In the small hours of Friday (January 2) morning, the global oil market got its first geopolitical jolt of 2020 after a U.S. airstrike in Iraq took out Qasem Soleimani, an Iranian General of the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and commander of its Quds Force, a division primarily responsible for extraterritorial military and clandestine operations.
Soleimani’s killing marked the most high profile political assassination in the region since that of another Iranian protégé – Lebanese Islamic Jihad Organization’s founder and then Hezbollah’s second-in-command Imad Mughniyeh in 2008; a man widely thought to have masterminded U.S. embassy bombing in Beirut, Lebanon in 1983, and described by none other than Soleimani as “the legend of our time.”
