On 3 January 2020, an American drone, in a targeted strike in Baghdad, Iraq, killed Qassem Soleimani, an Iranian major general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), who had been the commander of the IRGC's Quds Force since 1998. Alongside Soleimani, the deputy head o Iraq's Popular Mobilisation Forces was also killed. Yesterday, 5 January 2020, Nigeria's Inspector General of Police placed police formations around the country on red alert following "intelligence report that some domestic interests in Nigeria are planning to embark on massive public disturbances and sabotage" following the killing of Soleimani.

Almost 17 years ago, the United States of America invaded Iraq to get rid of the regime of Saddam Hussein. The ostensible excuse given for this military operation was the search for “weapons of mass destruction”, but the real motivation was the maintenance of American political dominance in the Middle East. Added to this, it appears President George W. Bush, in building on the legacy of his father, President George H.W. Bush, had some old scores to settle with Mr Hussein.

The architects of US policy in the Middle East were criticised at the time for their short-term policy approach. Chief among the grouses of experts and political watchers was the failure to come to terms with the complex ethnoreligious composition of Iraq. Iraq is at least 64% Shi’a Muslim, so it was almost certain that a democratic Iraq would be Shi’a dominated. Since Iran is the major Shi’a power in that region as well as a neighbour, it is almost destined to play an influential role in Iraqi politics.

The US mismanaged the post-war occupation of Iraq and did not prepare for the inevitable showdown between the newly empowered Shi’a and the newly disenfranchised Sunnis (Hussein was Sunni) which led to bloody encounters, and for all intents and purposes, a civil war. For Iran, this presented a wonderful opportunity which they duly took advantage of. The US has been looking to exit the Middle East in tandem with Trump's isolationist foreign policy--Syria, Afghanistan, for example, but also dreaded the vacuum such an exit would create. Recent discourse in American foreign policy circles has been dominated by the tension between the country’s desire to leave Iraq and the reckoning that the investments made since 2001 are far too costly to be inherited by Iran.

There is so much bad blood between the US and Iran that it is difficult for both sides to have a rational conversation. Iran has its own grievances dating back to the American sponsored coup in 1953 that removed the democratically elected Mohammad Mosaddegh. The US then imposed and supported the unpopular Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi from 1953 to 1979. In 1979, the US was humiliated by a 444-day siege of its embassy in Tehran. In 1983, Iranian proxies in Lebanon destroyed the US Marines barracks in that country, resulting in the deaths of scores of American military personnel. Then in 1988, the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655, resulting in the deaths of 290 people. Having said that, the US and Iran did cooperate briefly to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan in the early 2000s, and ISIS in Syria and Iraq over the last three years, but these were temporary alliances of convenience, and hardliners on both sides did not like the idea. With the election of Donald Trump, the hardliners on the US side returned to power. Added to this is the fact that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has Mr Trump’s ears.

For the US the strategic calculus is simple; the US will not tolerate an expansion of Iran’s sphere of influence; from Iraq to Syria to Yemen – and in order to do that, would deploy a range of measures, including crippling the Iranian economy with sanctions. For Iran, this is intolerable, and it was inevitable that Iran and its proxies would lash out.

It is within this context that the killing of Qassem Soleimani, Iran's most powerful and revered military commander by a US airstrike in Iraq last week should be understood. What is clear is that a cycle of action and reaction has been initiated by this military action. What is not clear is where this ends.

Can the US conceivably affect regime change in Iran? Very unlikely.

Can the US eliminate Iranian influence in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen? Very unlikely as well.

Iran is a fact of life in the Middle East and nothing, short of a full invasion, can eliminate the “Iran threat”. So, while “surgical strikes” might satisfy a certain bloodlust and boost the ratings of American politicians, what matters are the final strategic ends – which are not clear.

