Sympathy For Soleimani

A preemptive strike, that’s what white people call terrorism, and that’s apparently what transpired this Thursday on the tarmac of the Baghdad International Airport. A preemptive drone strike, ordered by our president, murdered General Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s most important military figure, alongside six others including the commander of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Unit, a legally recognized part of Iraq’s military. This was not an attack on a military operation. These men were meeting to attend a funeral for victims of another American terrorist attack earlier in the week. This was an act of extreme cowardice. This was a war crime. But most importantly, this was indeed a calculated act of war against two sovereign nations, a week in the making.

The previous Friday, rockets struck an American base in Iraq, killing a single American mercenary. This is a crime that remains unsolved, but the Trump Administration wasted zero time blaming it on Iran via their alleged proxies in the PMU. No evidence given, no evidence required. An American soldier of fortune died in Shia country, which is the greenlight Trump has been looking for to shithouse Iran since Sheldon Adelson payed him to do so in 2016. I suspect that Sheldon’s friends back in occupied Jerusalem may be the ones truly responsible for this convenient attack, but that’s just a hunch from a stalwart anti-Zionist with too much time on her hands. Take it with a grain of salt.

This attack set into motion a procession of tit for tat escalations that ended with the assassination of a man so revered by his people that a response is all but a forgone conclusion whether Iran wants it or not. Their hands are tied. Meanwhile, thousands of American troops prepare to re-flood the scarred battleground of America’s greatest imperial blunder, as the shitheads of American cable news take turns telling facetious horror stories about the extra-judicially murdered Soleimani. If you were dense enough to take these morons at their libel, you would be forced to come to the conclusion that the general was some kind of blood drinking Sith lord. But who was he really, to us and his people?

Qassem Soleimani was the brains behind Iran’s fearsome Quds Force, a sort of Shia Seal Team 6, devoted to protecting the faithful across Iran’s tight sphere of influence. Much like fellow western boogeyman Vladimir Putin, Qassem was no angel but he was far from the satanic super-villain our media elites and their deep state chums have painted him to be. And just like Putin, Qassem’s greatest crime was overreacting to legitimate western threats. As most professional soldiers are want to do, he often went too far, but his primary contribution to the region was containing the vilest strains Wahhabism, and the sheikhs, Zionists and Yankee officers who coddled them. This is why the man is seen as a hero, not just in Iran, but to people across the region who have spent decades at the mercy of American facilitated proxies. Soleimani beat the bastards at their own game, creating his own coalition of fucked-over proxies that have become known by enemies and allies alike as the Axis of Resistance.

I won’t lie to you, dearest motherfuckers. I’m not an unbiased journalist. In fact, I view the title itself as a contrived notion. I have long been sympathetic towards the goals of the Axis of Resistance, not because I have a strong affection for any of its members, other than perhaps those anti-Zionist militiamen in the decidedly stateless Hezbollah, but for basic tribal reasons. My sympathies are personal. I have a dog in this fight. To put it bluntly, ISIS, Al-Nusra and the rest of those Salafi cunts kill fags, my people. While Hillary and Obama facetiously draped themselves in the rainbow flag, they kept the Saudi pipeline flowing to those equally facetious flag-drapers in the Islamic State as they flung people like me from the rooftops. Now, Iran is hardly a friend to my people either, but compared to their Wahhabist rivals, they might as well be. Many people remain oblivious to the fact that, while homosexuality remains very much illegal in the Islamic Republic, that very same republic has long been the safest place for transwomen in the Islamic world, offering people like me surgery and recognition based on a Persian culture that has always maintained spaces for third genders. I would likely be stoned for being a lezbo upon receiving treatment, but it’s still a lovely gesture compared to my fate in their neighbor’s dusty kangaroo courts.

More importantly, this loose collaboration of Middle Eastern minorities has managed to cobble together the most successful bulwark to western imperialism that region has seen since Nasser and the halcyon days of Arab Socialism. So I find myself in the awkward position of throwing my wig in with these Shiites, Baathists and communists. I reserve hope that they can still be influenced by the example of wiser men than Soleimani, like Abdullah Ocalan and Muqtada al-Sadr, but regardless, I support the dark angry men flooding the streets of Baghdad  and Tehran, raging against the white man’s terrorism, for the simple reason that there needs to be a proletarian response to the imperial bourgeoise violence of pre-emptive strikes. Opponents of imperialism across the political spectrum need to display their solidarity with this movement even if they don’t agree with all of its members or values, because, just like the Vietcong and the Sandinistas before them, the idea of the Axis of Resistance remains it’s most powerful attribute, and that idea is poor people unite and shatter this goddamn empire.

So here’s to General Soleimani. He may very well burn in hell, but this one furious faggot who hopes he at least gets a cell with a view, one floor up from the Shah.

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.