He had made the journey dozens of times, boarding a plane that did not include his name on the manifest and landing at an airport where his arrival was not registered. As Qassem Suleimani criss-crossed the region over the past 20 years, there was next to no trace of his movements. The flight he took from Damascus airport in the early hours of Friday would have seemed no different.

Iran crisis: McConnell lauds death of 'master terrorist' as Democrats question Trump strategy – live Read more

When the 62-year-old Iranian general landed in Baghdad with his entourage, two cars were waiting on the tarmac along with a reception party. Greetings would have been warm but brief in the still winter air, before the men were whisked away in the two nondescript vehicles, a Toyota Avalon and a Hyundai Starex minibus. The group was briefly received in the VIP section of Baghdad airport in a nod to their status, before starting the journey into the centre of the Iraqi capital, a place Suleimani knew well.

Through the height of Iraq’s sectarian war, when Suleimani had consolidated his extraordinary hold on the country, the drive in from Baghdad’s airport was perilous. Car bombs and machine guns on either side regularly killed those who ran the gauntlet. This time, however, the foe was lurking in the darkness overhead: a US Reaper drone.

Profile Who was Qassem Suleimani? Show Hide Qassem Suleimani, killed by a US drone strike in Baghdad, had become well known among Iranians and was sometimes discussed as a future president. Many considered Suleimani to have been the second most powerful person in Iran, behind supreme leader of Iran Ali Khamenei, but arguably ahead of President Hassan Rouhani. He was commander of the Quds Force, the elite, external wing of the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which the Trump administration designated as a terror organisation in April last year. He was born in Rabor, a city in eastern Iran, and forced to travel to a neighbouring city at age 13 and work to pay his father’s debts to the government of the Shah. By the time the monarch fell in 1979, Suleimani was committed to the clerical rule of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and joined the Revolutionary Guards, the paramilitary force established to prevent a coup against the newly declared Islamic Republic. Within two years, he was sent to the front to fight in the war against the invading Iraqi army. He quickly distinguished himself, especially for daring reconnaissance missions behind Iraqi lines, and the war also gave him his first contact with foreign militias of the kind he would wield to devastating effect in the decades to come. By the the time the Iraq government fell in 2003, Suleimani was the head of the Quds force and blamed for sponsoring the Shia militias who killed thousands of civilian Iraqis and coalition troops. As fighting raged on Iraq’s streets, Suleimani fought a shadow war with the US for leverage over the new Iraqi leadership. Once described by American commander David Petraeus as ‘a truly evil figure’, Suleimani was instrumental in crushing street protests in Iran in 2009. In recent months outbreaks of popular dissent in Lebanon, Iraq and Iran were again putting pressure on the crescent of influence he had spent the past two decades building. Violent crackdowns on the protests in Baghdad were blamed on militias under his influence.

Eighteen months before his death, Suleimani had issued Donald Trump a public warning, wagging his finger and dressed in olive fatigues. “You will start the war but we will end it.” Michael Safi Photograph: Mehdi Ghasemi/AFP

The convoy had not even made it out of the airport compound when rockets sliced through the roofs of the vehicles, killing everyone inside both cars and ending the reign of the most influential figure in the Middle East – a man so powerful he was considered off limits by previous US administrations – in a violent flash.

Senior Iraqi officials said Suleimani’s body was almost destroyed in the attack, but at least one hand was largely undamaged, allowing him to be identified by a ring he always wore. Pictures circulating on social media purported to show the ring – a large oval, deep-red stone in a silver setting – on a hand distorted by the explosion and covered in mud.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A photo said to show Suleimani’s hand and ring. Photograph: SalamPix/ABACA/PA Images

Suleimani, more than anyone else, had shaped events across the entire region. He was feared, loathed and admired by his pursuers in equal measure. Tracking him down had been a difficult ask until recently, and assassinating him unthinkable.

That changed in the second half of last year. By then, Suleimani had shaken off the Keyser Söze image that had been characteristic of his early years, in which his aegis was well understood but the man himself had remained shrouded in sinister mystery.

Once a figure who refused to be photographed, Suleimani had been popping up everywhere, on the frontlines of Aleppo, in Beirut’s southern suburbs and in the halls of power in Baghdad, where he had been particularly conspicuous. Such had been the transformation from shadowy spymaster to public figure that speculation mounted that he was planning a run for the Iranian presidency.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A burning vehicle at Baghdad airport after the US airstrike. Photograph: HO/AP

Suleimani denied it, but he appeared to relish the attention. He must have known that the profile and his hectic travel schedule gave his enemies opportunities to track him, and by last autumn both the US and Israel had a steady bead on the movements and plans of their arch foe, drawn from a mix of informants, reconnaissance aircraft and intercepts. Suleimani was spending roughly the same amount of time in Damascus, Baghdad and Beirut.

In the Syrian capital he had been trying to secure an overland route into Lebanon for retrofitted rockets sent from Iran and intended for use against Israel.

