Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis

Jamal Jafaar Mohammed Ali Āl Ebrahim (Arabic: جمال جعفر محمد علي آل إبراهيم‎, 1954 – 3 January 2020), known by the kunya Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis (Arabic: أبو مهدي المهندس – literally, the engineer‎), was an Iraqi-Iranian military commander who headed the Popular Mobilisation Committee (Al-Hashd Al-Sha'abi), which is active against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant militant group.

The organisations he oversaw are reported to have close connections to the Quds Force, part of the Armed Forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

He was the commander of the Kata'ib Hezbollah militia, and prior to that worked with the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps against the Saddam Hussein regime.

Allegations of terrorism have been levelled against him over his activities in Kuwait in the 1980s. He was sentenced to death in absentia by a court in Kuwait for his involvement in 1983 Kuwait bombings. Muhandis was on the United States list of designated terrorists.

He was killed by a US airstrike at the Baghdad International Airport on 3 January 2020 which also killed Iran's Revolutionary Guard Commander Qasem Soleimani.

Biography

Jamal Jafaar al-Ibrahimi was born in 1954 in Basra, Iraq, to an Iraqi father and an Iranian mother. He finished his studies in engineering in 1977 and in the same year joined the Shia-based Dawa Party, which opposed the Ba'athist government. After the activity of the Dawa Party was banned by Saddam Hussein, Jamal fled, in 1979, across the border to Ahvaz in Iran, where the Iranians had set up a camp to train Iraqi dissidents, with the aim of undermining Saddam. He began working with Iran's Revolutionary Guard in Kuwait in 1983, organizing attacks on embassies of countries that supported Saddam in the Iran–Iraq War. Hours after the December 1983 bomb attacks on U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait, he fled to Iran. He was later convicted and sentenced to death in absentia by a court in Kuwait for planning the attacks. He settled in Iran, married an Iranian woman, and became an Iranian citizen. He was later appointed a military adviser to the Quds Force, advising on attacks against Iraqi military based in his hometown of Basra.

He returned to Iraq after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and served as a security adviser to the first Iraqi prime minister after the invasion, Ibrahim al-Jaafari. In 2005 he was elected to the Iraqi Parliament as a Dawa Party representative for the Babil Governorate. When U.S. officials realised his identity and connection with the 1983 attacks, they raised the issue with then-Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki in 2006 or 2007.[4] After this Jamal fled to Iran. He returned to Iraq after the withdrawal of US troops and became head of the Kata'ib Hezbollah militia, and then deputy chief of the Popular Mobilization Forces.

On 3 January 2020, al-Muhandis was killed in an airstrike while travelling in a convoy near Baghdad International Airport along with Qasem Soleimani.