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 Jan. 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 considered by some to be the second most powerful figure in Iran, behind Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whom Trump successfully 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.”
“He was a vicious, horrible human being, but he was a great general and a great leader—if you define a leader in a certain way—a very powerful leader,” he went on, just a few weeks after calling Soleimani a “brilliant general.”
“In fact, he was so powerful that I really think that the leadership of Iran was extremely happy when I took him out, but they don’t say that,” Trump said. “But nobody’s going to be asking them anymore, because they’re not here either.”
Over the past month, the U.S. and Israel’s war against Iran has killed around 40 of the country’s top officials.
Iranian civilians who have been killed number at least 1,492, according to The Human Rights Activists News Agency, while more than 1,110 people in Lebanon have been killed.
The U.S. death toll for American service members is 13.
After Soleimani’s death, the Russian Defense Ministry praised him as “a competent military leader,” who “commanded well-deserved authority and significant influence in the entire Middle Eastern region.”
