TEHRAN - Bassam Abu Abdullah, an expert on international relations, has said that assassination of Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani was a “miscalculation” by the United States.
“They thought this action will lead to annihilation of the resistance axis, but if we study response to this assassination, we will see that Washington miscalculated,” ISNA quoted him as saying on Sunday with an Arab media.
He said, “Iran targeted Ain al-Assad base and the United States kept silence while no country had targeted the United States’ military bases since the World War Two.”
“At first the United States announced that no one was injured. However, the Pentagon announced later that more than 100 military forces of the United States. Moreover, this action shows precision and power of their [Iran] missiles,” he added.
In an interview with the NBC News on February 14, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said U.S. President Donald Trump was misled to believe his country would get away with the assassination of Soleimani.
Trump believed that the assassination would augment U.S. security but it worked the other way around, Zarif said.
On January 3, Trump ordered strikes that martyred General Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the second-in-command of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (PMU).
In the early hours of January 8, the IRGC attacked the Ain al-Assad in Anbar province in western Iraq as part of its promised “tough revenge” for the U.S. terror attack.
“Iran responded in a proportionate way against the base from which the operations against Soleimani were carried out,” said Zarif.
He explained that Iran’s retaliatory attack was intended to show to the United States that they cannot bully Iran and that actions against Iran will have repercussions.
The Pentagon announced Friday the total number of U.S. service members who suffered brain injuries in the attack increased to 110.
Wendy Sherman, the former undersecretary of state for political affairs who led the U.S. negotiating team that concluded the Iran nuclear agreement, has said that assassination of Soleimani was an extraordinary risk.
“I think the president took an extraordinary risk and I don’t think we’ve seen the end of that risk yet,” WUSF News quoted her as saying in a news conference before the Ringling College Library Association Town Hall lecture series.
She added, “After he [Soleimani] was murdered by the United States government, they [the Iranian people] were in the streets protesting America. That’s not in our national security interest.”
She said that the assassination of Soleimani and the subsequent retaliation by Iran against U.S troops in Iraq brought the two countries close to war.
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