In a startling revelation, a former chief of Israel’s military intelligence has said that his country was involved in the US airstrike that killed Iran’s General Qassem Soleimani in January 2020.
This is the first public acknowledgement of Israel’s role in the operation against Soleimani, who headed the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s elite Quds Force and helped orchestrate Iran’s involvement with paramilitary groups abroad.
Soleimani was killed in a US drone strike at the Baghdad airport in January 2020.
A week after the airstrike, it was reported that Israeli intelligence helped confirm the details of Soleimani’s flight from Damascus to Baghdad. Earlier this year, it was reported that Israel “had access to Soleimani’s numbers” and gave that intelligence to the United States.
However, Maj Gen Tamir Heyman, the now-retired general who headed Israel’s military intelligence until October, appears to be the first official to confirm Israel’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 interviewers wrote that Heyman opened the interview by talking about the American airstrike that killed Soleimani, but in which Israeli intelligence played a part.
“Assassinating Soleimani was an 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. Heyman called Soleimani “the engine of the train of Iranian entrenchment” in neighbouring Syria.
Heyman said that Israeli strikes had succeeded in “preventing the attempt by Iran to put down roots in Syria.”
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Heyman’s remarks.
