Trump Feared Assassination Attempt By Iran Over Killing Of Qassem Suleimani, New Book Claims

Acoording to a new book, former U.S. President Donald Trump expressed fears that Iran would seek revenge for Qassem Suleimani's killing.

It's been claimed that in December 2020, Trump told his friends that he was afraid Iran would try to assassinate him in revenge for the death of the Iranian general. He was killed in a U.S. drone strike in January 2020, reported The Guardian. The claim was made in a new book, "The Divider: Trump in the White House 2017-2021," by American journalists Susan Glasser and Peter Baker.

The New Arab reported that the book, which will be released next week, documents how Trump constantly clashed with his closest security advisers over the U.S.' increasingly hawkish approach to Iran. The book also touches upon the reluctant talks over a nuclear deal signed under former U.S. President Barack Obama and the moment in June 2019 when Trump agreed to air strikes, but called them off at the last minute.

Later it emerged that the Fox News host Tucker Carlson was among those people who advised the former President against ordering the Iran strikes. But six months later, he did authorize the strike on Suleimani, who was the commander of the elite Quds (Jerusalem) force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. He was killed on Jan. 3, 2020 as he left Baghdad airport. Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps was designated by the U.S. a terrorist group in 2019. Apart from him, officials from Iran-backed Iraqi militias were also killed in the strike. An MQ-9 Reaper drone was used for the attack.

Suleimani had been “actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region," the Pentagon said. During a rally in Toledo, Ohio, Trump bragged about the strike saying that they stopped him and they stopped him quickly and they "stopped him cold." He said that Suleimani was a bad guy, a bloodthirsty terrorist, and "he’s no longer a terrorist. He’s dead.”

Less than a year later, at least in private, Trump was not quite so bullish, Glasser and Baker revealed.

On Dec. 16, 2020, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, tweeted that those who ordered the murder of "General Suleimani as well as those who carried this out should be punished." In the tweet he warned that the revenge would "certainly happen at the right time.”

Trump and his advisers considered new strikes, but they backed off as the end of Trump’s time in power was approaching, Baker and Glasser wrote in the book. The authors further mentioned that at a cocktail party, Trump told many of his Florida friends that he was "afraid Iran would try to assassinate him, so he had to go back to Washington where he would be safer.”