Tehran’s order seeking justice for the killing of its general, including asking Interpol for help, was immediately dismissed by the Trump administration.
IRAN ON MONDAY ISSUED an arrest warrant for President Donald Trump and 35 others in retaliation for the killing of powerful military leader Qassem Soleimani in January.
The warrants, announced through Iran’s state news service Monday morning, also included a request for Interpol to issue what’s known as Red Notices that inform global law enforcement about pending warrants to help make the arrests for members of the Trump administration as well as officials from other countries. The reported charges include murder and terrorism, and Iranian officials claimed Trump would face prosecution once his term as president ends.
Brain Hook, Trump’s envoy for Iran, almost immediately dismissed the news as a “propaganda stunt.”
“Our assessment is that Interpol does not intervene and issue Red Notices that are based on a political nature,” Hook said during a news conference in Saudi Arabia alongside the Saudi minister of state for foreign affairs.
The news follows persistent analysis that the regime in Iran believes it has not responded forcefully enough to Trump’s dramatic decision to order the extrajudicial killing of the former commander of the zealous Quds Force and one of the most influential leaders in Iran.
Senior U.S. military leaders also assess that Iranian leaders are “struggling” to contain the fallout from the devastating effect of the spread of the coronavirus there.
Trump’s Jan. 3 decision to order a drone strike against Soleimani as his ground convoy left Baghdad International Airport sparked an international crisis with fears worldwide that the provocative action would lead to military confrontation between the U.S. and Iran. Tehran responded Jan. 7 with a rocket strike against two U.S. bases in Iraq that injured dozens of U.S. forces there – an attack senior U.S. military officials say was designed to kill Americans.[
Initial outrage among Iran’s population faltered a day later when Iranian military forces shot down a Ukrainian civilian airliner that had departed Tehran. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps later acknowledged it had mistaken the aircraft for an incoming cruise missile.
Trump’s decision to kill Soleimani, who held a cult following among many Iranians, came under almost immediate scrutiny after he justified the strike as necessary to prevent an imminent attack. His top advisers, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, later backed away from that clear of an assertion, pointing to a pattern of dangerous behavior by Soleimani and his lieutenants instead as justification for killing him.
Iran launched an intense propaganda campaign in the following weeks, including claiming credit for a U.S. spy plane that crashed in Afghanistan in early February. Sources familiar with the Pentagon investigation into the crash denied those claims. Tehran has also said it will execute more than a dozen men already in custody whom it claims are spies for the CIA.