ADVERTISEMENT

Ilhan Omar: Trump Killed Soleimani Because He ‘Needs the Distraction’

Soleimani was the leader of a U.S. designated foreign terrorist organization.

Ilhan Omar
Ilhan Omar / Getty Images
January 3, 2020

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) tweeted Thursday that President Donald Trump ordered a strike on Iranian general Qassem Soleimani to distract from other issues.

"So what if Trump wants war, knows this leads to war and needs the distraction?" the freshman Democrat tweeted hours after news broke of the successful strike on the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps's Quds Force.

The freshman Democrat did not respond to request for comment. Omar's tweet came amid a flurry of tweets from left-wing activists and Democrats claiming Trump was trying to draw attention away from impeachment. Former Democratic Party chief Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D., Fla.) called the killing of one of the world's leading terrorists "outrageous."

"What I think is going on here, frankly, is that this action was taken more in President Trump's self-interest rather than our national interests," Wasserman Schultz said during an appearance on CNN. "That's outrageous and I think that has a lot to do with what this attack was about."

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told CNN on Friday morning that Trump's decision "saved American lives" and was made in light of intelligence assessments indicating Soleimani was planning to "take big action, as he described it, that would have put hundreds of lives at risk."

As a member of the Revolutionary Guard, Soleimani was a leader of a U.S. designated foreign terrorist organization. In a factsheet explaining the designation, the State Department noted that Soleimani's Quds Force "has the greatest role among Iran’s actors in directing and carrying out a global terrorist campaign."