Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei again vowed revenge for the killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani — this time with an image of a golfer resembling former President Donald Trump standing in the shadow of a military aircraft.
“Those who ordered the murder of General Soleimani as well as those who carried this out should be punished. This revenge will certainly happen at the right time,” the tweet from Thursday reads. “Revenge is certain.”
?انتقام حتمی است
قاتل سلیمانی و آمر به قتل سلیمانی باید انتقامشان را پس بدهند.
اگر چه کفش پای سلیمانی هم بر سرِ قاتل او شرف دارد؛ اما بالاخره غلطی کردند، بایستی #انتقام پس بدهند؛ #هم_آمر_هم_قاتل بدانند که در هر زمان ممکن باید انتقامشان را پس بدهند.
۱۳۹۹/۰۹/۲۶ pic.twitter.com/i2DYpPSBhw— KHAMENEI.IR | سایت (@khamenei_site) January 21, 2021
Trump in January 2020 ordered a drone strike in Baghdad that killed Soleimani, who led the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s Quds Force, and Abu Mahdi al Muhandis, the Iraqi leader of the Popular Mobilization Forces.
Soleimani was believed by the United States to be responsible for the killing of hundreds of U.S. troops in Iraq. Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said at the time that the U.S. attacked Soleimani to counter “imminent threats to American lives.”
The text mirrors a tweet Khamenei sent in December last year, ahead of the one-year anniversary of Soleimani’s death.
Tensions in the region have worsened since 2018, when Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Iran nuclear deal. Since then, Iran has gradually ramped up its production of enriched uranium and seized a South Korean oil tanker ahead of sanctions negotiations. Tensions reached a crescendo in late November, when an Iranian nuclear scientist who spearheaded the country’s military nuclear program was assassinated. Iranian officials blamed Israel for the attack and vowed retribution.
Khamenei’s tweets have faced criticism in the past, especially from GOP politicians who claim that Twitter does not censor foreign leaders in the same way that it does conservatives in the U.S.
Twitter on a number of occasions flagged or removed tweets from Trump during his presidency and permanently suspended his account after the Jan. 6 attack on Capitol Hill, but has allowed tweets from Khamenei that call for violence against Israel.
Twitter did remove a tweet from Khamenei in which he claimed that the U.S. and the United Kingdom could be producing coronavirus vaccines “to contaminate other nations,” according to Reuters.
The Washington Examiner reached out to Twitter for further comment.
