US Comes Under UNSC Fire for Assassinating Gen. Soleimani

By Staff, Agencies

Dozens of countries at a Thursday UN Security Council meeting took a swipe at the US administration for assassinating the Middle East's most prominent anti-terror commander Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani.

The meeting, originally called to discuss the UN Charter, morphed into an hours-long debate featuring several member nations who blasted the administration of US President Donald Trump for escalating tensions in the Middle East.

Chinese Ambassador Zhang Jun said “at present the United States’ unilateral military adventurism has led to the tensing of the situation in the Middle East Persian Gulf region.”

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also criticized “miscalculations” and warned against moves that would bring the region into another conflict. “War is never inevitable; it is a matter of choice, and often it is a product of easy miscalculations.”

Syrian Ambassador Bashar Jaafari criticized the Security Council’s silence toward the US assassination of General Soleimani.

“How is the council silent vis-a-vis the US assassination crime against Iranian and Iraqi leaders that were fighting Daesh [the Arabic acronym for ‘ISIS/ISIL’] and Nusra Front in Syria and Iraq?” he asked.

The US ambassador, however, defended his country’s dangerous move, repeating the claim that it was a move to prevent an “imminent threat”, without providing any evidence.

“This decision was not taken lightly,” US Ambassador Kelly Craft said at the UN. She tried to justify the assassination by stating that Iran had been “threatening” the lives of Americans for years.

US President Donald Trump has said he personally ordered the assassination of Gen. Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the second-in-command of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units [PMU], in a drone strike in Baghdad last Friday.

General Soleimani cooperated closely with the PMU and other counter-terrorism groups against the most brutal of the terrorist outfits, including Daesh.

On Wednesday, Iran pounded two US military bases in Iraq with its precision-guided missiles in a retaliation which Leader of the Islamic Revolution His Eminence Imam Sayyed Ali Khamenei described a "slap on the face" of the Americans.