50 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY10, 2020
was allegedly planning than in the likely
Iranian response to his death. “The risk
of inaction outweighs the risk of action,”
she said.
Trump chose the Suleimani option.
At Central Command, officers were
startled; they asked to see a formal order
in writing, and they scrambled to com-
pose a plan, known as a “concept of op-
erations.” By the following evening, they
had intelligence showing that Suleimani
was in Beirut, seeing Nasrallah, the Hez-
bollah leader, and that he planned to
pass through Damascus on his way to
Iraq. As a site for the killing, Damas-
cus was ruled out. It was hostile airspace,
trafficked by planes from many coun-
tries. In Iraq, by contrast, the U.S. had
the full range of American firepower.
The defense official explained, “We had
a short window if we were going to take
this opportunity.”
According to U.S. intelligence, Su-
leimani was scheduled to board a com-
mercial plane at Damascus International
Airport for the ninety-minute flight to
Baghdad. Planners envisaged a missile
strike on his convoy after he landed in
Iraq. The plan was kept secret even from
officials at the State Department in
charge of securing the Embassy in Bagh-
dad, though the Administration alerted
Netanyahu.
I
n the months before his killing, Su-
leimani publicly embraced the image
of a wanted man. In October, Iran’s state
media conducted a rare, and reveren-
tial, interview with him, in which he
described a moment, in 2006, when he
and Nasrallah were in Beirut and saw
Israeli drones circling in the sky over-
head, preparing for an air strike. They
escaped by hiding under a tree and flee-
ing, with Mughniyeh’s help, through a
series of underground bunkers, allow-
ing them to, as he put it, “deceive and
outwit the enemy.” A few days after
that interview, Iran’s government an-
nounced the arrest of three suspects in
a supposed plot to kill Suleimani, which
had involved digging a tunnel to the
site of an upcoming memorial service
for his late father and then detonating
a bomb during the ceremony. After
years of working in secret, Suleimani
had all but abandoned efforts to dis-
guise his whereabouts. The U.S. defense
official observed, “I think Suleimani
was not even thinking we would take
such an action.”
When Suleimani boarded his final
flight, American MQ-9 Reaper drones
settled into position over the Iraqi cap-
ital. At 12:36 A.M., his flight touched
down at Baghdad International Air-
port. A van and a car raced up to the
base of the stairs, where Suleimani was
greeted by Muhandis. Commanders
knew not to proceed if the strike would
risk the lives of any senior Iraqi gov-
ernment officials. But Muhandis was
deemed an acceptable casualty.
The two men, with an entourage,
climbed into the two vehicles and
turned onto the empty road into town.
At 12:47 A.M., as the convoy sped past
rows of palm trees, the first of several
missiles crashed into the vehicles, set-
ting them aflame. In all, ten passengers
were killed.
At the State Department, some se-
curity officers, who learned of the strike
only when an Iraqi journalist tweeted
about a mysterious explosion, exchanged
hurried e-mails, asking if the Embassy
was at risk. They ordered personnel in
Baghdad to take cover.
Shortly before the Pentagon con-
firmed the news, Trump tweeted an
image of the American flag. Later, in a
speech to donors at Mar-a-Lago, he re-
lived the operation, recalling that he had
been told by a military officer, “They
have approximately one minute to live,
sir. Thirty seconds. Ten, nine, eight.”
There was an explosion. The officer said,
“They’re gone, sir.”
T
he Suleimani operation differed
substantially from America’s pat-
terns of targeted killing since 2002.
Suleimani was not the leader of a state-
less cabal but a high-ranking represen-
tative of one of the most populous na-
tions in the Middle East, which, for all
its deep involvement in terrorism, is
not in a conventional war with the
United States. In adopting a mode of
assault usually reserved for a wartime
enemy, the Administration acted on the
belief, which is popular among many
of the President’s most influential ad-
visers, that the U.S. has been deceiving
itself about the nature of its relation-
ship with Tehran. “We’ve been in a
conflict with Iran since 1979. A lot of
people just don’t realize it,” a Trump
Administration official said.
Immediately after the killing, Iran
fired more than a dozen missiles at two
U.S. installations in Iraq. The Pentagon
reported that, though no one was killed,
more than thirty U.S. soldiers reported
symptoms of traumatic brain injury. (By
some accounts, the missiles narrowly
avoided causing far more casualties.)
Tehran also declared that it was aban-
doning restrictions on the enrichment
of uranium, though it would continue
to permit inspections from the Inter-
national Atomic Energy Agency. The
over-all message was that Tehran was
not pursuing further escalation.
Twelve years after the gathering on
a winter night in Damascus, the three
participants were dead, each from a
different form of lethal government
action: a bombing, a sniper team, and
a drone strike. In the first two cases,
the countries responsible deliberately
avoided claiming credit. In the killing
of Suleimani, Trump departed from
that approach. On January 8th, he con-
vened a triumphant press conference,
surrounded by aides and generals in
uniform. Iran was “standing down,” he
said, and he went on to announce a new
round of “punishing economic sanc-
tions” that would remain in place “until
Iran changes its behavior.” Within a
week, the focus in Washington drifted
back to other crises, most notably the
Senate impeachment trial.
But many American national-secu-
rity officials braced themselves. The U.S.
diplomat said that the Trump Admin-
istration’s justification for killing Sulei-
mani reminded him of the casual op-
timism among Bush’s advisers about
the consequences of invading Iraq in
- “We’re in the first inning,” he said.
“When I heard about Suleimani, my
first reaction was ‘Good. I’m not shed-
ding a tear.’ But then my second reac-
tion was ‘Wait—was this thought
through at all?’” He continued, “In ad-