In Baghdad and Beirut, he wanted to bring an end to civic movements that had paralysed both countries and threatened Iran’s hold on their legislatures. “He was instrumental in the crackdown in Iraq in particular,” said one senior Lebanese figure with ties to Hezbollah. “When they [the security forces] turned from appeasement to overwhelming violence, that was at his instruction. It was less the case in Lebanon, but he had become more bothered by things there in the last month.”

Suleimani had long been busy, shaping the course of the Syrian war, leading the Iraqi fightback against Isis – where at one point proxies loyal to him had been protected by US air cover - and giving extensive support to Hezbollah in Lebanon. The past few years had seen him more influential and visible than ever.

“Qassem Suleimani was a combination of, in US terms, CIA director, JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] commander, and special presidential envoy for the region,” the former CIA director David Petraeus, who was also the commanding US general in Iraq in 2007-08, said on Friday. “He has been a hugely important player in the region for over two decades, the architect of the Iranian effort to solidify control over the so-called Shia crescent and the operational commander of the various elements of that effort.

“It is impossible to overstate the significance of this action. He is, in my view, the second most important person in Iran and the most important Iranian regionally. And there is no question about the amount of US, coalition and Iraqi blood on his hands, just from the activities by the militias the Quds forces supported in Iraq, much less elsewhere in the region.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Protesters and militia fighters stormed the US embassy in Baghdad on New Year’s Day. Photograph: Thaier Al-Sudani/Reuters

Suleimani’s growing role in quelling protest movements had been noted, but it was his more traditional activities that had rattled Washington, and took him off the untouchable list. The Quds force of the Revolutionary Guards, which he led for more than 20 years, had been the apex of Iran’s security machinery, tasked with advancing the goals of the Islamic Revolution. It had become more committed than ever to consolidating a land corridor that ran through Iraq and Syria, and into Lebanon.

Partly in response to Donald Trump’s decision to revoke the nuclear deal signed by his predecessor, Barack Obama, which had offered sanctions relief in exchange for Tehran setting aside its ambition to enrich uranium, and also because of ongoing enmity, the Quds force and its proxies in Iraq had been taking the fight to the US and its allies.

Timeline The buildup to Qassem Suleimani's death Show Hide A rocket attack on an Iraqi military base near Kirkuk kills an American contractor and injures US and Iraqi soldiers. The US blames Shia militia group, Kata’ib Hizbullah (KH) The US conducts retaliatory airstrikes against five KH bases in Iraq and Syria, saying there had been 11 attacks against Iraqi bases hosting coalition forces in Iraq over the past two months Protesters storm the US embassy in Baghdad, trapping diplomats inside while chanting “Death to America” and slogans in support of pro-Iranian militias. At one point they breached the main gate and smashed their way into several reception rooms. The rampage was carried out with the apparent connivance of local Iraqi security forces who allowed protesters inside the highly protected Green Zone In a drone strike ordered by US president Donald Trump, the US kills Iranian general Qassem Suleimani while he was being transported from Baghdad airport

Since the middle of last year, Suleimani loyalists had launched rocket attacks on US bases and Saudi Arabia’s oil production centre, and used mines against shipping in the strait of Hormuz.

As Iran’s economy crumbled under new US sanctions, the attacks intensified. So did the retaliation. In the last week of December, an apparent attack by the Iranian proxy Kata’ib Hezbollah on a US base, which killed a US contractor, was followed by US strikes on Shia militia bases.

On New Year’s Day, Shia groups stormed the US embassy in Baghdad. Scenes of chanting crowds overrunning the compound evoked images of Tehran in 1979 and Benghazi in 2012. The US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, tweeted a photo later that day of Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a key Suleimani ally and powerful figure in Iraq’s security apparatus, standing outside the embassy.

The US says that by then it had learned of threats against its citizens and interests that Suleimani had personally ordered. “We know it was imminent,” Pompeo told CNN on Friday. “This was an intelligence-based assessment that drove our decision-making process.” Pompeo claimed the attack had been dubbed “the big action” and would have put dozens of US lives at risk. That position had shifted from an earlier justification that Suleimani’s assassination had been long planned.

Whatever the reason, the decision to shoot was made without an extensive buy-in from the US security apparatus that had pursued Suleimani for more than 15 years. Trump made the call while on holiday at his Florida resort, relying as he often does on instinct and conviction, rather than a room full of experts.

“The question that looms now, of course, is how do Iranian forces and their proxies throughout the region and beyond respond to this attack?” said Petraeus. “It appears that the US has thought through and shored up defences against the possible Iranian actions – attacks on US bases in the Gulf region, interdiction of shipping through the Gulf and the strait of Hormuz, attacks by proxies in Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen on US and coalition and partner forces.”

A former British intelligence official was less sure the aftermath could be managed. “Qassem Suleimani was a messianic Shia supremacist, the most important person to the supreme leader. His death will be avenged, that is for certain. We don’t know what’s been unleashed here. This is a defining moment in the Middle East, one way or another.”

