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General Qassem Soleimani Assassinated in Baghdad, Khamenei Promises a Tough Iranian Revenge

January 3, 2020

Major General Qassem Soleimani

 

Iran's Top General Qassem Soleimani Martyred in US Targeted Assassination

Fars News, January 3, 2020

TEHRAN (FNA)-

Commander of Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), Qods Force, Major General Qassem Soleimani was martyred in a targeted assassination attack by US aircraft at Baghdad International Airport early Friday morning.

"General Qassem Soleimani has been martyred by the US helicopters after lifetime efforts," the IRGC said in a statement early Friday morning.

The airstrike also martyred Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy commander of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), or Hashad al-Shabi. The PMF media arm said the two were martyred in an American airstrike that targeted their vehicle on the road to the airport.

A PMF official said seven people were martyred by missiles fired by the US helicopters at Baghdad International Airport.

He said the dead included the PMF airport protocol officer, Mohammed Reda.

The Pentagon confirmed the attack in a statement.

The attack came amid tensions that started by the US attack on PMF units that killed 25 Iraqi popular forces. A day later, Iraqi people attacked the US embassy in Baghdad. On Wednesday President Donald Trump ordered about 750 US soldiers deployed to the Middle East.

US officials earlier suggested they were to engage in further retaliatory attacks in Iraq.

The developments also represent a major downturn in Iraq-US relations that could further undermine US influence in the region and American troops in Iraq and weaken Washington’s hand in its pressure campaign against Iran.

US President Donald Trump was vacationing on his estate in Palm Beach, Florida, but sent out a tweet of an American flag.

The attack represents a dramatic escalation by the US toward Iran after months of tensions. The tensions take root in Trump’s decision in May 2018 to withdraw the US from Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers, struck under his predecessor.

https://en.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13981013000048

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Iran's Leader: US Must Await 'Tough Revenge' Following Assassination of General Soleimani

Fars News, January 3, 2020

TEHRAN (FNA)-

Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei stated on Friday those who assassinated Commander of Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), Qods Force, Major General Qassem Soleimani must await a tough revenge.

Ayatollah Khamenei said in a statement on Friday that the “cruelest people on earth” assassinated the “honorable” commander who “courageously fought for years against the evils and bandits of the world”.

His demise will not stop his mission, but the criminals who have the blood of General Soleimani and other martyrs of the attack on their hands must await a tough revenge, the Leader added.

The Leader noted that all the friends and foes must know that the Resistance movement’s struggle will continue more strongly, and a definite victory awaits those who fight on this auspicious path.

“The demise of our selfless and dear general is bitter, but the continued fight and achievement of the final victory will make life bitterer for the murderers and criminals,” he stressed.

In his statement, the Leader also offered condolences to the Iranian nation and General Soleimani’s family, and declared three days of national mourning over the tragedy.

General Soleimani was martyred in a targeted assassination attack by US aircraft at Baghdad International Airport early Friday morning.

The airstrike also martyred Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy commander of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), or Hashad al-Shabi. The PMF media arm reported that the two were martyred in an American airstrike that targeted their vehicle on the road to the airport.

The Pentagon confirmed the attack in a statement.

The attack came amid tensions that started by the US attack on PMF units that killed 28 Iraqi popular forces. A day later, Iraqi people attacked the US embassy in Baghdad. On Wednesday President Donald Trump ordered about 750 US soldiers deployed to the Middle East.

US officials earlier suggested they were to engage in further retaliatory attacks in Iraq.

The developments also represent a major downturn in Iraq-US relations that could further undermine US influence in the region and American troops in Iraq and weaken Washington’s hand in its pressure campaign against Iran.

The attack represents a dramatic escalation by the US toward Iran after months of tensions. The tensions take root in Trump’s decision in May 2018 to withdraw the US from Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers, struck under his predecessor.

https://en.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13981013000141  

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Top Iranian General Qassim Suleimani Is Killed on Trump’s Orders, Officials Say

New York Times, January 3, 2020

By Falih Hassan, Alissa J. Rubin, Michael Crowley and Eric Schmitt

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. —

The commander of Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guards Corps was killed early Friday in a drone strike at Baghdad International Airport that was authorized by President Trump, American officials said.

