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https://scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/3046698/donald-trump-gives-new-justification-killing-qassem
World/ United States & Canada

Donald Trump gives new justification for killing Qassem Soleimani: he said ‘bad things’ about US

  • Trump said that officials counted down the last minutes of the general’s life as they watched the strike from ‘cameras that are miles in the sky’
  • The president also erroneously claimed that Soleimani was meeting ‘the head of Hezbollah’ while in Baghdad
US President Donald Trump. Photo: Bloomberg

US President Donald Trump gave a new justification for killing Qassem Soleimani, telling a gathering of Republican donors that the top Iranian general was “saying bad things about our country.”

“How much are we going to listen to?” Trump said on Friday, according to remarks from a fundraiser obtained by CNN. He also used a vulgar expression to describe the nature of Soleimani’s comments.

Trump spoke amid a brewing controversy in Washington, where some lawmakers, especially Democrats, have said the White House has repeatedly shifted its justification for the January 3 strike, which pushed Washington and Tehran to the brink of war.

The drone strike in Baghdad that killed Soleimani came days after a violent protest by Iranian-backed protesters at the US Embassy in Baghdad and a rocket attack that killed an American contractor at a facility in Iraq.

Secretary of State Michael Pompeo has said Soleimani was planning an imminent attack on Americans and working “to build out a network of campaign activities that were going to lead, potentially, to the death of many more Americans.” But he has also acknowledged that the administration did not necessarily know when and where future attacks were being planned. Trump told Fox News on January 10 that he believed Soleimani was planning attacks on the US embassy in Baghdad and three other US embassies in the region. Two days later, US Defence Secretary Mark Esper told CBS News that he “did not see” intelligence suggesting the specific threat Trump described.

“What the President said was, he believed it probably could have been,” Esper said in a separate interview with CNN. “He did not cite intelligence.”

Trump on Monday said his administration has been “totally consistent” in its explanation of the intelligence that justified the strike.“ Here’s what’s been consistent: We killed Soleimani, the number-one terrorist in the world by every account,” Trump said. “Bad person.”

At Friday’s fundraiser, held at the president’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, Trump described the attack on Soleimani in vivid detail, according to the recording obtained by CNN. He said military officials counted down the last minutes of the Iranian general’s life as they watched the strike from “cameras that are miles in the sky.”

The president also erroneously claimed – as he has before – that Soleimani was meeting “the head of Hezbollah” while in Baghdad.

Soleimani was met at the airport by Iraqi paramilitary leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the leader of Kata’ib Hezbollah. That is a paramilitary group separate from the more prominent Lebanese militant organisation, which also receives backing from Iran.

About 100 people attended Friday’s fundraiser, according to the president’s re-election campaign. The event was expected to raise US$10 million. In addition to his fundraising remarks, Trump tweeted publicly about Iran on Friday evening, saying that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “should be very careful with his words!” and that the people of Iran “deserve a government that is more interested in helping them achieve their dreams than killing them for demanding respect.”

Earlier in the day, Khamenei said Iran had delivered a “slap to the US’s image as a superpower” in a rare appearance leading Friday prayer in Tehran.