A secret meeting at a villa on the river ... revealed the attacks that Qasim Soleimani had ordered

In a villa in the Rusafa region on the eastern side of the Tigris River, General Qassem Soleimani met with his allies from the armed Shiite factions in Iraq in mid-October.

In the Karkh area on the west side of the river, the US embassy complex is located inside the heavily fortified Green Zone.

According to security officials and faction leaders, Soleimani instructed his biggest ally in Iraq to intensify attacks on American targets using new advanced weapons supplied to them by Iran.

The leaders of powerful factions attended the meeting, along with the deputy head of the popular crowd, Mahdi Al-Muhandis, who was killed alongside Soleimani in the American raid on Friday.

The strategic meeting - which media reports did not talk about before - came as massive protests against Iran's growing influence in Iraq were gaining momentum.

According to sources familiar with the meeting and close to the Iraqi Prime Minister, Soleimani's plans to attack American forces were aimed at provoking a military response that would divert this growing anger towards the United States.

Through interviews with Iraqi security sources and leaders of Shiite armed factions, Reuters highlights how Soleimani works in Iraq.

Soleimani once told Reuters that he knew Iraq by heart.

Diplomats, soldiers, and pilots
Two weeks before the villa overlooking the Tigris River, Soleimani ordered the Iranian Revolutionary Guard to transfer more sophisticated weapons to Iraq, including Katyusha rockets and shoulder-fired missiles that can land helicopters, through two border crossings.

At the villa meeting, Soleimani asked the assembled military leaders to form a new armed faction, unknown to the United States, that could carry out missile attacks on Americans in Iraqi military bases.

Sources familiar with the meetings stated that he ordered the Hezbollah Brigades - which was founded by the engineer and trained in Iran - to take over the implementation of the new plan.

Soleimani told the assembled that such a (new) group would "be difficult for the Americans to monitor."

And yesterday, Friday, American officials revealed that before the attacks, American intelligence services had believed that Soleimani was involved in an "advanced stage" in planning to attack Americans in several countries, including Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

A senior US official said that Soleimani supplied sophisticated weapons to the Hezbollah Brigades. US National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien told reporters that Soleimani had just returned from Damascus "where he was planning attacks on American soldiers, pilots, marines, sailors, and diplomats."

An official at the Iranian Revolutionary Guards headquarters declined to comment on these leaks, and it was not possible to obtain a comment from the Iranian Foreign Ministry.

It is noteworthy that Soleimani played a key role in expanding Iran's military influence in the Middle East as the director of covert operations outside Iran.

Soleimani, 62, was considered the second most powerful figure in the Islamic Republic after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

As for the engineer, he supervised the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces, which are an umbrella for the Shiite armed factions, mostly supported by Iran, and formally integrated into the Iraqi armed forces.

Like Soleimani, the engineer has long been on the radar of the United States, which has designated him a terrorist.

Iranian plane to photograph American soldiers
A commander in the armed factions said that Soleimani chose the Hezbollah Brigades to lead the attacks on the American forces in the area, because they had the ability to use the drones to explore the targets to attack them with Katyusha rockets.

Faction leaders have mentioned that among the weapons that Soleimani supplied to his allies were a drone developed by Iran that was able to hide from the radar systems' eyes.

According to Iraqi security officials, the Hezbollah brigades used drones to take aerial photographs of locations where American forces are deployed.

On December 27, more than thirty rockets were fired at an Iraqi military base near the city of Kirkuk in the north of the country in an attack that killed an American civilian contractor and wounded four Americans and two Iraqi soldiers.

Washington accused the Hezbollah Brigades of carrying out the attack, and the group denied this. Two days later, the United States launched air strikes targeting the group, killing at least 25 fighters and wounding 55.

The strikes sparked violent protests over the past two days by supporters of armed factions backed by Iran who stormed a security point in the vicinity of the US embassy and threw stones at the security forces.

This prompted Washington to send additional forces to the region and threaten revenge against Tehran.

Yesterday, Thursday, the US Secretary of Defense warned that his country might have to take pre-emptive action to protect American lives from expected attacks by Iranian-backed factions, stressing that "the rules of the game have changed."

Just hours after this threat, the US military carried out a raid on two vehicles near Baghdad International Airport, killing Soleimani, the engineer, and other Iranian and Iraqi personalities.