The commander, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, and several officials from Iraqi militias backed by Tehran were killed when an American MQ-9 Reaper drone fired missiles into a convoy that was leaving the airport.

The killing of General Suleimani was a staggering blow for Iran’s military and national pride, and was a serious escalation of Mr. Trump’s growing confrontation with Tehran, one that began with the death of an American contractor in Iraq in late December.

Regional analysts said Iran’s leaders were likely to treat General Suleimani’s killing as an act of war. United States officials were braced for potential Iranian retaliatory attacks, possibly including cyberattacks and terrorism, on American interests and allies.

United States officials consider General Suleimani responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American soldiers during the Iraq war, when he provided Iraqi insurgents with advanced bomb-making equipment and training. They also say he has masterminded destabilizing Iranian activities that continue throughout the Middle East and are aimed at the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

“General Suleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region,” the Pentagon said in a statement. “General Suleimani and his Quds Force were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American and coalition service members and the wounding of thousands more.”

It did not elaborate on the specific intelligence to led them to carry out General Suleimani’s killing. The highly classified mission was set in motion after the American contractor’s death on Dec. 27 during a rocket attack by an Iranian-backed militia, a senior American official said.

While many Republicans said that the president had been justified in the attack, Mr. Trump’s most significant use of military force to date, critics of his Iran policy called the strike a reckless unilateral escalation that could have drastic and unforeseen consequences that could ripple violently throughout the Middle East.

In killing General Suleimani, President Trump took an action that previous presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama had rejected, fearing it could end in catastrophe, destabilizing the region further and perhaps leading to all out war between the United States and Iran.

“Soleimani was an enemy of the United States. That’s not a question,” Representative Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, wrote on Twitter, using an alternate spelling of the Iranian’s name. “The question is this - as reports suggest, did America just assassinate, without any congressional authorization, the second most powerful person in Iran, knowingly setting off a potential massive regional war?”

Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, called the killing of Mr. Suleimani an act of “international terrorism” and warned it was “extremely dangerous & a foolish escalation.”

“The US bears responsibility for all consequences of its rogue adventurism,” Mr. Zarif tweeted.

Speaking to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., on Tuesday night, hours after an assault on the American Embassy in Baghdad that United States officials said was orchestrated by Iran, Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly vowed to end American entanglements in the Middle East, insisted that he did not want war.

“I don’t think that would be a good idea for Iran. It wouldn’t last very long,” Mr. Trump said. “Do I want to? No. I want to have peace. I like peace.”

The strikes followed a warning on Thursday afternoon from Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper, who said the United States military would pre-emptively strike Iranian-backed forces in Iraq and Syria if there were signs the paramilitary groups were planning more attacks against American bases and personnel in the region.

“If we get word of attacks, we will take pre-emptive action as well to protect American forces, protect American lives,” Mr. Esper said. “The game has changed.”

“This strike was aimed at deterring future Iranian attack plans,” the Pentagon statement added. “The United States will continue to take all necessary action to protect our people and our interests wherever they are around the world.”

In Iran, state television interrupted its programing to announce General Suleimani’s death.

The news anchor recited the Islamic prayer for the dead — “From God we came and to God we return” — beside a picture of General Suleimani.

Hawkish Trump administration allies cheered the strike. “This is devastating for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, the regime and Khamenei’s regional ambitions,” said Mark Dubowitz, chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, referring to the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

“For 23 years, he has been the equivalent of the J.S.O.C. commander, the C.I.A. director and Iran’s real foreign minister,” Mr. Dubowitz said, using an acronym for the United States Joint Special Operations Command. “He is irreplaceable and indispensable” to Iran’s military establishment.

