"This wasn’t just another assassination, it’s in a league of its own"
That assessment is according to four high-placed figures in the defense establishment. In interviews with Mishpacha, they painted a picture of a man whose power was growing and who was at the spearhead of Iran’s aggression and expansion across the Middle East. Missile batteries in Syria and Iraq were a Soleimani project. It all started, continued, and ended with him. He was the vital force behind the project to carry the Iranian Revolution westward, the man who swore to encircle Israel with a ring of terror and missiles.
“This targeted hit is on a new level,” Chaim Tomer, a former senior Mossad figure, explains to Mishpacha. “This wasn’t just a terrorist leader, we’re talking about Iran’s equivalent of the head of the Mossad, who was in charge of Iran’s special forces units, as well. This wasn’t just another assassination, it’s in a league of its own.”
“The United States tells Iran — the rules of the game have changed, you’ve crossed a red line,” sums up Major-General Amos Yadlin, former head of the Military Intelligence Directorate and current head of the Institute for National Security Studies. “Soleimani had started feeling a little bit too comfortable. He went from being a man in the shadows to enjoying his photographs on Twitter. He could be found in field dress anywhere there was trouble across the Middle East. Bit by bit, he abandoned his safety precautions.”
Yadlin calls Soleimani’s killing “the most dramatic assassination in the Middle East in modern times,” and the most significant retaliation against the head of a terrorist organization.
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