BAGHDAD (Reuters)- – A month after a U.S. missile killed him, Qassem Soleimani looms as large over Iraq’s fractured democracy as he ever did alive. The death of the Iranian general removed a shrewd guiding hand on the pro-Tehran Shi’ite militias who revered him, setting off a menacing new instability in Iraq’s fragile political arena. Now the shadowy power structure he helped to build — a state above the state made up of Iraq’s formal institutions — risks colliding ever more bloodily with a powerful youth-led anti-Iranian protest movement.