Implications for Nigeria

The major short to medium term consequence of this escalation will be increased tension and brinkmanship in the Middle East. The impact on crude oil prices is difficult to predict but is based almost entirely on what course of action Iran pursues. If the Iranians succeed in crippling major oil installations in Saudi Arabia, the impact could be significant for a couple of months, but extra production elsewhere, and there is so much of that now, will make up for the losses. Iran's daily oil production has dropped to about around 2% of available global supply. This is completely different from the 1970s when they had a much larger share. So the major fears will not be about the loss of Iranian oil supply. The worry is the possibility that a vengeful Iran could target Middle Eastern oil production and shipping systems to effect a brutally costly disruption to the Middle-East oil trade either by gunboat piracy in the Straits of Hormuz or terrorist attacks on facilities belonging to American companies and its allies.

If the Iranians act in this manner, there will be a bump in oil prices that Nigeria will not mind considering its precarious public finances. The bump, however, will not last because as pointed out earlier, the US itself has somewhat insulated from the adverse effects of a price rise because of its newfound energy independence thanks to shale oil production. Nigeria cannot plan based on peak oil prices as a result of this event.

It is important to note that traditional US allies have not been too enthusiastic in their support for US policy on Iran. This may be linked to Trump’s America First policy. If push comes to shove and there is an all-out war (also an unlikely possibility), none of them will be willing to follow the US, except Israel. Australia, a supportive ally is unlikely to enter into the fray pressing domestic priorities - Scott Morrison’s government has come under withering criticism for an initially slow response to that country’s worst bushfire season. Britain's Johnson has said a major war in the Middle East is not in its interest. France holds a similar position.

The security angle for Nigeria is rather striking because the Nigerian Government is a pro-Sunni one that has been in serious conflict with the Islamic Movement of Nigeria, a Shi’a sect. It is important to remember that in October 2010, an Iranian national said to be a member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps was caught in Lagos’ Apapa Port trying to bring thirteen containers of weapons into the country.

It was not entirely clear if the weapons were merely in transit or were meant to be used in Nigeria. The Iranian, Azim Aghajani, was eventually given a five-year jail term along with his Nigerian accomplice. A US Treasury report on the case stated that a certain Esmail Ghaani was the person with financial oversight over the botched import operation as well as other Iranian operations on the African continent. Esmail Ghaani has been named to replace Qassem Solemaini as the new Commander of the Quds Force.

The exact scale and direction of Iran’s operations in Africa are unclear, but the illegal arms shipment that was intercepted is proof that there is a lot of interest from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Nigeria.

The IRGC is closely tied to the Lebanese Shi’a militia Hezbollah and Nigeria hosts a large Lebanese community. In theory, there is the distinct possibility that there could be cells operational or being set up in parts of Nigeria and the country’s lax and poorly-secured environment could provide a tempting choice of soft targets associated with the US. Any attacks could provide an increasingly heavy-handed Nigerian government justification for increased restrictions on the rights of citizens.

In conclusion, Soleimani's assassination represents another milestone in the evolution of America’s relationship with the Middle East. The big question is whether the US has outlived its usefulness to the Middle East, as the British, Russian and Ottoman empires did before it. In an election year where presidents are reticent to involve the country in any serious military engagement, the optics of the strike might help Trump's re-election chances by projecting the image of a strong leader, or hurt his chances if it is interpreted as a reckless act by an entitled, self-absorbed leader. The US might have sought to resolve a few questions by killing Soleimani, but for it, Iran, Iraq, the Middle East, Nigeria, and the global economy, the strike may have succeeded in heralding a new chapter of uncertainty and instability.

SB Morgen Intelligence

SOURCE: https://brandspurng.com/2020/01/06/how-could-the-soleimani-killing-impact-nigeria/

It won't...iranians are Shiites and our oga at d top hate dem with grade a passion.

the guy above me does not how these Muslims reason especially,the ones in the northern Nigeria.And una oga at the top is not different from them at all

A country with about 6000 nuclear warheads would dictate to NK not to own a single nuclear weapon.

A country with weapons of mass destruction invaded Iraq and killed the supreme leader with the excuse that he "might" posses weapons of mass destruction.

A country with the worse record of genocide and war crimes invaded Libya and killed her president, claiming to restore peace.
Libya and Iraq is still a death zone till date.

A country that killed a military general and several iranians because an American citizen was killed.
Yet, the president comes to boast about their weapons and all....

