Speaking at a weekly press conference on Tuesday, a Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin said General Soleimani’s assassination was “another example of how the US has wantonly undermined the norms governing international relations based on the UN Charter.”
“It is also one of the war crimes the US has committed with abuse of force,” added the Chinese official. “The US could go as far as to perform “targeted killing” of a sovereign state’s military leader through terrorist means in violation of international law, and also to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians around the world.”
Wang added, “All these illegal and brutal acts in the eyes of people around the world have been hidden by the US behind the facade of ‘the rules-based international order’ as it claims.”
He said although the US kept repeating the mantra of “upholding the rules-based international order,” it had been proven time and again that Washington only cared about the “rules that meet its needs and serve its interests.”
The Chinese official noted that the US sought to consolidate its hegemony and overriding the international community.
“But such rules and order that violate international law will not be accepted by the people in Iran, the Middle East and the rest of the world,” he pointed out.
General Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), and his Iraqi trenchmate Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the second-in-command of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), were martyred along with their companions in a US drone strike authorized by former president Donald Trump near Baghdad International Airport on January 3, 2020.
Both commanders were highly revered across the Middle East because of their key role in fighting the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group in the region, particularly in Iraq and Syria.
Five days later, in a military operation codenamed Operation Martyr Soleimani, the IRGC launched a volley of ballistic missiles at the Ain al-Asad airbase in Iraq’s western province of Anbar and at another airbase in Erbil in the Kurdistan Region.
Iran said missile strike was only a “first slap” in its process of taking “hard revenge” and that it would not rest under the US military leaves the Middle East in disgrace.