January 3, 2020

Assassination of Qasem Soleimani

U.S. drone strike kills Qasem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis near Baghdad airport

Ten people died in the convoy — five Iranians and five Iraqis. In Washington it was still 2 January.

A convoy leaving the airport

Early on 3 January 2020, local time, a U.S. drone strike hit Qasem Soleimani's convoy as it left Baghdad International Airport. The target was a departing convoy near the airport, not the terminal.

The strike killed Soleimani, commander of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps–Quds Force, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a founder of Kataib Hezbollah and deputy leader of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces, along with eight others — ten dead in all, five Iranians and five Iraqis.

It was still 2 January in Washington, which is why some U.S. documents call this the January 2 strike.

The stated rationale, and the dispute about it

The Defense Department said President Donald Trump ordered the operation. A senior defence official asserted that Soleimani was developing attacks against U.S. diplomats and troops and described the strike as defensive; the administration also presented deterrence of future Iranian aggression as a rationale.

Members of Congress and later investigators contested whether the evidence established an imminent threat. A UN special rapporteur subsequently concluded that the publicly supplied evidence did not demonstrate an ongoing or imminent attack sufficient to justify the strike under her legal analysis.

The killing followed a fast escalation: a 27 December rocket attack — 31 rockets by the Defense Department's count — killed a U.S. contractor and injured four U.S. service members and two Iraqi security personnel, U.S. retaliatory strikes hit Kataib Hezbollah facilities, and militia supporters breached the outer area of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

The next five days

Iran declared three days of mourning and vowed revenge.

On 5 January Iraq's parliament voted 170–0 for a non-binding resolution calling for an end to the foreign military presence. It called on the government to act; it did not itself expel U.S. troops.

On 8 January Iran retaliated directly with ballistic missiles against Iraqi bases housing U.S. forces — ballistic missiles, not a combined missile-and-drone attack.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 6 sources not yet audited

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

What the sources leave uncertain

The strike occurred shortly after midnight on January 3 in Iraq, while it was still January 2 in Washington. Consequently, some U.S. documents call it the January 2 strike.
The death toll of ten is supported by contemporary reporting, but the initial reports varied and the U.S. government did not publicly identify every person killed.
The United States’ claim of an imminent threat remained contested. A UN special rapporteur later concluded that the public evidence did not demonstrate an ongoing or imminent attack sufficient to justify the strike under her legal analysis.