A lion in winter

AS IRAN’S most prominent security operative, Major-General Qassem Suleimani has long been respected at home; but as a creature of the shadows. That changed when pictures of him appeared on social media from the battlefields in Iraq, directing the fight against Islamic State and pushing its jihadists back from the approaches to Baghdad. The 58-year-old commander of the Quds Force, the foreign wing of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), quickly became a celebrity, even winning a Man of the Year poll. With Iran keen to project its growing influence in the Middle East, the pictures of General Suleimani were at first tolerated and then actively encouraged in state-run newspapers. He even acquired a parody Twitter account, and some admirers fawningly dubbed him “Supermani”.

This has all changed again. In recent months General Suleimani has all but vanished from view, only appearing this week to give his scheduled annual report on regional affairs to Iran’s powerful Assembly of Experts. Not only are the selfies of him posing with Shia militias now seen as unhelpful, but much of his strategy has also been called into question. “He put too much pressure on Iraq’s Sunnis. There were a lot of complaints about him,” says a political analyst in Tehran. Chief of the critics, it is said, is Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most senior Shia cleric. A public rebuke by the ayatollah, issued on March 13th, followed a series of boastful remarks by the general about Iran’s mighty influence in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Bahrain. A private message of concern from Mr Sistani even reached Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to a well-placed source in Tehran. But it was comments made shortly afterwards attributed to General Suleimani, about the so-called Shia crescent reaching a fifth Arab state, Jordan, that proved the final straw. “He is under the control of a council now and can no longer act as a de facto foreign minister,” the source says.