Former IDF Intel Chief Admits Israel Was Involved In Assassination Of Top Iranian General Soleimani

JAKARTA - A former top official of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) admitted for the first time that Israel played a role in the assassination of Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani in Iraq, carried out by a US drone, in an interview.

In the early hours of January 3, 2020, an SUV and a minivan drove off the tarmac at Baghdad International Airport, Iraq, carrying a number of officials, including Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the head of the Shia Kata'ib militia. Hezbollah, as well as the deputy commander of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF).

Unbeknownst to the passengers, however, the cars were followed by a US Air Force MQ-9 Reaper drone, which moments later fired a Hellfire R9X missile, destroying the SUV and killing both.

Soleimani, commander of Iran's elite Quds Force, is on his way to meet Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi to lay the groundwork for reconciliation talks with Iran's arch-rival in the region, Saudi Arabia.

The general has broad respect in the region for his role in bringing down Daesh (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria, a role in which he developed close ties to the Iraqi PMF but which the Trump administration says was used to direct the militia to work as proxies for attack US troops in the region.

Just days after the attack, NBC reported that Israeli intelligence had participated in the operation, alerting the Americans to Soleimani's plane leaving Syria's Damascus airport for Baghdad.

Last week, Donald Trump, who was the US president at the time of the airstrikes, complained in an Axios interview that he felt pressured by Jerusalem to take the initiative in the operation.

However, the acknowledgment of participation by Major General Tamir Hayman, former head of the IDF's Directorate of Military Intelligence, in a recent interview with Israeli media, is the first by an Israeli official.

"Killing Soleimani is an achievement, because our main enemy, in my eyes, is the Iranians," Hayman said in the quarterly Israel Intelligence Heritage and Commemoration Center issue of Kislev's journal Mabat MLM, published in November, citing Sputnik News December 22.

Hayman said there were two significant and significant killings during his term which ended in October.

"The first, as I already remember, was Qassem Soleimani, it's rare to find someone so senior, who is the architect of the fighting force, strategist, and operator, that's rare," he said.

He called Iranian commanders the "train engine of Iran's stronghold" in Syria, where Israel has carried out airstrikes for years against targets it claims are Iranian facilities preparing to strike Israel.

Hayman added that the attack had succeeded "in preventing Iranian attempts to take root in Syria."

Israel has claimed the right to attack Iran in other ways, too, including a series of espionage operations against the country's nuclear program, which Israel claims aims to build nuclear weapons against them.

This includes sabotage, as well as assassinations such as the November 2020 killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a leading Iranian nuclear scientist.

Meanwhile, Tehran has repeatedly rejected claims it is pursuing nuclear weapons, which the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ruled in 2009 as a violation of Islam's moral code.

In contrast, Iran says it wants to use its purified uranium to fuel power plants and for use in medical research facilities, but has increased the quality and quantity of the uranium it produces to pressure the United States to return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. (JCPOA) the nuclear deal that unilaterally withdrew in 2018, reimposed crushing economic sanctions on Iran.