Tens of thousands of people marched in Baghdad on Saturday to mourn Iran’s military chief General Qassem Soleimani and Iraqi commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, martyred in a U.S. airstrike that has raised the specter of wider conflict in the Middle East.
The U.S. assassination of the two commanders at Baghdad airport in the early hours of Friday has triggered a wave of outrage among Iranians and Iraqis, and forged an unprecedented unity with vociferous calls for revenge.
Both Soleimani and Muhandis were popular figureheads in helping squelch an ominous rise of Daesh which once came as close as 30 km to Baghdad, while the US withdrew troops from Iraq and looked on.
Images of the Iranian commander tagging along with Iraqi fighters at frontlines as the ferocious battle against Daesh terrorists went on are endearingly etched in the minds of many Iraqis.
Their massive turnout in Saturday’s funeral is both a testimony to Soleimani’s popularity among many Iraqis and a message to the U.S. which made its stay in the Arab country more unwelcome with the extrajudicial killing, observers said.
In all, 10 people — five Iraqis and five Iranians — were martyred in the U.S. strike on their motorcade just outside Baghdad airport as Soleimani’s flight arrived from Syria, leading to speculations that the Israeli intelligence might have played a role.
The cortege set off around Kadhimiya, a pilgrimage district of Baghdad, before heading to the Green Zone government and diplomatic district where a state funeral was to be held attended by top dignitaries.
The convoy snaked its way through a sea of black-clad mourners, some of whom carried portraits of Iran’s Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei.
The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad urged American citizens to leave Iraq following the strike at Baghdad airport that martyred Soleimani. Dozens of American employees of foreign oil companies left the southern Iraqi city of Basra on Friday.
Close U.S. ally Britain warned its nationals on Saturday to avoid all travel to Iraq, outside the autonomous Kurdistan region, and to avoid all but essential travel to Iran.
The United States and its allies have suspended purported training of Iraqi forces due to the increased threat, the German military said in a letter seen by Reuters late on Friday.
Soleimani, a 62-year-old general, was Tehran’s pre-eminent military commander and – as head of the IRGC’s overseas Quds Force – the architect of Iran’s anti-terror campaign and fight against American and Israeli hegemony in the Middle East.
Muhandis was the deputy commander of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) umbrella body of paramilitary groups.
Mourners included many Iraqi fighters in uniform for whom Muhandis and Soleimani were heroes. They carried portraits of both men
and plastered them on walls and armored personnel carriers in the procession, and chanted, “Death to America” and “No No Israel”.
Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi and Iraqi commander Hadi al-Amiri, the top candidate to succeed Muhandis, senior cleric Ammar al-Hakim and other important figures in a large crowd accompanied the coffins.
Ameri and many other Iraqi leaders have called on all factions in Iraq to unite and expel foreign troops.
“We call on all national forces to unify their stance in order to expel foreign troops whose presence has become pointless in Iraq,” Ameri told national television on Friday.
Mourners later brought the bodies of those martyred in the strike by car to the holy city of Kerbala south of Baghdad. The procession was to end in Najaf, another sacred city where Muhandis and the other Iraqis martyred will be laid to rest.
Gen. Soleimani’s body was transferred on Saturday to the southwestern Iranian province of Khuzestan that borders Iraq. On Sunday it will be taken to the holy city of Mashhad in Iran’s northeast and from there to Tehran and his hometown Kerman in the southeast for burial on Tuesday.
On Friday, Ayatollah Khamenei vowed to retaliate and said Soleimani’s martyrdom would intensify the Islamic Republic’s resistance to the United States and the Zionist regime.
Many Iraqis condemned the U.S. attack, regarding General Soleimani as a hero for his role in defeating Daesh terrorists who seized large swathes of north and central Iraq in 2014.
“It is necessary to take revenge on the murderers. The martyrs got the prize they wanted – the prize of martyrdom,” said one of the marchers, Ali al-Khatib.
source: This article/news was published on Friday, 05 January 2020 on the http://kayhan.ir/en/news/74735