Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a veteran Iraqi militant who was closely allied with Iran and rose to be a senior militia commander during the war against the ISIS, was killed overnight Friday in a US strike that also felled Iran’s top general.
Al-Muhandis was the deputy commander of the Popular Mobilization Forces, an umbrella group of mostly Shiite paramilitaries. He was also the founder of the Kataeb Hezbollah, or Hezbollah Brigades. The US blamed the group, which is separate from the Lebanese Hezbollah movement, for a rocket attack in northern Iraq last week that killed a US contractor.
The militias, many of which are backed by Iran and trace their roots back to Shia insurgency against US forces following the 2003 invasion, mobilised in 2014 when the ISIS swept across northern and western Iraq. Al-Muhandis, who had spent much of his life as a secretive operative in Iran’s regional shadow wars, emerged as a public face of the force, a tall man with a gray beard and thick glasses who was often seen on the front lines directing his fighters by radio.
He was killed in an American airstrike near Baghdad’s international airport around midnight along with Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force and the architect of its regional military alliances.