Is that a big brother or a bully?

A country that practices obvious imperialism, religious intolerance and neo-colonialism.

*TRUMP KILLS IRAN’S MOST OVERRATED WARRIOR*
..........
Suleimani pushed his country to build an empire, but drove it into the ground instead.
..........
By Thomas L. Friedman, Columnist, New York Times (January 03, 2020)
..........

One day they may name a street after President Trump in Tehran. Why? Because Trump just ordered the assassination of possibly the dumbest man in Iran and the most overrated strategist in the Middle East: Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani.
Think of the miscalculations this guy made. In 2015, the United States and the major European powers agreed to lift virtually all their sanctions on Iran, many dating back to 1979, in return for Iran halting its nuclear weapons program for a mere 15 years, but still maintaining the right to have a peaceful nuclear program. It was a great deal for Iran. Its economy grew by over 12 percent the next year. And what did Suleimani do with that windfall?

He and Iran’s supreme leader launched an aggressive regional imperial project that made Iran and its proxies the de facto controlling power in Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and Sana. This freaked out U.S. allies in the Sunni Arab world and Israel — and they pressed the Trump administration to respond. Trump himself was eager to tear up any treaty forged by President Obama, so he exited the nuclear deal and imposed oil sanctions on Iran that have now shrunk the Iranian economy by almost 10 percent and sent unemployment over 16 percent.

All that for the pleasure of saying that Tehran can call the shots in Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and Sana. What exactly was second prize?

With the Tehran regime severely deprived of funds, the ayatollahs had to raise gasoline prices at home, triggering massive domestic protests. That required a harsh crackdown by Iran’s clerics against their own people that left thousands jailed and killed, further weakening the legitimacy of the regime.
Then Mr. “Military Genius” Suleimani decided that, having propped up the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and helping to kill 500,000 Syrians in the process, he would overreach again and try to put direct pressure on Israel. He would do this by trying to transfer precision-guided rockets from Iran to Iranian proxy forces in Lebanon and Syria.

Alas, Suleimani discovered that fighting Israel — specifically, its combined air force, special forces, intelligence and cyber — is not like fighting the Nusra front or the Islamic State. The Israelis hit back hard, sending a whole bunch of Iranians home from Syria in caskets and hammering their proxies as far away as Western Iraq.
Indeed, Israeli intelligence had so penetrated Suleimani’s Quds Force and its proxies that Suleimani would land a plane with precision munitions in Syria at 5 p.m., and the Israeli air force would blow it up by 5:30 p.m. Suleimani’s men were like fish in a barrel. If Iran had a free press and a real parliament, he would have been fired for colossal mismanagement.

But it gets better, or actually worse, for Suleimani. Many of his obituaries say that he led the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq, in tacit alliance with America. Well, that’s true. But what they omit is that Suleimani’s, and Iran’s, overreaching in Iraq helped to produce the Islamic State in the first place.

It was Suleimani and his Quds Force pals who pushed Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, to push Sunnis out of the Iraqi government and army, stop paying salaries to Sunni soldiers, kill and arrest large numbers of peaceful Sunni protesters and generally turn Iraq into a Shiite-dominated sectarian state. The Islamic State was the counterreaction.

Finally, it was Suleimani’s project of making Iran the imperial power in the Middle East that turned Iran into the most hated power in the Middle East for many of the young, rising pro-democracy forces — both Sunnis and Shiites — in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq.

As the Iranian-American scholar Ray Takeyh pointed out in a wise essay in Politico, in recent years “Soleimani began expanding Iran’s imperial frontiers. For the first time in its history, Iran became a true regional power, stretching its influence from the banks of the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. Soleimani understood that Persians would not be willing to die in distant battlefields for the sake of Arabs, so he focused on recruiting Arabs and Afghans as an auxiliary force. He often boasted that he could create a militia in little time and deploy it against Iran’s various enemies.”

