US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday that Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani was planning imminent action that threatened American citizens when he was killed in a US strike.
Soleimani, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ foreign operations arm, was killed by US forces in an air raid on Baghdad international airport.
“He was actively plotting in the region to take actions — a big action, as he described it — that would have put dozens if not hundreds of American lives at risk,” Pompeo told CNN.
“We know it was imminent,” Pompeo said of Soleimani’s plot, without going into detail about the nature of the planned operation.
“This was an intelligence-based assessment that drove our decision-making process,” Pompeo added.
