After midnight on 3 January 2020, a flight from Damascus, Syria, touched down at Baghdad International Airport. The flight, a few hours behind schedule, landed in a secluded area of the airport. Travelling on the flight to Baghdad was General Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force and the second highest ranking official in the Iranian government, behind Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Soleimani was being watched. Three drones armed with Hellfire missiles were hovering above the airport. Three teams of Delta Force operators, special forces under the control of the Joint Special Operation Command, hiding in old buildings and cars around the airport, were peering through their scopes. One member of the team had a camera which livestreamed images to the US Embassy in Baghdad. Next to the airplane, personnel from the Counter- Terrorism Group (CTG), an elite US-trained Kurdish unit, were disguised as airport operators. Their role was to help Delta snipers with wind calls and to provide final identity confirmation. The secretive military intelligence organisation Intelligence Support Activity (ISA), also known as Task Force Orange, was also on the ground for close-range tactical signal intelligence. In Tel Aviv, the US Joint Special Operation Command (JSOC) worked with its Israeli counterpart to track signals from Soleimani’s ever-changing cell phones.