Early on Friday morning, the US carried out an air strike on Baghdad airport which killed General Soleimani, along with members of local militia.
Who was General Soleimani, why is he so important, and what reasoning has the US given for carrying out this strike?
According to the BBC:
The 62-year old [general] spearheaded Iranian military operations in the Middle East as head of Iran's elite Quds Force. [...] Under his leadership, Iran had bolstered Hezbollah in Lebanon and other pro-Iranian militant groups, expanded Iran's military presence in Iraq and Syria and orchestrated Syria's offensive against rebel groups in the country's long civil war. [...]
Gen Soleimani was widely seen as the second most powerful figure in Iran behind the Ayatollah Khamenei. His Quds Force, an elite unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, reported directly to the Ayatollah and he was hailed as a heroic national figure.
As you might expect, Iran (through the voice of Khamenei himself) has pledged to revenge his death...
As for the US (official) statements why he was killed... the full Pentagon statement was fairly brief:
At the direction of the President, the U.S. military has taken decisive defensive action to protect U.S. personnel abroad by killing Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force, a U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization.
General Soleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region. General Soleimani and his Quds Force were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American and coalition service members and the wounding of thousands more. He had orchestrated attacks on coalition bases in Iraq over the last several months – including the attack on December 27th – culminating in the death and wounding of additional American and Iraqi personnel. General Soleimani also approved the attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad that took place this week.
This strike was aimed at deterring future Iranian attack plans. The United States will continue to take all necessary action to protect our people and our interests wherever they are around the world.
Some statements before Soleimani's killing have probably predicted an US action like this, in hindsight:
Acting U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper on Thursday announced that "the game has changed" for how President Donald Trump's administration deals with Iran [...]
"There are some indications out there that they may be planning additional attacks," Esper told Politico. "If we get word of attacks, we will take preemptive action as well to protect American forces, protect American lives. The game has changed."
A CRS document notes earlier statements by Trump:
President Trump said in a June 24 interview that he believes he has the authority to direct strikes against Iran, and said, “I do like keeping them [Congress] abreast, but I don’t have to do it, legally.” On June 25, he tweeted that “any attack by Iran on anything American will be met with great and overwhelming force. In some areas, overwhelming will mean obliteration.”
As Republicans have fairly uniformly supported Trump in this action, we can quote one (or two) of them as summarizing the issue (in what I'd call Trumpian style):
Sen. Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, said in a news release that "General Soleimani is dead because he was an evil bastard who murdered Americans" and "the President made the brave and right call, and Americans should be proud of our service members who got the job done."
His comments were echoed by Sen. Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, who said in a statement that Soleimani "masterminded Iran's reign of terror for decades, including the deaths of hundreds of Americans." "Tonight, he got what he richly deserved, and all those American soldiers who died by his hand also got what they deserved: justice," Cotton said. "America is safer now after Soleimani's demise."
(It seems that, in contrast, Democrats have generally disapproved of the strike, calling it "reckless" and so forth.)
Trump himself has now commented on the purpose of the US action. The statement is a bit long, so here are some excerpts:
Last night, at my direction, the United States military successfully executed a flawless precision strike that killed the number-one terrorist anywhere in the world, Qasem Soleimani.
Soleimani was plotting imminent and sinister attacks on American diplomats and military personnel, but we caught him in the act and terminated him. [...]
For years, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its ruthless Quds Force — under Soleimani’s leadership — has targeted, injured, and murdered hundreds of American civilians and servicemen.
The recent attacks on U.S. targets in Iraq, including rocket strikes that killed an American and injured four American servicemen very badly, as well as a violent assault on our embassy in Baghdad, were carried out at the direction of Soleimani. [...]
Soleimani has been perpetrating acts of terror to destabilize the Middle East for the last 20 years. What the United States did yesterday should have been done long ago. A lot of lives would have been saved. [...]
We took action last night to stop a war. We did not take action to start a war.
Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man. - Friedrich Nietzsche @EricDuminil - Hope is another way of saying "I pass my turn and wait to see what happens". In an Era where everyone has a voice and it is often used wrongly, staying silent is almost not a choice. People should engage in healthy debate so the opinions may gain momentum and reach the ears it should reach.
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Jan 6, 2020 at 17:08
Major General Qasem Soleimani was the leader of the Iran Revolutionary Quds Force, the unit responsible for unconventional warfare, [...] intelligence activities, and [...] extraterritorial operations. He was also, by some estimates, the second most powerful person in Iran after Ayatollah Ali Khamenei:
He is also considered by many to be the the most important figure in building Iran's influence across the Middle East, supporting groups from Hezbollah in Lebanon to the Houthi rebels in Yemen: it was largely his actions which led to Iran supporting Bashir al-Assad in the Syrian civil war. He is perhaps most notable for his work in Iraq, where he has aggressively supported pro-Iran Shia militias.
It is worth noting that, in some ways, he was as much a diplomat as a general in the conventional sense.
It was his ability to build relationships that made him so effective, said Esfandiary. “He built them with everyone, inside and outside Iran, inside and outside government,” she said.
Tom Fletcher added on BBC Radio 4's Today programme:
"[Qassem Soleimani] was a much more powerful figure than Osama bin Laden or Baghdadi, where at the moment of their own deaths, their power was in decline. His was growing as it has been really since the US invasion of Iraq. It is hard to overstate the potential impact of this moment."
There have recently been a series of tit-for-tat moves against one another from the USA and Iran in their ongoing proxy war in Iraq.
This is a clear escalation in this series of attacks, since it is direct US military action against Iran. Donald Trump made this attack "without the sombre presidential address to explain his actions to the nation as is customary at such pivotal junctures in the country’s history, merely tweeting out a US flag and leaving it to the Pentagon to make the announcement," so it is difficult to know exactly what his intent was in escalating this conflict. That said, Trump's record with Iran has never implied that he has been working toward closer cooperation, most notably in his leaving the 2015 Nuclear Deal. The statement from the Pentagon was as follows:
"General Suleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region. This strike was aimed at deterring future Iranian attack plans. The United States will continue to take all necessary action to protect our people and our interests wherever they are around the world."
The USA officially considers the Quds Force a terrorist organisation, so they will likely argue that all they have done is kill a dangerous terrorist. This is what the official statement seems to imply.
Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, repeatedly referred to the attack on twitter as a "defensive action" in response to "imminent threats to American lives".
More conspiracy-minded people may note that there is an election coming up and Trump has previously implied that he thinks wars can boost presidents' reelection chances.
It appears that Pentagon officials were shocked by this course of action. According to the New York Times:
Ultimately, what seems most likely is that the USA saw a chance to strike back hard against recent Iranian actions and took it, with the escalation being a continuation of current US foreign policy in this area. That said, this is a clear escalation, to an extent that surprised even the Pentagon.
While both answers are pretty good, I would like to add couple of points to "Who was Gen. Soleimani":
