Until a few weeks ago, he was among the strongest men in Syria — if not the strongest — but Javad Ghaffari’s last battle in the war-torn country was this time with no one other than the ruling elite he came to the country to defend.

“He became a liability,” an official Syrian source told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. “The time has changed, and he still wants to act as per the rules of war, when the war is almost over.”

The Iranian general, whose real name is Ahmad Madani, was appointed as head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) forces in Syria in 2015 to succeed Maj. Gen. Hussein Hamadani. Hamadani laid the foundation for the Iranian intervention in Syria and was killed in October 2015 in Aleppo by the Islamic State, according to what the IRGC announced. However, nonofficial accounts cast doubt over his death suggesting it was a car accident, and some Iranian websites claim it was an assassination.

Ghaffari was the choice of IRGC Quds Force’s slain commander Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, a source close to the Quds Force told Al-Monitor. The source said that there was a main hurdle preventing his appointment — Ghaffari’s marriage to a non-Iranian woman. “Soleimani took him to Tehran to meet the supreme leader and secured him an exception,” the source said.