AL-QUDS (Dispatches) —
Israel’s former military intelligence chief says the occupying regime was involved in the American airstrike that martyred Iran’s legendary anti-terror commander General Qassem Soleimani in January 2020. It was the first public acknowledgement of the Zionist regime’s role in the terrorist act.
Gen. Soleimani headed the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC)’s Quds Force and helped orchestrate Iran’s fighting against terrorism abroad. He was assassinated in a U.S. drone strike at the Baghdad airport in January 2020, an incident that revealed the terrorist nature of the American government and its support for such brutal groups as Daesh.
A week after the airstrike, NBC News reported that Israeli intelligence helped confirm the details of Gen. Soleimani’s flight from Damascus to Baghdad. Earlier this year, a Yahoo News reported that the Zionist regime “had access to Soleimani’s numbers” and gave that intelligence to the United States.
But Maj. Gen. Tamir Heyman, the now-retired general who headed military intelligence until October, appears to be the first official to confirm the occupying regime’s involvement.
Heyman’s comments were published in the November issue of a Hebrew-language magazine closely affiliated with Israel’s intelligence services. The interview was held in late September, a couple of weeks before his retirement from the military. The authors wrote that Heyman opened the interview by talking about the American airstrike that martyred Gen. Soleimani, but in which Israeli intelligence played a part.
“Assassinating Soleimani was an achievement, since our main enemy, in my eyes, are the Iranians,” Heyman told the magazine. He said there were “two significant
 and important assassinations during my term” as head of army intelligence.
“The first, as I’ve already recalled, is that of Qassem Soleimani -- it’s rare to locate someone so senior, who is the architect of the fighting force, the strategist and the operator -- it’s rare,” he said.
The interview was published Iran and other countries were engaged in negotiations to reach a new agreement to remove U.S. sanctions on the Islamic Republic. The deal, struck in 2015, unraveled after the United States unilaterally withdrew in 2018 and reimposed inhuman sanctions on Iran.
On Wednesday, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan was scheduled to meet this week in Al-Quds with extremist Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett to discuss “a range of issues of strategic importance to the U.S.-Israel bilateral relationship, including the threat posed by Iran,” National Security Council Spokesperson Emily Horne said