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The Shadow Commander: Soleimani, the US, and Iran's Global Ambitions
The process of writing a biography is seldom easy and it gets even more complicated if the subject is associated with politics and the military. Qasem Soleimani is considered a terrorist in one part of the world, yet adored and admired in another part. Soleimani, the de facto creator and longtime leader of Iran’s elite Quds Force unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), is an extremely controversial figure in the world and in Iranian politics. This book is particularly interesting because of the often aggressive and not always constructive foreign policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Tehran’s expansionist policy in the vast region from Afghanistan to Syria is a derivative of Iran’s fundamentalist revolutionary ideology and a factor in destabilizing regional politics. Following the will of the Islamic Republic founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s leaders are actively exporting fundamentalist Shiism, trying to strengthen their geopolitical and economic influence. After the Iranian revolution of 1979, there was practically no regional conflict in the Islamic world in which Iran was not involved and did not try to spread Shiism as a political worldview and ideology. In these wars, the shadow of Iran was always represented “like a mythical bandit in a folktale” by Soleimani (p. 6). The Shadow Commander is an interesting attempt to understand the mosaic of numerous regional conflicts in the dust and glory of the revolution and to analyze the internal political multisteps to the personality of Soleimani, as he signed his letters, “soldier and son” of the supreme leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei. Soleimani is a character from Hollywood action movies and epic films about spies and intelligence, who by the will of fate appears in various parts of the world defeating the enemies of the revolution and building the glory of the new Iran. At the same time, Soleimani is not one of the great humanists. He is known for his brutality, intransigence, and toughness, and is guilty of numerous murders and other violent crimes (p. 259). M