Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, the butcher responsible for as many as 30,000 deaths in a single 1988 massacre, claimed before the United Nations on Wednesday that former American President Donald Trump had confessed that America “created” the Islamic State.
Raisi made the remark during a rant before the General Assembly in which he also claimed that his nation, the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorism, was responsible for the demise of the Islamic State. He credited slain Iranian terror chief Qassem Soleimani, the former head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, with eliminating the Sunni jihadist organization.
Raisi indicated that Iran will seek to prosecute and imprison Trump for ordering the airstrike that killed Soleimani in Iraq in 2020.
In reality, Soleimani was tasked with running Shiite terrorism operations for the IRGC outside of Iran, credited with hundreds of deaths and injuries of American soldiers. The IRGC is a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.
President Trump organized the effort, with the support of Kurdish forces in Iraq and Syria, against the Islamic State. A U.S. operation resulted in the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of ISIS, in 2019.
Raisi made the outrageous accusation that the United States created ISIS – treated as common knowledge by Iranian regime media outlets – during a long, rambling address at this week’s General Assembly that also compared energy woes in Europe to American interventions in the Middle East and appeared to accuse Canada of genocide but only in passing. Raisi attended the event in New York City despite extensive American sanctions on his person, both on the grounds of his role as Iranian president and in response to his personal role in the mass killing of anti-regime dissidents.
“Sometime ago, the previous president of the United States of America announced that ISIS was created by the United States of America,” Raisi told the United Nations. “For us, it makes no difference whether ISIS, Daesh [another term for ISIS] was made by which administration, which American government – what matters is that a government on the other side of this planet decided to bring havoc and chaos to the geography of our region at the expense of the lives and the blood of women and children and innocents.”
Raisi did not specify what remarks by Trump he was referencing. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump as a candidate repeatedly credited then-President Barack Obama with helping fuel the rise of the Islamic State through his poorly executed military withdrawal from Iraq, among other policies. Trump levied similar criticisms against his opponent and Obama’s former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.
“In fact, in many respects, you know they honor President Obama,” Trump said at a 2016 campaign rally. “ISIS is honoring President Obama. He is the founder of ISIS. He is the founder of ISIS, okay? He’s the founder! He founded ISIS! And I would say the co-founder would be ‘Crooked Hillary Clinton.'”
Trump later jokingly “awarded” Clinton and Obama “most valuable player” awards on the Islamic State’s “team.”
“Everyone’s liking it. I think they’re liking it. I give him the most valuable player award,” he said at the time. “And I give it to him [Obama], and I give it to, I gave the co-founder to Hillary. I don’t know if you heard that.”
Elsewhere in his United Nations speech, Raisi claimed the entirety of credit for eliminating the Islamic State – the product of efforts by the U.S. military, the Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga forces, and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) – for Iran.
“The Islamic Republic [of Iran] resistance put an end to that destructive movement. And the leader that descended into the arena of the fight against terrorism was no one other than the beloved late martyr General Qassem Soleimani,” Raisi claimed, “a freedom-seeking man who became a martyr on the path of obtaining the freedom of the nations of the region.”
“The proper pursuit of justice in the face of a crime that the American president admitted to having put his signature on will not be abandoned,” Raisi promised, apparently vowing to prosecute Trump for the airstrike. “We will pursue through a fair tribunal to bring to justice those who martyred our beloved Gen. Qassem Soleimani.”
Raisi has repeatedly threatened to arrest and prosecute Trump, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in speeches but has taken no meaningful action to make such an arrest a reality. The United States has no extradition agreement with Iran that would mandate current President Joe Biden to ship Trump to Iran for a trial.
Raisi notably did not mention Biden at all in his remarks, though he dedicated much of his speech to attacking the United States.
“America cannot accept that certain countries have the right to stand on their own two feet and they keep equivocating militarism with security,” Raisi said. “The friends of America do not enjoy a better situation. What is occurring today in Europe is a mirror image of what is going on in western Asia in the past few decades.”
“The comportment and the result of the movement of the troops throughout these regions all have yielded the same results because all of them have shown that the fate of many countries shows that America has pursued her own interest at the expense of the interest of many other countries,” he argued.
Outside of his remarks on America, Raisi called for “the globalization of justice” and “rejected” the “double standard” of human rights, proclaiming much of the world does not believe in universal human rights norms anymore. Raisi also claimed that the brutal Islamic revolution of Iran – facing widespread protests this week in response to a woman, Mahsa Amini, beaten to death for not wearing a hijab – was an inspiration to the world.
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