Iran Strikes Back: Ballistic Missiles on US Bases After Soleimani Killing

General Qassem Soleimani was not simply a military commander when he was killed by a US drone strike at Baghdad International Airport on January 3, 2020: he was the architect and operational manager of Iran's entire regional proxy network, the most consequential military figure the Islamic Republic had produced since the Iran-Iraq War, and the person most personally responsible for converting the IRGC Quds Force from a regional arm of Iranian foreign policy into the most capable non-state military network in the Middle East. Under Soleimani's command since 1998, the Quds Force had cultivated, armed, funded, and operationally directed Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, the Popular Mobilisation Forces in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen, and militia networks in Syria that had been decisive in keeping Bashar al-Assad's government in power through the Syrian civil war. Soleimani had survived multiple assassination attempts and had operated openly in Iraq and Syria for years with a visibility unusual for a covert operations commander — he appeared in front-line photographs alongside IRGC-supported militias, was photographed in Aleppo during Syrian operations, and had been sanctioned by the United States Treasury since 2011 without the designation translating into a kinetic targeting decision by the Obama or Trump administrations until the night of January 3. The Trump administration justified the assassination on the grounds of an "imminent threat" to American diplomatic facilities and personnel in Iraq, but the strike also killed Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy commander of Iraq's Popular Mobilisation Forces and a key link in the Quds Force's Iraqi network — a pairing that left no ambiguity about the operation's breadth of target set.

Iran's response came five days later, on January 8, 2020, when the IRGC Aerospace Force launched more than a dozen Qiam and Fateh-313 ballistic missiles at two Iraqi facilities housing US troops: Al-Asad Air Base in Iraq's Anbar province, which had been the hub for US operations in western Iraq and was the largest US military installation in the country, and Erbil International Airport in the Kurdistan Region, which housed US Special Operations forces. The strikes were announced in advance through Iraqi intermediaries — Baghdad had been informed through official channels hours before the launches, giving US forces warning time to take protective shelter. This pre-notification was a deliberate strategic choice: Iran intended to demonstrate ballistic missile capability and willingness to strike American facilities while managing the risk of causing US casualties at a scale that would have triggered immediate and overwhelming American retaliation. The missiles struck the bases with significant accuracy, demonstrating improvements in Iranian ballistic missile precision, but the pre-notification produced no American fatalities on the night of the strikes — a fact Iran publicly noted as evidence that its operation had been calibrated to signal resolve without triggering an uncontrollable escalation. The Trump administration initially stated there were no US casualties; subsequent reporting and a formal Pentagon acknowledgement revealed that more than 100 US servicemembers had suffered traumatic brain injuries from the blast pressure of the strikes — injuries the administration had initially declined to classify as casualties, producing a secondary political controversy about how the human cost of Iranian retaliation was being reported.

The same night as the ballistic missile strikes, IRGC air defence units operating around Tehran on maximum alert, in the heightened security posture triggered by the crisis, detected what they assessed as incoming hostile cruise missiles and fired surface-to-air missiles at the contact. The target was Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752, a Boeing 737-800 carrying 176 passengers and crew — 82 Iranians, 63 Canadians, 11 Ukrainians, 10 Swedes, 4 Afghans, 3 Germans, and 3 British nationals — that had taken off from Imam Khomeini International Airport minutes earlier. All 176 aboard were killed. The IRGC initially denied responsibility, and Iranian officials publicly stated that the aircraft had experienced a mechanical failure. Within three days, however, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stated publicly that Canadian intelligence indicated the aircraft had been shot down by an Iranian missile, and the IRGC admitted responsibility on January 11, framing the shootdown as an "unintentional human error" by an operator who had misidentified the aircraft. The admission triggered a second wave of international outrage — from Canada, Ukraine, the UK, Sweden, and Germany, whose nationals had died — and an immediate wave of domestic protest inside Iran against a government that had killed its own nationals and then lied about it for three days while families sought information about their relatives. The PS752 shootdown became a distinct political crisis layered onto the Soleimani aftermath: it damaged the IRGC's domestic legitimacy with segments of the Iranian middle class in a way that pure military confrontation with the United States had not, and it established the pattern — an Iranian military action followed by an Iranian information failure followed by a forced admission that produced deeper domestic damage than the action itself — that would recur throughout the escalation cycle leading to the 2026 war.