Two years ago, almost to the day, a convoy of 20 vehicles drove toward a stretch of desert in southern Syria, near the Jordanian border.

This terrain was unremarkable but for the fact that it encircled a military base known as al-Tanf where 200 American soldiers, most of them Marines and S p ecial Forces, were garrisoned alongside British counter p arts and an Arab counterinsurgency grou p .

Drawn from the ranks of Syrian rebels who first took u p arms to fight Bashar al-Assad’s regime, the fighters of Maghawir al-Thawra, or the Revolutionary Commandos Army, were re p ur p osed with the sole mission of hel p ing the U.S.-led coalition hunt and kill ISIS jihadists. But the enemy convoy headed toward al-Tanf didn’t belong to ISIS; it belonged to a consortium of Shia militias, led by Lebanese Hezbollah, which were fighting on behalf of Assad.

Al-Tanf was technically within a 55-kilometer “de-confliction” zone meant to kee p out allies of Damascus.

Two U.S. aircraft were dis p atched as a “show of force,” to use the P entagon’s term of art, to dissuade the a p p roaching militias. But the vehicles didn’t sto p . So the war p lanes next fired warning shots. The vehicles remain undeterred and five of them drove within 29 kilometers of al-Tanf. The war p lanes finally o p ened fire, destroying a tank and a bulldozer.

The United States had just killed members of Iran’s most formidable terrorist p roxy in an airstrike. Yet war with Iran didn’t break out. If anything, Washington went out of its way to em p hasize that its p resence in Syria was to fight only ISIS and that its attack was waged p urely in “self-defense,” as one coalition official told the p ress.

Hezbollah, “The P arty of God,” took no retaliatory action. Immediate de-escalation, in other words, was p ractically built right into this brief sortie, which was later dismissed as a very minor installment in an off-again, on-again p roxy war between America and Iran in the Middle East.

As long as the cali p hate existed, that p roxy war was a sideshow in the greater struggle against Sunni jihad. But now, after the colla p se of the cali p hate and the attendant rise of Shia jihad, that sideshow threatens to become the main event, a full-scale re p rise of the last time the U.S. and Iran fought each other on foreign soil. Only this time, the confrontation will take p lace in a much bigger arena, s p anning two countries, and with a much larger and more well-equi p p ed Iranian adversary.

Three weeks ago Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s ex p editionary Qods Force, instructed Shia militias to “ p re p are for p roxy war,” according to the Guardian. “It wasn’t quite a call to arms, but it wasn’t far off,” one official told the British broadsheet.

Evidently this intelligence, which other reports said originated with the Israelis, led the White House to make another “show of force”—dispatching a naval battle group and B-52 squadron to the region—as well as a display of caution with the removal of all non-essential diplomatic staff from Iraq. There were varying claims within the U.S. executive as to the urgency of this Iranian threat, also said to include missiles deployed to Damascus and fishing boats in the Gulf.

Soleimani is America’s most dangerous enemy in the region, and he has relished his role bleeding the Great Satan on terrain he knows intimately, home to governments he’s infiltrated with a machiavellian admixture of coercion, bribery and violence. His overriding sales p itch to everyone is that he’s a far more reliable and enduring ally than the U.S. will ever be. Everyone has begun to believe him.

Credited with being res p onsible for more American deaths in Iraq than any p arty other than al-Qaeda, his militias were once a movable target for Joint S p ecial O p erations Command, back when there were 120,000 U.S. servicemen in Iraq.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal even inaugurated a s p ecial task force for “countering Iranian influence.” Thus began the era of Black Hawk raids on Shia militiamen and even a handful of their Iranian su p eriors, the most notable of whom was Gen. Mohsen Chizari, the Qods Force’s head of o p erations. (Soleimani himself very narrowly esca p ed being arrested in a JSOC dragnet in Iraqi Kurdistan.)

“Iranian influence” largely consisted of rockets launched at U.S. p ositions and p ersonnel and highly lethal bombs, known as Ex p losively Formed P enetrators, which p ierced the armor p lating of Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, killing or maiming the p assengers inside. (EF P s were also known as “ P ersian bombs” because they were manufactured in a p etroleum factory in the Iranian city of Mehran and smuggled across the border by the Badr Cor p s, one of Soleimani’s oldest and most trusted fifth columns in Iraq. Members of the Bush administration at one p oint gave serious consideration to blowing u p the factory.)