For those same reasons, other regional analysts warned, Iran is likely to respond with a intensity of dangerous proportions.

The United States killed Iran's top general and architect of Tehran's proxy wars in the Middle East in an airstrike at Baghdad's international airport on Jan. 2, an attack that threatens to dramatically ratchet up tensions in the region.

The Pentagon said on Jan. 2 that the U.S. military has killed Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran's elite Quds Force, at the direction of President Donald Trump.

President Donald Trump ordered a visa ban on senior Iranian government officials and their family members, barring them from entering the United States to travel, study or work on Sept. 25 in New York. (Pictured) Donald Trump speaks during a press conference on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 25 in New York City.

“From Iran’s perspective, it is hard to imagine a more deliberately provocative act,” said Robert Malley, president and chief executive of the International Crisis Group. “And it is hard to imagine that Iran will not retaliate in a highly aggressive manner.”

“Whether president Trump intended it or not, it is, for all practical purposes, a declaration of war,” added Mr. Malley, who served as White House coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa and the gulf region in the Obama administration.

Some United States officials and Trump administration advisers offered a less dire scenario, arguing that the show of force might convince Iran that its acts of aggression against American interests and allies have grown too dangerous, and that a president the Iranians may have come to see as risk-averse is in fact willing to escalate.

One senior administration official said the president’s senior advisers had come to worry that Mr. Trump had sent too many signals — including when he called off a planned missile strike in late June — that he did not want to a war with Iran.

The official recalled that Tehran backed down during the so-called Tanker War of the 1980s after an American warship accidentally downed an Iranian passenger jet it mistook for a hostile plane.

But the official, who spoke on the grounds of anonymity, also acknowledged that Mr. Suleimani’s killing presented huge risks for Mr. Trump, and could just as likely prompt an outsize reaction.

Current and former American commanders and intelligence officials say tracking Mr. Suleimani’s location at any given time is a top priority for American spy services and the military, and Thursday night’s attack drew upon a combination of highly classified information from informants, electronic intercepts, reconnaissance aircraft and other surveillance.

The strike killed five people, including the pro-Iranian chief of an umbrella group for Iraqi militias, Iraqi television reported and militia officials confirmed. The militia chief, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, was a strongly pro-Iranian figure.

The public relations chief for the umbrella group, the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, Mohammed Ridha Jabri, was killed as well.

American officials said that multiple missiles hit the convoy in a strike carried out by the Joint Special Operations Command.

American military officials said they were aware of a potentially violent response from Iran and its proxies, and were taking steps they declined to specify to protect American personnel in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world.

Two other people were killed in the strike, according to a general at the Baghdad joint command, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media.

According to the Iraqi general, General Suleimani and Mr. Ridha, the militia public relations official, arrived by plane at Baghdad International Airport from Syria.

Two cars stopped at the bottom of the airplane steps and picked them up. Mr. al-Muhandis was in one of the cars.

As the two cars left the airport, they were struck, the general said.

The strike was the second attack at the airport within hours.

An earlier attack, late Thursday, involved three rockets that did not appear to have caused any injuries.

The strikes come days after American forces bombed three outposts of Kataib Hezbollah, an Iranian-supported militia in Iraq and Syria, in retaliation for the death of an American contractor in a rocket attack last week near the Iraqi city of Kirkuk.

The United States said that Kataib Hezbollah fired 31 rockets into a base in Kirkuk Province last week, killing an American contractor and wounding several American and Iraqi servicemen.

The Americans responded by bombing three sites of the Khataib Hezbollah militia near Qaim in western Iraq and two sites in Syria. Khataib Hezbollah denied involvement in the attack in Kirkuk.

Pro-Iranian militia members then marched on the American Embassy on Tuesday, effectively imprisoning its diplomats inside for more than 24 hours while thousands of militia members thronged outside. They burned the embassy’s reception area, planted militia flags on its roof and scrawled graffiti on its walls.

