TEHRAN -- A senior Iranian official says the United States has always spread lies to cover up its defeats ranging from Afghanistan to South America.
Iran’s special representative for Afghanistan, Hassan Kazemi Qomi, made the remarks in a post on his Twitter account in response to comments made by former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in an interview with Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya news channel, about the assassination of top Iranian anti-terror commander Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani in 2020.
“Let’s update our minds first and accept that lying and hiding the facts are typical of the United States,” Kazemi Qomi tweeted.
“It is natural that the reality goes missing in a system that wastes millions of dollars a year to protect Pompeo,” he added.
“And Washington portrays its record which is replete with defeats ranging from Afghanistan to South America with lies,” the Iranian official said.
In his interview, Pompeo said the U.S. murdered General Soleimani to safeguard its assets in Iraq, its people in Syria and, in fact, Americans all across the world.
He claimed that the assassination was an opportunity to stop what he called an imminent attack on U.S. positions, saying, “General Soleimani was engaged in a plot to kill another 500 Americans. We had the opportunity to take down that plot, and we did.”
General Soleimani was the commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps, who was assassinated in January 2020.
The U.S. State Department has said it’s paying more than $2 million per month to provide 24-hour security to Pompeo and a former top aide to protect them from Iran’s retaliation.
Five days after the assassination, in a military operation codenamed Operation Martyr Soleimani, the IRGC launched a volley of ballistic missiles at the Ain al-Asad air base in Iraq’s western province of Anbar.
According to the Pentagon, more than 100 American forces suffered “traumatic brain injuries” during the counterstrike on the base.
Iran said the missile strike was only a “first slap” in its process of taking “hard revenge” and that it would not rest unless the U.S. military leaves the Middle East in disgrace.