President Donald Trump has once again taken out a top-level terrorist in the Middle East. This past Friday, Trump ordered a military operation that killed the leader of the U.S. terror-designated Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force, Gen. Qassim Soleimani, and other Iranian officials at the Baghdad International Airport.
According to a report, “In April 2019, the State Department announced Iran was responsible for killing 608 U.S. troops during the Iraq War. Soleimani was the head of the Iranian and Iranian-backed forces carrying out those operations killing American troops. According to the State Department, 17 percent of all deaths of U.S. personnel in Iraq from 2003 to 2011 were orchestrated by Soleimani.”
The Pentagon also confirmed that Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy commander of Iran-backed militias known as the Popular Mobilization Forces, was also killed in the strike.
“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, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force, a U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization,” the Pentagon said.
“General Soleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region,” it added. “This strike was aimed at deterring future Iranian attack plans.”
Soleimani and al-Muhandis are said to have been killed the moment Soleimani exited the plane he arrived on.
The attack comes after dozens of Iranian backed militiamen, who supported Soleimani, attacked the U.S. embassy in Baghdad earlier in the week.
"Soleimani is our leader" had been photographed spray-painted on windows by Iran-backed militiamen at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.
Actress and liberal activist Alyssa Milano seemed upset that Trump ordered a military strike that killed 25 Iranian-backed militiamen, tweeting “Thousands of Iraqi protesters furious over deadly U.S. airstrikes storm the American Embassy in Baghdad, breaking down doors and setting fires.”
She failed to mention that the attack was against Iranian militiamen working at terrorist Soleimani’s direction. Milano and others didn’t know he was the target, but now they do.
Another liberal activist and MSNBC host Joy Reid, decided to envoke the attack at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya that resulted in the deaths of four Americans, tweeting “As Trump’s Benghazi unfolds in Iraq” during embassy attack in Baghdad.
Florida Congressman Michael Waltz (R), a U.S. Army Green Beret Reservist, appeared on Fox News to praise the president’s measured political and military strike at Iran.
This is a bold, decisive and frankly long overdue move on the part of the United States to take down Soleimani. He is directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American soldiers, thousands if not tens of thousands of people across the Middle East. He’s the equivalent of Iran’s Head of CIA and Special Forces that runs all their militias and proxies across Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. Particularly during the height of the Iraq War [he was] running the Iranian-backed Iraqi Shiite militias that were bombing, shooting, ambushing and killing U.S. soldiers.”
Earlier this year, Republican Senators Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, John Cornyn, and others, penned a letter to President Donald Trump asking him to impose more sanctions against the Central Bank of Iran (CBI).
The letter suggested that the president use elements within two of Rubio’s cosponsored and sponsored the bill, the Hizballah International Financing Prevention Act and the Hizballah International Financing Prevention Amendments Act.
Sanctions were already in place against the CBI, but President Obama’s controversial 2015 Iran Nuclear deal or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) did away with those sanctions.
Upon taking office, Trump scrapped the nuclear deal and reestablished the sanctions against the CBI for its history of financing terrorism and illegally proliferating nuclear weapons and other ballistic missiles.
The letter focuses on addressing the threat that Iranian proxy Hezbollah poses to the U.S. and its allies in the region. The CBI has been funding Hezbollah’s acts of terror to the tune of $700 million a year.
Here is an excerpt to the letter to President Trump:
“Your administration rightly reinstated sanctions on CBI as part of the unprecedented maximum-pressure campaign against Iran and Hezbollah. You also recognized that the CBI’s malign conduct extends well beyond its support for Iran’s nuclear program. After the United States exited the Iran nuclear deal, the Treasury Department imposed sanctions against high-ranking CBI officials for funneling millions of dollars to Hezbollah on behalf of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force.
