U.S. troops were killed in the strike, and only 11 troops were injured, Iranian officials claimed at least 80 U.S. personnel had been killed or injured in the strikes.
Trump decided to forgo the opportunity to retaliate against Iran for this strike, de-escalating hostilities between the two countries on Jan. 9, the Wall Street Journal reports.
How does a plane crash fit into all of this?
On Jan. 8 at 6:13 a.m. local time, Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752 departed from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport with 176 people on board, according to NPR.
In a report by the Iranian Civil Aviation Organization, Flight 752 climbed to an altitude of 8,000 feet before crashing in the outskirts of Tehran at 6:18 a.m, killing everyone on board.
Of the passengers who perished, 82 were Iranian, 63 were Canadian, 11 were Ukrainian, 10 were Swedish, four were Afghanistani, three were German and three were British, CNN reports.
Iranian state media initially blamed the crash on technical issues with the aircraft, ruling out the possibility that the plane could have been shot down amid the launching of missiles earlier that morning as part of Operation Martyr Soleimani.
FILE - In this Jan. 8, 2020 file photo, rescue workers search the scene where a Ukrainian plane crashed in Shahedshahr, southwest of Tehran, Iran. The downing of a Ukrainian jetliner near Tehran highlights the limits of the civilian arm of Iran's government against the absolute power of the Shiite theocracy and the paramilitary forces beneath it. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi, File)
On Jan. 11, Iran’s military announced it had “unintentionally” shot down Flight 752, attributing the firing of missiles at the aircraft to “human error,” according to Flightradar24.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani warned those responsible for downing Flight 752 would be punished amid the arrests of a currently unreleased number of people allegedly involved in the crash.
While Iranian officials had originally refused to hand over the black boxes of Flight 752 to foreign officials, on Jan. 18 Iranian officials announced the plane’s black boxes would be handed over to Kiev for investigation.
On Jan. 21, the Iranian Civil Aviation Organization confirmed Iran had launched Russian-made missiles at Flight 752 but added that “the impact of these missiles” had yet to be fully assessed.
Was war ever declared?
Despite the escalation of tensions between Iran and the U.S., those fearing the possibility of another World War — or a war on the scale of the Gulf War or Operation Desert Storm — can relax for now.
War was never declared by either country, though things may have turned out differently had any U.S. personnel been killed in Iran’s retaliatory strikes.
Iraq’s parliament voted to expel U.S. troops from the country on Jan. 5 in the wake of escalating U.S.-Iranian tensions, though U.S. troops resumed joint operations with Iraqi forces by Jan. 16, ABC News reports. For now, the U.S. has responded to Iran’s latest strike in the form of sanctions.
The latest development involved the launching of three rockets into Baghdad’s Green Zone, the area of the city that houses the U.S. Embassy.
Despite these developments, tensions between Iran and the U.S. remain relatively de-escalated following Trump’s Jan. 9 announcement that there would be no retaliation for Iran’s Jan. 8 strike.
Will anyone be drafted?
In the aftermath of Soleimani’s death and the ensuing tension between Iran and the U.S., American social media took to referencing the possibility of being drafted into the international conflict — some accounts doing so jokingly, while others treated the possibility far more seriously.
Several hoaxes — such as a text claiming recipients were being drafted and should contact military officials — prompted the U.S. Army to discredit the idea that such messages were sincere.
“The decision to enact a draft is not made at or by U.S. Army Recruiting Command,” the article states. “The Selective Service System, a separate agency outside of the Department of Defense, is the organization that manages registration for the Selective Service.”
Originally created in 1917, the U.S. Selective Service System generally requires all male citizens aged 18 to 25 register in case of a crisis requiring a draft — registered men would then be inducted into the military via a random lottery process.
Should a crisis arise that requires additional manpower in an armed conflict, mobilization of the over 1 million members of the U.S. National Reserve Forces would occur before a Selective Service draft.
According to the U.S. Military’s information on deployment, mobilization requires the approval of the president in the case of a partial mobilization, where forces are used “in response to external threats to national security for no longer than 24 months.”
A full mobilization — involving the mobilization of all reserve units “in response to a declaration of war or national emergency” — requires the approval of Congress and the president.
If a mobilization proves inadequate for the purposes of response, the possibility of a draft becomes much more tangible.
According to the Selective Service System’s sequence of events overview, Congress would need to pass legislation initiating a draft, which would require the signature of the president.
As there has been no mobilization of reserve forces and no push in Congress to create draft legislation, the possibility of a draft is currently extremely unlikely, which will likely stay unchanged due to the recent de-escalation of tensions between the U.S. and Iran.
