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Donald Trump calls slain Iran general Qassem Soleimani No.1 terrorist
In an address early on Saturday, Trump said he ordered the killing to “stop a war” and not to start one, even as thousands of additional US troops were deployed to the region.
United States President Donald Trump has called Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian general who was on Friday killed in a drone strike, the world’s “No. 1 terrorist” with a hand in plots across the world, including in New Delhi.
Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds force and mastermind of its regional security strategy, was killed in a US airstrike authorised by Trump early on Friday near the Iraqi capital’s international airport in an incident that has spiked global tensions.
In an address early on Saturday, Trump said he ordered the killing to “stop a war” and not to start one, even as thousands of additional US troops were deployed to the region. The leader of an Iran-backed Iraqi militia was also killed in the US strike.
“Soleimani made the death of innocent people his sick passion, contributing to terrorist plots as far away as New Delhi and London. Today we remember and honour the victims of Soleimani’s many atrocities and we take comfort in knowing that his reign of terror is over,” the US President said in what experts saw as an attempt to address audiences outside the US and convey global salience of the strike ordered by him.
The strike killed a total of five Iranian Guards and five members of Iraq’s Hashed al-Shaabi paramilitary network, whose members have close ties to Tehran. On Saturday, the Hashed said a new strike had hit a convoy of their forces north of Baghdad, with Iraqi state media blaming the US.
But US-led coalition spokesman Myles Caggins denied involvement, telling AFP: “There was no American or coalition strike.”
In his remarks, Trump was referring to the 2012 bombing of a car carrying the wife of an Israeli diplomat in New Delhi while she was on her way to collect their children from school. Several people were wounded but no one died in the attack. Israeli diplomats were targeted the same day in Tbilisi, Georgia and a day later in Bangkok, Thailand, in attacks that were blamed on Iran, as revenge for, in their view, the attacks on its scientists by Israel.
Trump said Soleimani was “plotting imminent and sinister attacks on American diplomats and military personnel”. He did not elaborate on the nature and other details of these planned attacks.
“We took action last night to stop a war,” Trump said even as experts pointed to the prospects of a military conflict heightening, with Iran vowing revenge. “We did not take action to start a war,” he added. Just a short while before, Pentagon announced sending 3,500 additional troops to the region.
“The recent attacks on US targets in Iraq, including rocket strikes that killed an American and injured four American servicemen very badly, as well as a violent assault on our embassy in Baghdad, were carried out at the direction of Soleimani,” the US President told reporters at his personal Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Friday.
In 2012, Israel had immediately blamed the New Delhi bombing on Iran, but the Indian government was found noticeably reluctant to publicly name Tehran, given their long and historic ties and Iran being one of its biggest suppliers of crude oil. A “strong message was sent privately” over the incident, according to a person involved in deliberations and who asked not to be named.
The Delhi Police had arrested a man who, they alleged, had worked with a five-man module of members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which was headed by Soleimani.
Tens of thousands of people marched in Baghdad on Saturday to mourn the Iran military chief.
Gholamali Abuhamzeh, a senior commander of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards, said Tehran would punish Americans “wherever they are in reach”, and raised the prospect of possible attacks on ships in the Gulf.
The US Embassy in Baghdad urged American citizens to leave Iraq following the strike at Baghdad airport that killed Soleimani. Dozens of American employees of foreign oil companies left the southern Iraqi city of Basra.
Close US ally Britain warned its nationals on Saturday to avoid all travel to Iraq, outside the autonomous Kurdistan region, and to avoid all but essential travel to Iran.
The US and its allies have suspended training of Iraqi forces due to the increased threat, the German military said in a letter seen by Reuters late on Friday.
Soleimani’s body was to be transferred on Saturday to the southwestern Iranian province of Khuzestan that borders Iraq. On Sunday, it will be taken to Mashhad in Iran’s northeast and from there to Tehran and his hometown Kerman in the southeast for burial on Tuesday, state media said.
The US strike followed a sharp increase in US-Iranian hostilities in Iraq since last week when pro-Iranian militia attacked the US Embassy in Baghdad following a deadly US air raid on the Kataib Hezbollah militia.
(With inputs from agencies in Baghdad)
