President Donald Trump on Friday said Qassem Soleimani's death was a long time coming, since his forces "targeted, injured, and murdered hundreds of American civilians and servicemen."
"We caught him in the act and terminated him," Trump said during a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort in south Florida. "His reign of terror is over."
"What the United States did yesterday should have been done long ago," Trump continued. "A lot of lives would have been saved. Just recently Soleimani led the brutal repression of protesters in Iran where more than 1,000 innocent civilians were tortured and killed by their own government. We took action last night to stop a war. We did not take action to start a war."