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The missiles, which hit near the air cargo terminal, reported Reuters, killed Soleimani, Jamal Jaafar Ibrahimi, an Iraqi militia commander, who was better known by Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, Soleimani’s son-in-law and the son-in-law of the late Hezbollah commander Imad Mugniyah, who was assassinated by the CIA and Mossad in 2008.

The drone strike, said Thomas Juneau, a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, was absolutely typical in some ways — but not at all in others.

“The rank of the individuals … that’s not typical because these are seriously senior people,” Juneau told the Post in an interview. “It gets buried a bit because of Soleimani, but that’s a big deal. (al-Muhandis) was one of Iran’s closest partners on the ground in Iraq.”

Why, then, such senior — and notorious — figures would have travelled from an international airport, is something of an open question, as the United States has perfected this sort of operation in the last 18 years. Michael Knights, a security expert and senior fellow at the Washington Institute in D.C., said Soleimani’s movements before the convoy was hit was a “very foolish thing to do.”

Photo by West Asia News Agency)/Nazanin Tabatabaee via REUTERS

“They took a big risk. They put themselves in very close proximity to a lot of U.S. surveillance. It was a golden opportunity,” said Knights. “(The Americans looked at it and thought) it’s a VIP convoy, it’s not one of our own, or any of the coalition, it’s not anyone else. All the boxes were ticked. ‘If we want to do this, we can do it clean’ “