Photo - Twitter
Qassem Suleimani second from left with white scarf.
Qassem Suleimani, a silver-haired Iranian spymaster Washington has long disparaged as a terrorist, has spent decades staying out of public view as he quietly worked to funnel arms and money to Iranian proxies and allies across the Middle East. Now, he’s stepping into the limelight as the face of Tehran’s intensifying battle with the Islamic State.
In recent weeks, photos of Suleimani on a mountaintop alongside Yazidi elders who had faced extermination at the hands of the Islamic State and shaking hands with Kurdish Peshmerga fighters on battlefields in Kurdistan have been widely shared on Twitter, Facebook, and Iranian state-run media. That means the once-elusive leader of the Quds Force, a branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard responsible for high-profile missions outside of Iran, is enjoying a strange form of celebrity among those cheering Iran’s willingness to deploy small numbers of ground troops against the Islamic State, something Washington has steadfastly refused to do.
Suleimani’s emergence highlights the vastly different ways Washington and Tehran are trying to portray their roles in the fight against the Islamic State. While the United States downplays its involvement in strikes against the militants by hiding under the umbrella of a fragile coalition, the Iranian government is taking a totally different approach: boasting of its solo ventures into Iraq and trying to argue that Iran, not the United States, deserves credit for recent victories, no matter how temporary.
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