Tehran: An Iranian Minister on Sunday hit out at US President Donald Trump, who earlier in the day announced that US Special Forces had cornered and eliminated fugitive IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in a raid in Syria, saying the US had only killed its own creation.
"Not a big deal! You just killed your creature," Information Minister Mohammad-Javad Azari Jahromi tweeted in response to Trump's Saturday evening tweet - "Something very big has just happened!" - which raised speculation that Al-Baghdadi had been killed.
Trump on Sunday, in a special address from the White House, announced that Baghdadi had been killed in a raid by US Special Forces in Syria's Idlib on Saturday night.
Shia Iran had been a long-standing foe of the rabidly anti-Shia IS, and had been supporting the Iraqi and Syrian governments fight it. While Foreign Minister Javad Zarif had called IS an "ideological sibling of the Al Qaeda", Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had called the US coalition against the IS "hypocritical" and claimed that photos showed US supplying the IS with weapons.
