TEHRAN – Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has said that the Middle East and the wider world owe General Qassem Soleimani, commander of the IRGC Quds Force, praising his role in fighting terrorism.

“Major General Soleimani has played a great role in fighting terrorism,” IRNA quoted Zarif as saying in a meeting with a number of U.S. reporters and editors in New York on Thursday.

The Washington-based magazine Foreign Policy put General Soleimani at the top of its 2019 list of Global Thinkers in the defense and security field in January.

The IRGC commander is widely seen as a strategist in the counter-terrorism operations against Takfiri terrorists in Syria and Iraq.

The powerful general leads Iranian military advisers backing the national armies of Syria and Iraq in their fight against terrorism.

General Soleimani was present on the ground to supervise the decisive stages of Iran-backed operations against Daesh, which lost in late 2017 all the territories it had seized in Iraq and Syria.

He had been photographed on anti-terrorism battlefields from Iraq’s Mosul to Syria’s Aleppo.

The general took personal command of the battle against Takfiri militants in the Syrian city of Bukamal, located in Dayr al-Zawr Province, in November 2017.

In Iraq, at the height of Daesh’s terror camp in neighboring Iraq, he assisted the Baghdad government in commanding the operation to retake the strategic oil-rich city of Tikrit from Daesh in 2015.

He declared the end of Daesh’s territorial rule in a letter addressed to Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei in November 2017.

According to Press TV, in January 2015, the head of Iraq’s Badr Organization credited Tehran and General Soleimani with saving the Baghdad government when Daesh first unleashed its campaign of terror in Iraq a year earlier.

“If it were not for the cooperation of the Islamic Republic of Iran and General Soleimani, we would not today have a government headed by Haider al-Abadi in Baghdad,” Hadi al-Ameri said.

NA/PA