Trump’s killing of Qassem Suleimani triggered fall of Assad, says Tugendhat
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Ex-security minister says assassination ordered by Trump caused chain of events that led to revolution in Syria. Donald Trump’s decision to sanction the assassination of an elite Iranian commander triggered a chain of events that has revealed the country as a paper tiger and led to the overthrow of Basher al-Assad, the former UK security minister has said.
Tom Tugendhat, now on the Conservative backbenches and intending to focus on foreign policy, also predicts the Iranian regime will collapse in a few years. He said that, if handled properly, Syria could become the economic powerhouse of the Middle East within a decade.
It is unusual for a former British cabinet minister to lavish praise on what is seen by some as such a controversial act bordering on an extrajudicial killing. His remarks were made shortly before the fifth anniversary of Qassem Suleimani’s killing in Baghdad, an anniversary that led the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, again to claim in a speech in Tehran that the Syrian leadership will be forced to withdraw as “youth rises up” to defeat the newly installed Sunni regime.
Suleimani was instrumental in using Syria and Iraq as a base from which to drive back the Sunni Islamist group Islamic State and to entrench Iranian interests in both countries. Tugendhat argued on the Conflicted podcast that Suleimani’s death in a drone attack has proved to be a turning point.
He said: “I’m always struck by how some people can be much more seminal, much more key, pivotal to an organisation than you realise at the time. The reality is when Qassem Suleimani was killed in January 2020, he held in his head all the relationships, all the deals for everybody around the region.
