By: Kayhan Int’l Staff Writer

It has now been established beyond an iota of doubt that the US, or in fact the cowardly administration of Donald Trump, committed an "unlawful” act by murdering the famous anti-terrorist icon, Iran’s Qassem Soleimani, last January at Baghdad airport, along with Iraq’s Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.
The United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary and Arbitrary Killings, France’s Agnes Callamard, has done a commendable job in this regard through her report to the Human Rights Council in Geneva.
She says: "The assassination of General Soleimani shows how dangerously close the world has been to a major and deadly crisis. The international community now confronts the very real prospect that states may opt to eliminate high ranking military officials outside the context of a "known” war, and try to justify such a killing.”
With due respect to her probe, and, of course, her verdict that Soleimani’s murder was "unlawful”, the questions that arise are: Does the UN consider as "lawful” murders, the acts of terrorism that the US frequently carries out all over the world by justifying its crimes against humanity as threats to American national security?
Why is the UN silent on the US military presence in and around the Persian Gulf, where Washington claims it has been invited by littoral states, when actually the Americans are in this region as part of their extrajudicial policy of causing harm to the Islamic Republic of Iran and looking for pretexts to start armed hostilities?
What about the illegal American military presence in Syria, where the government of Damascus has clearly not invited the US soldiers to set foot on its soil and is demanding that they leave?
And how does the US fleet justify its intrusion into the South China Sea, where it provocatively holds war games dangerously close to the Chinese naval forces which are in their own territorial waters, and have all the right to retaliate in case of any wrong move by the Americans?
These and several other related questions remain unanswered as the trigger-happy Yankees continue to kill people at will around the world, including the one-and-a-half million Iraqis that died in the American invasion, and the routine targeting of marriage parties in Afghanistan by US forces to turn festivities into mourning ceremonies.
The World Body ought to be honest in its reports in view of the fact that Martyr Soleimani wasn’t the sole Iranian victim of American lawlessness, although he was the most prominent one.
For its part, the Islamic Republic of Iran reserves the right to retaliate, since the innocent blood of General Soleimani and other martyrs, is crying for justice.
The UN very well knows that the US administration is the world’s topmost terrorist and guilty of crimes against humanity all over the world.
Therefore, instead of merely saying that Washington and Trump indulged in "unlawful” murder, the Security Council should take up the matter to punish the outlaws, and when it cannot do so because of the questionable veto right of the five self-imposed permanent powers, it can at least instruct the International Court of Justice to entertain Iran’s request to put the Americans in the criminal dock, especially since the Islamic Republic has already issued an arrest warrant against Trump and his accomplices, and already notified Interpol in this regard.