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Israeli Analyst: Most Iraqi Shiites Did Not Mourn Soleimani
(Algemeiner) Benjamin Kerstein - Veteran Middle East analyst Ehud Yaari noted, "The most important event of the last day following Soleimani's assassination is what did not happen: Baghdad's Shiites did not take to the streets to participate in a funeral procession." This demonstrates the crumbling of Iranian influence over Iraqi Shiites, who "have gone to Baghdad's squares for weeks to protest the government and burn [Iranian Supreme Leader] Khamenei's and Soleimani's pictures." "It turns out that most Shiites in Iraq are unwilling to join Soleimani's adulation as a fairy-tale hero and do not want to see Iraq become a battlefield between Iran and the United States." Yaari also pointed out that "most Shiite militias deployed by Iran in Iraq have left the country in recent days for fear of further assassinations by the Americans." Khamenei "in no way wants war. He would like to drag the United States into a skirmish in the form of attrition around the presence of 5,000 American troops in Iraq, but he does not want to provoke Tomahawk missiles and the U.S. Air Force. Iran has no answer to U.S. capabilities." Avi Melamed, President of Inside the Middle East: Intelligence Perspectives, noted, "Some argue that the assassination of Soleimani will increase tensions in the Middle East. This outlook confuses cause and effect: Tensions in the Middle East have intensified over the past decade because of the violent Iranian aggression which Soleimani spearheaded."