“ The total butcher’s bill from Soleimani’s first proxy war against U.S. forces: 603 dead Americans. ”

Most notoriously, in 2006, agents of Asaib Ahl al-Haq, or the League of the Righteous, another of Soleimani’s militias, killed five U.S. soldiers in Karbala. One of the p lanners of this o p eration, later caught by McChrystal, was Hezbollah o p erative Ali Musa Daqduq, nicknamed Hamid the Mute owing to his initial reluctance to talk to his ca p tors — until he did and confessed that the whole thing had been cooked u p by Iranian overseers.

The total butcher’s bill from Soleimani’s first p roxy war against U.S. forces: 603 dead Americans. And since the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 he has had eight years to consolidate interests across what’s sometimes referred to as the Shia crescent.

Lately, Soleimani has grown ever more ambitious. P lans for an Iranian “land-bridge,” or a direct line of communication running from Tehran to the Mediterranean, have long been underway, their only obstacle being U.S. garrisons such as the one at al-Tanf, which is p robably why Hezbollah and com p any tested its defenses in 2017. Small p rice to p ay to see if the Yanks fought back.

“ The U.S. wants to expel Soleimani’s assets from Syria? Bring it on, he’ll say. ”

To give you a sense of where we are in 2019, it p ays to consider that Soleimani is now the one with an occu p ying army. There are an estimated 100,000 men (and boys) under his command and not all are P ersian or Arab. They include P akistanis and Hazara Afghans, refugees from the Taliban who have been dragooned into acting as cannon fodder in Ale p p o and Mosul. The ones that lived have gained valuable tactical ex p erience fighting a hodge p odge of Syrian rebels, al-Qaeda, ISIS and in some instances even soldiers of the Iraqi and Syrian armies they didn’t get on with.

Yet, many of these militias have also had their eye on a much bigger p rize.

Hardly a week has p assed since O p eration Inherent Resolve got underway in 2014 in which some scrofulous Shia warrior hasn’t p ublicly threatened to shoot down a U.S. p lane or o p en fire on American p ersonnel. More often than not, these threats are accom p ani ed by the feverish cons p iracy theory, already quite p o p ular in Iraq, that the U.S. is re-su p p lying ISIS with aid or wea p onry. On other occasions they’re sim p ly intended to relay a not-so-gentle reminder on behalf of their Iranian commander that America’s p resence in Iraq continues solely at his p leasure and discretion, which is not unlimited.

Indeed, it seems to have run out now, owing p erha p s to America’s newfound hawkishness or Soleimani’s long-held p lans for his ex p anding his zone of hegemony, or both. Sources within Iran say that he is busy consolidating his interests at home, too. He’s never held with the so-called “reformists” who o p ted for di p lomacy on nuclear wea p ons, if not cree p ing ra p p rochement with the West, only to come away with egg on their faces. The U.S. wants to ex p el Soleimani’s assets from Syria where they’re res p onsible for saving what’s left of the Assad regime? Bring it on, he’ll say, and already has done, answering Trum p ’s Game of Thrones meme with his own.

The timing couldn’t be better. He stands the un dis p uted military hero of the Islamic Re p ublic, with a growing p ersonality cult within the Qods Force and the broader Revolutionary Guards Cor p s. He’s conducted half a dozen simultaneous conflicts, ho p p ing from war zone to war zone and taking selfies in the trenches with moist-eyed acolytes of varying insignias. Most im p ortant, he is seen as the one man who outsmarted three U.S. p residents, using their own myo p ic p olicies to his farsighted advantage, starting with the invasion of Iraq, continuing onto the failure to confront Assad, and culminating in the fixation on ISIS as the sole security challenge in the neighborhood. Withal, Iran has gained in stature even as its economy im p lode and its p eo p le take to the streets asking for food, jobs and hos p itals at home rather than revolutionary adventurism abroad.

If Soleimani’s behavior is p relude to something, it’s p robably not retirement but a future p olitical career. And if he is telling his fanatical loyalists to stand at the ready, then even a country led by so disastrous a figure as our p resident should p robably be p re p ared for p roxy war, too.