No injuries or deaths were reported, and the militia members did not enter the embassy building.

They withdrew late Wednesday afternoon.

The Pentagon statement Thursday night said that General Suleimani “had orchestrated attacks on coalition bases in Iraq over the last several months,” including the one that killed an American contractor last Friday.

General Suleimani also “approved the attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad,” the statement said.

Mr. Trump said on Tuesday that Iran would “be held fully responsible” for the attack on the embassy, in which protesters set fire to a reception building on the embassy compound, which covers more than 100 acres. He also blamed Tehran for directing the unrest.

Washington and Tehran appear intent on ratcheting up both their messaging and their forces, raising concerns of a larger conflict. In the past several months, Iranian-supported militias have increased rocket attacks on bases housing American troops. The Pentagon has dispatched more than 14,000 troops to the region since May.

Caught in the middle is the Iraqi government, which is too weak to establish any military authority over some of the more established Iranian-supported Shiite militias.

On Thursday, Mr. Esper said the Iraqi government was not doing enough to contain them. The Iraqis need to “stop these attacks from happening and get the Iranian influence out of the government,” Mr. Esper said.

Representative Andy Kim, Democrat of New Jersey, who served as the National Security Council’s director for Iraq under Mr. Obama, said the strike would most likely elicit “a very serious backlash” from a number of Iraqi leaders for taking the action on Iraqi soil, as well as Shia communities “that already were protesting and upset in recent days.”

“This is something that is going to make it very difficult for our diplomatic presence there, our military presence there,” Mr. Kim said in an interview.

General Suleimani was long a figure of intense interest to people in and out of Iran.

He was not only in charge of Iranian intelligence gathering and covert military operations, he was regarded as one of Iran’s most cunning and autonomous military figures. He was also believed to be very close to the country’s supreme leader, Mr. Khamenei, and was seen as a potential future leader of Iran.

The United States and Iran have long been involved in a shadow war in battlegrounds across the Middle East — from Iraq to Yemen to Syria. The tactics have generally involved using proxies to carry out the fighting, providing a buffer from a direct confrontation between Washington and Tehran that could draw America into yet other ground conflict with no discernible endgame.

The potential for a regional conflagration was a basis of the Obama administration’s push for a 2015 agreement that froze Iran’s nuclear program in return for sanctions relief.

Mr. Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018, saying that Mr. Obama’s agreement had emboldened Iran, giving it economic breathing room to plow hundreds of millions of dollars into a campaign of violence around the region. Mr. Trump responded with a campaign of “maximum pressure” that began with punishing new economic sanctions, which began a new era of brinkmanship and uncertainly, with neither side knowing just how far the other was willing to escalate violence and risk a wider war. In recent days it has spilled into the military arena.

The killing of General Suleimani is also likely to further strain a coalition that the Trump administration had tried to build to blunt Iranian aggression. The coalition, made up primarily of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Israel, in recent months has begun to fracture amid concerns among the Arab nations that rising tensions might lead to more direct attacks on the Arab nations.

His presence in Iraq would not have been surprising.

General Suleimani led the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ Quds Force, a special forces unit responsible for Iranian operations outside Iran’s borders. He once described himself to a senior Iraqi intelligence official as the “sole authority for Iranian actions in Iraq,” the official later told American officials in Baghdad.

In his speech denouncing Mr. Trump, he was even less discreet — and openly mocking.

“We are near you, where you can’t even imagine,” he said. “We are ready. We are the man of this arena.”

Michael Crowley reported from West Palm Beach, Fla.; Falih Hassan from Baghdad; and Eric Schmitt from Washington. Reporting was contributed by Alissa J. Rubin from Paris, Farnaz Fassihi from New York and Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Helene Cooper, Mark Mazzetti, Catie Edmondson and Edward Wong from Washington.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/top-iranian-general-qassim-suleimani-is-killed-on-trumps-orders-officials-say/ar-BBYz0Zs?ocid=spartandhp

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