Abu Mahdi Muhandis was a power broker who helped guarantee discipline among paramilitary groups. By Nabih Bulos. Qassem Suleimani, commander of the elite Quds Force. Moments later, after the two men and their companions had climbed into an SUV and headed onto the highway out of the airport, a U.
Both men died in the strike early Friday. For many, he was the face of Iran in the country. It has since morphed into a political party with significant economic interests. When Saddam Hussein seized power in , Muhandis fled to Kuwait. The Dawa, meanwhile, had moved its headquarters to Iran in One of those countries was Kuwait: In , a Kuwaiti court later alleged, Muhandis was part of a team of operatives linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that conducted a series of bombings in Kuwait City on the U.
It was an early use of transnational Shiite irregular forces now seen in all battlefields involving Tehran. Muhandis escaped to Iran before he could be arrested.
There, he spent much of the next two decades as a political operator and a leader in what was known as the Badr Brigade. The group has since become a political party, with its armed wing part of the Popular Mobilization Forces. The U. But when U. In the intervening years he agitated for ever-stronger links between Iraq and Iran β a position he personified in many ways: He was a dual citizen of both countries, spoke fluent Arabic and Persian, was married to an Iranian woman and had a house in Tehran.
He was later designated as a threat to peace and stability in Iraq by the U. Despite his ties to Iran, Muhandis nevertheless found himself fighting on the same side as the Americans in , when Islamic State extremists swatted aside entire Iraqi army brigades and took over a third of Iraq. Muhandis was also seen as a guarantor of some measure of discipline among the militias, which, despite ostensibly operating under the aegis of the state, have acted on their own authority in the past and would clash with regular troops.
