1. For the people of Iran, the news of killing of their hero, Gen Qasem Soleimani, is certain to come as a terrible shock and infuriate them to frenzy.
2. Iranian Foreign Minister Zawad Jariff has called it an act of ‘international terrorism’. It is the 9/11 moment for Tehran.
3. Is this a planned move by President Trump to revive and re-build the Islamic State or is it a direct provocation to Iran to declare a suicidal war on the US?
4. Will President Trump, who has repeatedly pulled back from the brink of ordering a strike on Iran finally go the whole hog?
5. Will the NATO forces join the US when it has struck the first blood? Most unlikely.
When I went to Tehran in December 2015, I saw these huge billboards of a General smiling down on the people of Tehran in a benign way, all along the streets from the airport to the city centre. I asked my Iranian guide, who was taking me to the International Conference on Terrorism that the Government of Iran was hosting, as to who was that? He said very proudly, that is General Qasem Soleimani, our national hero who is fighting the war against the ISIS in Syria.
What surprised me was that his pictures seemed to dominate next only to that of the two Ayotallahs: the founding Ayotallah of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ruholla Khomeini and the present leader, Ayotallah Ali Khameni. More importantly, his image was being actively promoted by the regime as a national hero and that the common man in Iran knew that he and his paramilitary force, the al-Quds, were fighting the ISIS in Syria. This was a time when the Gulf Kingdoms; Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Kuwait were all hiding their involvement in Syria. And so was Turkey.