Iran’s IRGC commander: No US commander will be safe if Iranians are threatened

Any US attempt to “assassinate” another Iranian military commander would put all US commander’s lives in jeopardy, said the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Hossein Salami on Monday.

“The Americans ... and others should know that if they threaten our commanders, none of their commanders will find a safe spot, meaning that if they threaten to assassinate our commanders or carry out their threat, the lives of none of their commanders will be safe,” said Salami, according to the semi-official Tasnim news agency.

This comes after US Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook said that if Esmail Ghaani, the new commander of the IRGC Quds Force, follows in the footsteps of his slain predecessor Qassem Soleimani, he will face the same fate.

“If Ghaani follows the same path of killing Americans then he will meet the same fate,” Hook told the Arabic-language daily Asharq al-Awsat on Thursday.

IRGC commander Salami added on Monday: “If they intend to continue this game, our responses will be totally different from the past, and their scale will also be different, as they will be faced with quite new conditions which they will be unable to manage and control. So we warn them to retreat from this field.”

Soleimani was killed by US airstrikes while he was in Baghdad on January 2. Ghaani was quickly assigned his post and he said he would “continue in this luminous path” taken by Soleimani and that the goal was to drive US forces out of the region, Iran’s long-standing policy.