Pentagon Confirms U.S. Killed Senior Iranian Commander
3 Jan., Kathmandu : The U.S. Department of Defense announced on Thursday night that U.S. forces had carried out a strike that killed Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps. “At the direction of the President, the U.S. military has taken decisive defensive action to protect U.S. personnel abroad by killing Qasem Soleimani,” said the Pentagon in a statement. “This strike was aimed at deterring future Iranian attack plans,” the statement added.
An attack near Baghdad International Airport on Friday killed Soleimani, along with Abu Mahdi al-Muhamdis, the deputy chief of Iraq’s paramilitary Hashd Shaabi forces, reported the Iraqi state TV earlier Friday. The attack came amid high tensions between Washington and Tehran.
PM says US strike threatens ‘devastating war’
Iraq’s caretaker prime minister Adel Abdel Mahdi slammed a US strike that killed top Iraqi and Iranian commanders in Baghdad on Friday as an “aggression” that would “spark a devastating war”. “The assassination of an Iraqi military commander in an official post is an aggression against the country of Iraq, its state, its government and its people,” Abdel Mahdi said in a statement.
He was referring to Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy head of the powerful Hashed al-Shaabi paramilitary force, who died in the strike along with Iranian commander Major General Qasem Soleimani. Abdel Mahdi said the strike was also a “flagrant violation of the conditions authorising the presence of US troops” on Iraqi soil. AFP/Xinhua
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