An affiliate of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps plotted to assassinate Ivanka Trump, the daughter of the U.S. president, to avenge the elimination of his alleged mentor, Iranian Quds Force chief Qassem Soleimani, by U.S. forces in 2020, the New York Post reported on Friday.
Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi, 32, an Iraqi national, was recently extradited from Turkey to the United States and charged with six terrorism offenses connected to “nearly 20 attacks and attempted attacks throughout Europe and the United States,” the U.S. Justice Department said.
According to the Post, on top of al-Saadi’s schemes to carry out terrorist attacks on Jewish targets across Europe and the United States, he also planned to kill Ivanka Trump, posting a map on X of her house in Florida.
“I say to the Americans, look at this picture and know that neither your palaces nor the Secret Service will protect you. We are currently in the stage of surveillance and analysis. I told you, our revenge is a matter of time,” the Post cited him as threatening in Arabic in an X post from 2021.
Entifadh Qanbar, a former deputy military attaché in the Iraqi embassy in Washington, told the Post that “after Qasem was killed, he [al-Saadi] went around telling people, ‘We need to kill Ivanka to burn down the house of Trump the way he burned down our house.’”
Al-Saadi was allegedly close to Soleimani and maintained ties with his successor, Brig. Gen. Esmail Qaani (also rendered as Esmail Ghaami), the current commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force, a unit responsible for extraterritorial operations.
Al-Saadi grew up in Baghdad and was sent to Tehran to train with the IRGC, according to Qanbar.
He later became a high-level commander of Kata’ib Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy militia operating mainly in Iraq that’s on the U.S.-sanctioned list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.
