This article is more than 8 months old

This article is more than 8 months old

Thousands of people have gathered across Iran and Iraq to mourn and vow revenge for the death of Qassem Suleimani, Iran’s top general and the most influential military commander in the Middle East, after he was killed in a US drone strike along with a key Iraqi ally.

Weeping crowds in Baghdad began a funeral procession that is expected to last days, taking Suleimani’s body through Shia holy cities in both countries. tA public farewell in Tehran will allow Iranian leaders to pay their respects in person before he is buried in his home province of Kerman on Tuesday.

Mourners shouted “death to America” as they escorted the coffins of Suleimani and the Iraqi militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who was killed in the same operation, through the streets of the Iraqi capital.

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

Iranian state television also aired images of a ceremony honouring Suleimani at a mosque in Qom, an Iranian centre of Shia scholarship and pilgrimage. A red flag was unfurled above the minarets, symbolising both blood shed unjustly and a call for vengeance for the dead.

US officials defended Donald Trump’s decision to order the strike, saying Suleimani had been planning imminent attacks on US personnel, but no evidence was laid out.

The US has been able to track the general’s movements for years, but previous presidents have held off ordering a strike because of fears of repercussions.

Critics in the US and beyond have said the assassination risks escalating violence in an already volatile region. The former UK foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt described the US confrontation with Iran as a “dangerous game of chicken”.

Play Video 0:35 Qassem Suleimani: moment Iranian general killed by US strike reportedly caught on CCTV – video

Iran has already vowed to respond to a killing it described as an act of war. The country’s ambassador to the UN said on Saturday that it would not go unanswered. “There will be harsh revenge,” Majid Takht Ravanchi told CNN. “The time, the place, will be decided by Iran.”

The US Department of Homeland Security said the response could include cyber-attacks. More conventional targets might include US installations, diplomatic and military personnel, or oil facilities. US citizens have been warned to leave Iraq.

Billboards with Suleimani’s instantly recognisable face appeared on major streets in Iran overnight, many bearing a warning from the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that “harsh revenge” awaits the US.

The Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, also said Washington did not realise what a great mistake it had made, during a visit to pay condolences to the general’s family. US citizens would be feeling the impact for years to come, he said.

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

The Baghdad funeral procession began at the Imam Kadhim shrine, one of the most revered sites in Shia Islam.

Mohammed Fadl, a mourner dressed in black, said he had come out in a show of loyalty and defiance. “It is a painful strike, but it will not shake us,” he said.

Two helicopters hovered over the crowd of mourners, who included Iraq’s prime minister, Adel Abdul-Mahdi, and leaders of Iran-backed militias.

Iran’s envoy to Baghdad, Iraj Masjedi, told Iranian state media that Abdul-Mahdi had insisted on holding a public funeral for Suleimani and al-Muhandis in Baghdad.

Who is Qassem Suleimani? Iran farm boy who became more powerful than a president Read more

The Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), an umbrella organisation of Iran-backed paramilitary groups, said five medics had been killed in fresh airstrikes on Saturday morning. But the US denied it had carried out any attacks and the Iraqi military later issued a statement saying that no attack had taken place.

From Baghdad the funeral procession moved to the Shia holy city of Kerbala and on to Najaf, where Muhandis and others will be buried.

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Suleimani’s remains will be returned to Iran’s south-western province of Khuzestan, which borders Iraq, abd taken taken to the Shia holy city of Mashhad in the north-east and from there to Tehran, where Khamenei will lead a prayer ceremony.

Suleimani, 62, oversaw the external operations of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards and was the architect of an expansion of Iranian influence across the Middle East in recent decades, controlling politicians and proxy militias in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen among other places.

A Pentagon statement accused Suleimani’s Quds force of being responsible for the deaths of hundreds of US soldiers and the wounding of thousands more.

Once a shadowy operator whose movements were a closely held secret, Suleimani had become a public figure in recent years, often posing for photos on the front lines.

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Despite his influence in wars across the region, he appears to have considered himself untouchable in recent years – a belief shattered by Friday morning’s strikes by Reaper drones on his convoy at Baghdad airport.

His killing triggered rejoicing in parts of Iraq and Syria, where he was implicated in tens of thousands of civilian deaths, but the general reaction in world capitals was one of apprehension.

“This is a moment in which leaders must exercise maximum restraint,” the UN secretary general, António Guterres, said. “The world cannot afford another war in the Gulf.”

The Pentagon ordered 3,000 reinforcements to the region on Friday, but US leaders including Donald Trump have characterised Suleimani’s killing as a pre-emptive strike to prevent American deaths in imminent attacks.

In a brief address from his Florida resort Mar-a-Lago on Friday, the US president described Suleimani as “the number one terrorist anywhere in the world”, and claimed the had been planning “imminent and sinister” operations against US diplomats and personnel.

Trump said, however, that he was not seeking regime change in Iran. “We did not take action to start a war,” he said.

Senior US officials said on Saturday that Suleimani’s killing would help to disrupt future military operations sponsored by Tehran.

“I’m just saying that Suleimani was in many ways the indispensable man, and with Suleimani dead it will be very difficult for these proxies to be organised on the scale, lethality and effectiveness that they had under Suleimani,” an official said.

“There were things he could do that nobody else could do. He was not a decentralised manager. He was a hands-on, down-to-the-details manager. And we are not safe in the region as long as Iran is pursuing this general strategy, but we are safer without him than we are with him,” another said.