Breaking: Iraqi Parliament Votes to Expel All Foreign Military Forces

FOLLOWING KILLING OF IRANIAN GENERAL

by Sharon Rondeau

(Jan. 5, 2020) — At approximately 10:12 a.m. ET on today’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” host Maria Bartiromo announced that the Iraqi Parliament voted to expel all foreign military forces from the country.

The hastily-scheduled resolution vote came after U.S. forces struck and killed Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani on January 2.

According to Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo and the Department of Defense, Soleimani is responsible for killing at least 600 American soldiers and the maiming of 1,600 more.  The U.S. strike responded to the killing of an American contractor and wounding of American and Iraqi soldiers on December 27.

Soleimani was head of the “Quds” force, a division of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which the Trump administration declared a “foreign terrorist organization” last spring.

Within that segment, Sen. Lindsey Graham, who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, reinforced the administration’s description of its killing of Soleimani as a “defensive” move.  In an address from Mar-a-Lago on January 3, President Trump said that Soleimani was “plotting imminent and sinister attacks on American diplomats and military personnel, but we caught him in the act and terminated him.”

According to a Middle-East analyst at The Brookings Institution on Friday, “It’s hard to overstate Soleimani’s influence. Because Iran’s conventional forces are weak, Tehran often works through militias, terrorist groups, and other proxies to advance its interests abroad. The IRGC takes the lead for many of these operations. In Iraq, and in other countries where Iran plays both a military and political role — such as Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, as well as with the Palestinians — the IRGC is often the dominant actor in Iran’s foreign policy, or at least an important voice.”

At 10:34, Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX4) said that the Obama regime designated Soleimani a terrorist.

Fox 5 reported Sunday morning that the U.S. has approximately 5,000 soldiers throughout Iraq.

In November, The Intercept, “in partnership with The New York Times,” reported that through Soleimani (spelled “Suleimani” in the article), Iran had conducted a “long campaign to maintain Iraq as a pliable client state.”