EXCLUSIVE: In 2007, the U.S. had an armed Predator drone trained on Soleimani but decided not to kill him. In what became settled U.S. policy for the next dozen years, the order came down to keep American hands off the Quds Force chief
One afternoon in Baghdad in the final months of 2007, a few members of a U.S. special operations task force were monitoring the feed from a Predator drone over the Iraqi capital, scanning for signs of trouble, when they spotted a large crowd gathering in the neighborhood of Sadr City.
As leader of the Quds Force, the covert action wing of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Soleimani was the patron of many of the Shiite militias then waging a vicious campaign against U.S. troops in Iraq. The Quds Force was providing its Shiite militia proxies with explosively formed penetrators , a deadly type of roadside bomb that could pierce armored vehicles and would eventually claim the lives of more than 600 U.S. troops.
Soleimani grew bolder. During the last years of the President George W. Bush administration, U.S. officials discovered that, with the help of Iraqi contacts, he had successfully snuck into the Green Zone — the highly fortified section of Baghdad that included the U.S. Embassy — several times. “This was a bit of an embarrassment to some in the Bush administration, and there were several officials who wanted to detain him next time this happened,” recalled a former CIA official.
The CIA was closely monitoring all of this. The agency and the U.S. military had access to “a lot of cameras” in Sadr City that allowed them to watch live video of trainers of the Quds Force and its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, instructing Shiite militiamen in urban warfare, Maguire said. But when CIA officers asked Army Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, head of Joint Special Operations Command , and other senior U.S.
It wasn’t just some in the CIA that felt their hands were tied. Task Force 17, the special operations force established to go after the Quds Force’s Shiite militias in Iraq, was likewise hamstrung. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki placed tight restrictions on any targeting of the Shiite militias and particularly Quds Force operatives. The task force frequently detained Quds Force officers, but Maliki always forced the Americans to release them within hours.
“For the Iranians, it was an easy message to have delivered, and to accommodate, because they had already achieved their desired outcome from their position,” which was greater influence in Iraq, and a drawdown in U.S. troops, Wise said. In these meetings, the Shiite political leaders would “sit silently and listen, their chief of staff would take notes, but they knew the tide had turned.”
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