US President Donald Trump narrated the last moments of the Quds Force Commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Qassem Soleimani, who was killed by the US military in a strike by a plane marching near Baghdad airport on January 3 and "shook the world," he said.
With the same strong dramatic performance, Trump described the scene as he watched from the White House operations room, killing Soleimani with the drone strikes, saying that he "deserved this cruel blow."
The US President spoke in his discotheque at his Mar El Ajo club in Palm Beach, Florida, at a party during which he raised $ 10 million for Trump's re-election campaign next year and the Republican National Committee.
Journalists were prevented from attending the ceremony. CNN said it got an audio recording of Trump's remarks.
On Saturday, the network broadcast an audio recording, in which Trump talks about the commander of the Quds Force in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard who was killed in the American strike near Baghdad airport with the deputy commander of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces, Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis.
"He used to think that he was unbeatable," Trump said of Soleimani, adding that before the strike that targeted him, "he was saying bad things about our country." He used to say, for example, we will attack your country, we will kill your citizens. "I told myself how long should we listen to this nonsense?"
Trump then recalled the scene of the assassination, recalling what the military told him as he was following the operation from the United States.
They said: Sir - you know that what is being imagined is cameras kilometers away in the air - that they are together, sir (...) They will not live for more than two minutes and 11 seconds. They are in the car. They are in an armored vehicle traveling. Sir, they have about a minute left in their life, sir, sir 30 seconds, ten, nine, eight, then suddenly the explosion "boom" occurred.
And Trump added that the military officials told him, "Their matter is over, sir. They are eliminated, sir."
Trump praised hitting "two birds with one stone", "two at one price", meaning Soleimani and the engineer.
Acknowledging that the strike “rocked the world,” he emphasized that Soleimani “deserved this cruel blow because he was evil (...) He killed hundreds of thousands of people and thousands of Americans.”
This is Trump's most detailed description of the drone operation, which has been criticized by some US lawmakers because the president and his advisers have not announced information to support their statements that Soleimani was an imminent threat to Americans in the region.
(CNN) said that Trump did not repeat in the audio recording that Soleimani was an imminent danger but rather that Soleimani was saying bad things about our country, before the strike was the reason that he decided to authorize his killing.