VietPress USA (Jan. 2nd, 2020): Today, Iranian Major-General Qassem Soleimani, the leader of Iran's elite Quds Force, was killed late Thursday in a U.S. airstrike that targeted a convoy near the main airport in Baghdad.

Soleimani began his military career in the beginning of the Iran–Iraq War of the 1980s, during which he commanded the 41st Division. He was later involved in extraterritorial operations, providing military assistance to anti-Saddam Shia and Kurdish groups in Iraq, and later Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories. In 2012, Soleimani helped bolster the Syrian government, a key Iranian ally, during the Syrian Civil War, particularly in its operations against ISIS and its offshoots. Soleimani also assisted in the command of combined Iraqi government and Shia militia forces that advanced against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in 2014–2015.

Soleimani was killed in a targeted U.S. airstrike on 3 January 2020 in Baghdad, Iraq. Also killed were Popular Mobilization Forces members.

Read this report from ABC News on Yahoo News at:

Leader of Iran's elite Quds Force killed in US airstrike near Baghdad airport

Qassem Soleimani, the leader of Iran's elite Quds Force, was killed late Thursday in a U.S. airstrike that targeted a convoy near the main airport in Baghdad.

Iraqi militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis also died in the airstrike, Ahmed al-Assadi, a spokesman for Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces umbrella grouping of Iran-backed militias, confirmed to ABC News.

Officials with the U.S. Department of Defense confirmed in a statement to ABC News that U.S. forces were responsible for the attack.

"At the direction of the President, the U.S. military has taken decisive defensive action to protect U.S. personnel abroad by killing Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force, a U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization," the statement read. "General Soleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region."

Soleimani and the Quds Force "were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American and coalition service members and the wounding of thousands more. He had orchestrated attacks on coalition bases in Iraq over the last several months -- including the attack on December 27th -- culminating in the death and wounding of additional American and Iraqi personnel," the statement said.

One U.S. civilian contractor was killed and several service members were wounded in the Dec. 27 rocket attack on the K1 military base used by U.S. and coalition forces in northern Iraq. The attack led to retaliatory U.S. military strikes in Iraq and Syria Sunday against the Iranian-backed militia the U.S. blamed for the Dec. 27 attack, which in turn led hundreds of pro-Iranian protesters to attempt to storm the U.S. embassy in Baghdad on New Year's Eve.

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