President Donald Trump on Friday called Qasem Soleimani, the high-ranking Iranian military officer he had killed by a drone strike, a “great leader.”
Trump, while trying to sell his Iran war at the Saudi-operated Future Investment Initiative in Miami, recalled his January 2020 strike on Soleimani near Baghdad International Airport. For 22 years, Soleimani was the commander of the Quds Force, the overseas extension of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. At the time of his death, he was widely considered to be the second most powerful figure in Iran, behind Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whom Trump killed earlier this month.
“It was a big moment, also in my first administration, when I took out Soleimani,” Trump, 79, said. “And a lot of people think that might have been the biggest thing of all, because he was a mad genius.”
Read more at The Daily Beast.
