US orders 3,000 troops to region after death of Qassem Suleimani, while six reportedly killed in more strikes targeting Iraqi militia

The Middle East is starting the decade under the shadow of a major new conflict, as Iran vows to take revenge for the US drone strike that killed its most powerful general, Qassem Suleimani.

The Pentagon ordered 3,000 reinforcements to the region, diplomats were reportedly told to pack their bags in case of sudden evacuation, and the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, called his counterparts around the world to try to persuade them the US was “committed to de-escalation”.

However, there were signs overnight that the US was continuing operations against Iranian allies in Iraq, with air strikes reported against the Shia Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) in a motorcade in north Baghdad in the early hours of Saturday. According to Reuters, six people were killed and three were critically wounded.

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

In Syria and Iraq, there was some rejoicing at Suleimani’s death. The ruthless commander was implicated in tens of thousands of civilian deaths, but the general reaction in world capitals was 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 Iranian supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, ordered three days of mourning and declared that the US would face “severe revenge” for the killing of Suleimani, who ran Tehran’s military operations in Iraq and Syria.

The incoming commander of the Quds Force, Esmail Ghaani, was quoted on al-Jazeera as saying: “We tell everyone, be patient and see the dead bodies of Americans all over the Middle East.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Qassem Suleimani, who was killed in the strike. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

In a brief address from his Florida resort Mar-a-Lago on Friday afternoon, Donald Trump described Suleimani as “the number one terrorist anywhere in the world”, and claimed the 62-year-old general was planning “imminent and sinister” attacks on US diplomats and personnel.

But the US president said that he was not seeking regime change in Iran, saying: “We did not take action to start a war.”

An initial Pentagon statement about the Suleimani killing said only that it was aimed at “deterring future Iranian attack plans”, but Pompeo later suggested that an actual attack plan by Iran had been in motion and had been foiled by the assassination.

“He was actively plotting in the region to take actions – a big action, as he described it – that would have put dozens if not hundreds of American lives at risk,” the US secretary of state told CNN.

Briefing reporters, a senior US official said the imminent attacks that Suleimani is alleged to have been preparing would have been in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

“These were attacks targeting American diplomats, American military personnel, and facilities that house Americans,” the official said.

Play Video 2:12 Donald Trump says US will take 'whatever action is necessary' against Iran – video

Suleimani died in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, when his car was targeted by a drone as local allies from the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) were driving him from the airport. The de facto leader of the PMF, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a close Suleimani associate, was also killed in the attack.

US officials said that the US became aware that Suleimani was touring the region, contacting local allies and planning attacks with them.

Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis: Iraqi killed in US strike was key militia figure Read more

“He’s not there on vacation. He is there for the specific purpose to plan multiple attacks against Americans and facilities, and that’s why he’s hanging out with Muhandis [the PMF militia deputy commander],” said a senior state department official. The former US general David Petraeus, who fought a battle of wits with Suleimani when he was US force commander in Iraq, said he was “in my view, the second most important person in Iran and the most important Iranian regionally”.

“The question that looms now, of course, is how do Iranian forces and their proxies throughout the region and beyond respond to this attack?” Petraeus told the Guardian.

Play Video 1:08 'Down with USA': protests sweep Iran after assassination of Qassem Suleimani – video

Agnes Callamard, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, said on Twitter that as a legal justification for the attack in which 10 people were killed, the Pentagon’s claims were “very vague”.

“Future is not the same as imminent, which is the time-based test required under international law,” she said.

Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, said Suleimani’s “martyrdom” would make the country more determined to resist America. “With no doubt, Iran and other freedom-seeking countries in the region will take his revenge,” he said.

Tehran’s Lebanon-based ally Hezbollah also promised to avenge the killing. In Iraq, Hadi al-Ameri, an Iran ally and head of the paramilitary Badr Organisation, called on all Iraqi factions to expel foreign troops.

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

In parts of a nervous region, where Suelimani’s reach had stretched as far as Gaza and Yemen, there were calls for vengeance. Street protests raged in Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiyeh, a stronghold of Hezbollah. In northern Syria, however, where Iran’s role in crushing the anti-Assad opposition had been led by Suleimani, there was a celebratory mood, and sweets were handed out in some towns.

“This general was the devil himself,” said Sobhih Mustafa, in the town of Maarat Numan. “He was worse than [Ariel] Sharon. His legacy will be written in blood.”

Qassem Suleimani's death threatens to open grisly new chapter in Middle East Read more

Suleimani was commander of the Quds force, the elite, external wing of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, which the Trump administration designated a terrorist organisation in April last year. A Pentagon statement accused the Quds force of being responsible for the deaths of hundreds of US service members and the wounding of thousands more.

Many considered Suleimani to be the second most powerful person in Iran, behind Khamenei, and arguably ahead of Rouhani. Through a mix of security operations and diplomatic coercion, he has been more responsible than anyone else for projecting Iran’s influence in the region. This has been led in Iraq, but also by establishing a seemingly permanent military foothold in war-torn Syria, linking Iran to the Mediterranean and a land border with Israel.

A senior US official said Suleimani would be hard for Iran to replace and so killing him had helped to stop attacks.

“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 organized on the scale, lethality, and effectiveness that they had under Suleimani,” the official said.

Another official said: “There were things he could do that nobody else could do. He was not a decentralized 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.”

A third official added Suleiman’s death would reduce the pace of attacks on Americans.

“It slows it down. It makes it less likely,” the official said, adding: “Jesus, do we have to explain why we do these things?”

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 drone strike came at a time when Iraq was already on the brink of an all-out proxy war, and hours after a two-day siege of the US embassy in Baghdad by a mob of PMF militants and their supporters. The Pentagon accused Suleimani of having masterminded the mob attack.

That siege followed US airstrikes on camps run by a PMF-affiliated militia particularly closely aligned with Tehran, which in turn was a reprisal for that militia’s killing of a US contractor in an attack on an Iraqi army base on Friday.

Trump authorised the strike at a time when the US Congress was in recess, and the White House framed the action as an act of self-defence in the context of counter-terrorism operations. But Democrats and perhaps some Republicans in Congress will see it as an usurpation of the legislature’s authority to decide matters of war and peace.