AFP via Getty ImagesĮarly Saturday, the group said another airstrike that targeted a convoy in the Taji area north of Baghdad killed and wounded a number of PMF members. The Pentagon on Thursday confirmed the strike killed Soleimani, who as head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force became the architect of Tehran’s proxy conflicts in the Middle East.Ību Mahdi al-Muhandis – the deputy head of the Iran-backed Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) – was also killed, according to a statement from the PMF, which said the pair “were martyred by an American strike.”Ību Mahdi al-Muhandis, left, and Qasem Soleimani were killed in the US strike. The strike, condemned by Iran and its allies as an “assassination,” has been met with concern by European officials and the United Nations, who have called for de-escalation. The move marks a major escalation in regional tensions that have pitted Tehran against Washington and its allies in the Middle East, raising the specter of further regional destabilization. By assassinating, by an act of terror, against one of our top generals,” he told CNN. “The US has started the economic war in – in May 2018. He said Washington has escalated a war it began when it pulled out of a nuclear deal with Tehran. By whom? When? Where? That is for the future to witness,” he said. “The response for a military action is a military action. He said the strike had escalated a war that started when the US pulled out of a nuclear deal with Tehran in 2018. It was “tantamount to opening a war,” Majid Takht Ravanchi, Iran’s ambassador to the UN, told CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront” on Friday. Iran, in a letter to the United Nations, called the attack state terrorism and an unlawful criminal act. Later, while at a Miami church for an Evangelicals for Trump event, the President said: “He was planning a very major attack and we got him.” We did not take action to start a war,” Trump said in a statement from his Mar-a-Lago resort on Friday, a day after a US drone strike on a Baghdad airport killed Qasem Soleimani. “We took action last night to stop a war. US President Donald Trump has said that he ordered a precision strike to “terminate” a top Iranian commander who was plotting “imminent and sinister attacks” on Americans, adding that the decision was one of deterrence rather than aggression.
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