Trump Envoy Issues Death Threat to Soleimani Successor, Head of Iran’s Quds Force
Thursday January 23, 2020
Just when you thought that Washington could not sink any lower in the international diplomacy game, the Trump White House compounds its previous misdeed by issuing a public death threat against the successor of assassinated Quds Force General Qasem Soleimani.
Presidential US Special Envoy to Iran, Brian Hook, gave a statement to the Arabic language newspaper, Asharq al-Awsat, where he warned new General of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Esmail Ghaani, that he will end up like Soleimani should he be accused of killing any Americans, remarking that, “follows the same path of killing Americans then he will meet the same fate.”
Soleimani was killed by a US drone strike on January 3, along with senior Iraqi PMU commander, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.
Hook continued saying,“We will hold the regime and its agents responsible for any attack on Americans or American interests in the region.”
Hook also went on to boast that Washington’s state-sponsored assassination of Soleimani has made the Middle East a safer place because it has “create a vacuum that the Regime will not be able to fill,” inferring that Ghaani will not be able to marshal “Iran’s agents in the region”.
Hook also repeated the common talking point that Soleimani was the ‘world’s most dangerous terrorist’ – a label which hardly corresponds with facts which clearly demonstrate that the Iranian military leader was leading the fight against ISIS and al-Qaeda in Iraq and Syria.
In the interview, Hook also used the opportunity to reinforce another State Department narrative which still claims that Iran somehow launched the September attack on Saudi Arabia’s Aramco oil facilities – even though the likely culprit, Yemen’s Houthi rebel forces, had already taken credit for the attack.
Reprinted with permission from 21st Century Wire.