Nearly a year after the U.S. airstrike that killed a revered Iranian military leader, a senior American general said that Tehran is still considering retaliatory steps, raising the possibility of renewed confrontation with Iran in the Trump administration’s final days. The State Department has already withdrawn some personnel from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad ahead of the first anniversary of the Jan. 3, 2020, strike on Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, who directed a network of armed groups across the Middle East that have launched violent attacks on Americans.

While the pace of rocket and missile fire at U.S. forces in Iraq has slowed in recent months, militiamen fired rockets at Baghdad’s Green Zone as recently as this past Sunday. No U.S. personnel were wounded or killed. Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie Jr., who heads the U.S. Central Command, said Iranian leaders would like to see further retaliation but were still grappling with internal disarray that has followed the loss of a leader who was the “mastermind” of militant activity by groups from Iraq to Lebanon to Yemen.

“The Iranians have never doubted our capability to respond. They never doubted that. But they’ve often doubted our will to respond,” McKenzie said. “I think that the Soleimani episode last January sort of set them back and they had to recalculate the will of the United States. We demonstrated a level of will that perhaps they did not believe that we would be able to have.”

McKenzie said the sudden death of someone he described as a charismatic leader and a “ruthless bureaucratic operator” also weakened Iran’s grip on militia groups in Iraq that have long been a threat to American personnel, injecting another element of unpredictability into American attempts to anticipate and prepare for further Iranian retaliation.