April 19, 2019
The deputy commander of the Qods Force bragged at a recent ceremony that his operatives have killed more Americans than US troops have killed Iranian fighters.
Brig. Gen. Esmail Ghaani was referring to Iran’s intervention in Iraq to supply Shiite militias with supercharged explosives that could penetrate US armored vehicles. The Pentagon recently announced that the Qods Force, the foreign intervention arm of the Pasdaran, killed at least 603 American troops in Iraq that way.
“Americans have suffered more losses from us then we have suffered losses from them,” Gen. Ghaani said, according to an article by Ahmad Majidyar, director of the Iran Observed Project at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC.
The United States and Iran are not at war, so such killings are not considered war casualties under international law, thus potentially opening up the Qods Force to charges of participating in murder.
“This, of course, is not only a confession, but also outright bragging about how the Qods Force murdered Americans in Iraq,” Michael Rubin, a Middle East analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, told The Washington Times. “It was the Qods Force, after all, that smuggled explosively-formed, armor-penetrating projectiles into Iraq for insurgents to incorporate in improved explosive devices.”
Gen. Ghaani also repeated Tehran propaganda that America carried out the 9/11 attacks in New York and the Pentagon, not Al-Qaeda.
“America, under the pretext of the September 11 attacks, which it carried out itself, invaded Afghanistan and mobilized young Muslims and deployed them to Afghanistan so that they could later attack Iran,” he said.