It was precisely those Suleimani proxies — Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen — that created pro-Iranian Shiite states-within-states in all of these countries. And it was precisely these states-within-states that helped to prevent any of these countries from cohering, fostered massive corruption and kept these countries from developing infrastructure — schools, roads, electricity.
And therefore it was Suleimani and his proxies — his “kingmakers” in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq — who increasingly came to be seen, and hated, as imperial powers in the region, even more so than Trump’s America. This triggered popular, authentic, bottom-up democracy movements in Lebanon and Iraq that involved Sunnis and Shiites locking arms together to demand noncorrupt, nonsectarian democratic governance.

On Nov. 27, Iraqi Shiites — yes, Iraqi Shiites — burned down the Iranian consulate in Najaf, Iraq, removing the Iranian flag from the building and putting an Iraqi flag in its place. That was after Iraqi Shiites, in September 2018, set the Iranian consulate in Basra ablaze, shouting condemnations of Iran’s interference in Iraqi politics.
The whole “protest” against the United States Embassy compound in Baghdad last week was almost certainly a Suleimani-staged operation to make it look as if Iraqis wanted America out when in fact it was the other way around. The protesters were paid pro-Iranian militiamen. No one in Baghdad was fooled by this.

In a way, it’s what got Suleimani killed. He so wanted to cover his failures in Iraq he decided to start provoking the Americans there by shelling their forces, hoping they would overreact, kill Iraqis and turn them against the United States. Trump, rather than taking the bait, killed Suleimani instead.

I have no idea whether this was wise or what will be the long-term implications. But here are two things I do know about the Middle East.
First, often in the Middle East the opposite of “bad” is not “good.” The opposite of bad often turns out to be “disorder.” Just because you take out a really bad actor like Suleimani doesn’t mean a good actor, or a good change in policy, comes in his wake. Suleimani is part of a system called the Islamic Revolution in Iran. That revolution has managed to use oil money and violence to stay in power since 1979 — and that is Iran’s tragedy, a tragedy that the death of one Iranian general will not change.
Today’s Iran is the heir to a great civilization and the home of an enormously talented people and significant culture. Wherever Iranians go in the world today, they thrive as scientists, doctors, artists, writers and filmmakers — except in the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose most famous exports are suicide bombing, cyberterrorism and proxy militia leaders. The very fact that Suleimani was probably the most famous Iranian in the region speaks to the utter emptiness of this regime, and how it has wasted the lives of two generations of Iranians by looking for dignity in all the wrong places and in all the wrong ways.

The other thing I know is that in the Middle East all important politics happens the morning after the morning after.
Yes, in the coming days there will be noisy protests in Iran, the burning of American flags and much crying for the “martyr.” The morning after the morning after? There will be a thousand quiet conversations inside Iran that won’t get reported. They will be about the travesty that is their own government and how it has squandered so much of Iran’s wealth and talent on an imperial project that has made Iran hated in the Middle East.
And yes, the morning after, America’s Sunni Arab allies will quietly celebrate Suleimani’s death, but we must never forget that it is the dysfunction of many of the Sunni Arab regimes — their lack of freedom, modern education and women’s empowerment — that made them so weak that Iran was able to take them over from the inside with its proxies.
I write these lines while flying over New Zealand, where the smoke from forest fires 2,500 miles away over eastern Australia can be seen and felt. Mother Nature doesn’t know Suleimani’s name, but everyone in the Arab world is going to know her name. Because the Middle East, particularly Iran, is becoming an environmental disaster area — running out of water, with rising desertification and overpopulation. If governments there don’t stop fighting and come together to build resilience against climate change — rather than celebrating self-promoting military frauds who conquer failed states and make them fail even more — they’re all doomed.

[s]

Officialgarri:
A country with about 6000 nuclear warheads would dictate to NK not to own a single nuclear weapon.

A country with weapons of mass destruction invaded Iraq and killed the supreme leader with the excuse that he "might" posses weapons of mass destruction.

A country with the worse record of genocide and war crimes invaded Libya and killed her president, claiming to restore peace.
Libya and Iraq is still a death zone till date.

A country that killed a military general and several iranians because an American citizen was killed.
Yet, the president comes to boast about their weapons and all....

Is that a big brother or a bully?

A country that practices obvious imperialism, religious intolerance and neo-colonialism.

[/s]