TEHRAN — Habibollah Dehmardeh, an Iranian lawmaker, said on Saturday that the Islamic Republic’s missile attack on a major U.S. airbase in Iraq gave courage to Muslims and freedom-seekers around the world.

The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps’ attack exposed the “fake grandeur” of the United States in the world, said Dehmardeh, Mehr reported.

Iran proved to the Islamic world that significant progress can be made if they unite and challenge the illegitimate interests of arrogant states, he added.

In drone strikes on January 3, the U.S. assassinated Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani, chief of the IRGC Quds Force, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the second-in-command of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (PMU). The attack was ordered by Donald Trump, according to the Pentagon.

In the early hours of January 8, the IRGC attacked the U.S. airbase of Ain al-Assad in Anbar province in western Iraq as a revenge against the assassination.

The U.S. assassination of General Soleimani was met with widespread condemnation across the globe.

Benjamin B. Ferencz, a former lawyer and Nuremberg war crimes prosecutor, has said the assassination was an “immoral action” and a “clear violation of national and international law.”

“The administration recently announced that, on orders of the president, the United States had “taken out” (which really means “murdered”) an important military leader of a country with which we were not at war. As a Harvard Law School graduate who has written extensively on the subject, I view such immoral acts as a clear violation of national and international law,” Ferencz wrote in a letter to The New York Times on Wednesday.

Ferencz, 99, who was a lawyer who helped prosecute Nazi leaders at the post-World War II Nuremberg trials, said, “The public is entitled to know the truth. The United Nations Charter, the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice in The Hague are all being bypassed. In this cyberspace world, young people everywhere are in mortal danger unless we change the hearts and minds of those who seem to prefer war to law.”

MH/PA