US troops with the 82nd Airborne Division have arrived in Kuwait as part of the Immediate Response Force, the US Department of Defense announces. RNA - This comes hours before US airstrikes in the Iraqi capital Baghdad on Friday killed Major General Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the second-in-command of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), according to media reports.
"The deputy head of the Hashed, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, and head of the Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani, were killed in a US strike that targeted their car on the Baghdad International Airport road," Iraqi media quoted the Iraqi pro-government group as saying in a statement.
"The American and Israeli enemy is responsible for killing the mujahideen Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis and Qassem Soleimani," said Ahmed al-Assadi, a PMU spokesman.
The group had earlier said that its public relations director Mohammed Reza al-Jaberi and four other members of the group were also killed after three Katyusha rockets struck a military base next to Baghdad International Airport in the Iraqi capital.
Earlier, a former counter-insurgency intelligence officer for the US war machine had publicly called for the United States and its proxies to murder the leader of PMU.
Mike Pregent, who is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute, said in a tweet that the Leader of Iraq's PMU is a legitimate military target for Iraqi Security Forces, the US, "and our allies in the region.”
On Tuesday, the US embassy was evacuated after thousands of angry Iraqi demonstrators gathered outside the gates of the compound to condemn Washington’s fatal military aggression that targeted PMU.
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