The onset of war: Trump orders assassination of Iranian General by U.S airstrike

by Germaine Rentoria, Editor-in-Chief
News
Originally written on January 12, 2020

Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the leader of the Quds Force under Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was killed last Friday, January 3 in a US airstrike at Baghdad International Airport. The airstrike was ordered by President Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States of America, as a way to “stop a war” and to prevent attacks of Iranians on Americans.

The late general Soleimani was revered as a hero in Iran - brave, charismatic and beloved by the troops. He is known as the “shadow commander” - having led the Quds Force since 1988 - he was the mastermind of the Iranian military operations in Iraq and Syria. According to Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, he is the “living martyr of the revolution”. This however, is not the case for the Americans who viewed the general as a ruthless killer.

“Soleimani was plotting imminent and sinister attacks on American diplomats and military personnel, but we caught him in the act and terminated him,” Trump tells the reporters from The New York Times, “We took action last night to stop a war, we did not take action to start a war.” However, this action may be facing the opposite as Iran vows to take severe revenge and considered it as an act for war.

The first act retaliation was the barrage of a dozen ballistic missiles sent by Iran on the US bases in Iraq last January 8. A few hours after the attack, a Ukrainian passenger jet crashed after being mistakenly shot down by Iran. The Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 crashed Wednesday after takeoff which killed all of the 176 innocent passengers on board - there were no survivors. A few days after, Iran admits to shooting down the Ukrainian plane unintentionally, they said that it was a human error, and they now blame the US for it.

Although those were the only acts of retaliation from Iran so far, tension among the Middle Eastern countries rise. The other US bases in the Middle East may also be an eye for target; these bases may be found in Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, UAE, and Qatar. The Philippine President, Rodrigo Duterte, has sent off two Philippine Navy Ships last January 14 to the Middle East that will help the evacuation or repatriation of the OFWs found in these countries. He hopes that the Navy would succeed in its “sacred mission” to exert all efforts to encourage all affected Filipinos to return to the Philippines and evacuate on safer grounds. In his speech, he states, “the lives of more than a million Filipinos working in the Middle East are no joke.”

Let us hope for no further escalations on the tension between the two countries as the stability and the lives of the OFWs in the Middle East are at stake.