© Flickr / Day Donaldson
according to a weekly newspaper affiliated with the group that once controlled much of Syria and Iraq.
Soleimani was killed by a US drone strike on January 3, as he was being driven, with others, near Baghdad international airport. In reprisal, Iran launched a limited strike on US bases in Iraq with ballistic missiles on Tuesday, causing no casualties but demonstrating a capability to hit US assets at will.
The weekly Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) newspaper
Al-Naba portrayed Soleimani's death
as an act of god in support of its cause, and Muslims in general, according to BBC Monitoring.
An editorial in the jihadi paper was
careful not to credit the US or even mention Soleimani by name. It couched the gloating in a historical analogy, referring to "Roman-Persian wars" that enabled early Muslims to overrun both Persia - today's Iran - and parts of the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as Byzantium.
Comment: It's not just ISIS. Shaikh Muhaysni, tied to al-Qaeda in Syria, is also ecstatic that Soleimani is dead. You'd think more people would find it a bit curious that ISIS, al-Qaeda, the U.S. and Israel all share the same outlook.
You'd almost think they're working together on some level.
But no, that's just crazy talk... right?
Comment: That's the end of the matter as far as international diplomacy is concerned.
But it remains to be seen how an air-defense system operator mistook a Boeing 737 for a cruise missile.
Unless it was fiddled with in some way, the Ukrainian Airlines jet's transponder should have told the operator of the TOR-1M system that the object he was seeing on his radar screen is a Boeing 737.
Additionally, the plane's appearance on his screen should have in no way surprised him - it was the TENTH flight out of Tehran's Khomeini Airport that night. Prior to Flight 752, the last flight movement there was the departure - from the same runway and in the same direction - of QR8408 at 05:39 local time.
Why then was the air-defense operator surprised by this flight?