04 February 2024 , 18:05
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Donald Trump claims Iran called him before launching strikes in Iraq and said that it was out of 'respect'.
The former US President says they called in response to the killing of General Qassem Soleimani to let him know that Americans were not going to be hit and they would intentionally miss their targets. The former US President suggests Israel was a part of the plans to assassinate the powerful Iranian four years ago.
“I had Iran in check. Do you know, we hit them very hard for something that they did, and they had to hit back, they feel they have to do that and I understand that," he told Fox News' Sunday Morning Futures. "Do you know, they called me to tell me ‘We’re going to hit a certain location but we’re not gonna hit it, it’s gonna be outside of the perimeter’.
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Qassem Soleimani was killed in the rocket strike in 2020 (Getty Images)"They let us know. And we had 16 missiles that went off. And we knew they weren’t going to hit. And now I reveal it - so they aimed those missiles and they said ‘please don’t attack us, we’re not going to hit you.’ That was respect, we had respect.”
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Soleimani, commonly thought of as the second most powerful man in Iran, was killed in Iraq in a US drone strike at a convoy at Baghdad airport in 2020. US Ambassador Woody Johnson backed the President's decision to carry out the assassination - and insisted it was not a provocative strike.
The military commander was killed alongside Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy commander of Iran-backed militias in Iraq known as the PMF. Iranian leaders instantly vowed to avenge the death of the 62-year-old, who was esteemed as the country's second most powerful figure after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Speaking to the station, the Republican presidential frontrunner went on: “When we took out Soleimani, you know Israel was supposed to do it with us. Two days before the take-out they said ‘We can’t do it. We can’t do it.’ I said ‘What?’ ‘We can’t do it.'”
“Then I had a certain general, who’s great, I said, ‘So general, do we do it ourselves?’ He said ‘We can, sir, it’s up to you.’ I said ‘We’ll do it.’ “But Israel was a part of it. You know, Bibi was a big part of it. And we had everything planned, everything. Because what he did was terrible. What he did to us was terrible. Killed so many of our soldiers. Killed so many people.”