US Says Arrested Relatives Of Iran General Qasem Soleimani, His Family Denies Link

The US State Department said Saturday that it has arrested two family members of late Iranian general Qasem Soleimani after their residency permits were rescinded.

It said that Hamideh Soleimani Afshar, the niece of Soleimani, who was killed in a US strike in January 2020, and her daughter were arrested after Secretary of State Marco Rubio cancelled their lawful permanent resident status.

Iranian media, however, quoted two daughters of Soleimani denying that two Iranian women arrested in the United States were their relatives.

Rubio announced the action on X, stating that both of them had been living in the United States on green cards until recently.

"Until recently, Hamideh Soleimani Afshar and her daughter were green card holders living lavishly in the United States. Afshar is the niece of the late Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani. She is also an outspoken supporter of the Iranian regime who celebrated attacks on Americans and referred to our country as the 'Great Satan'," he said.

"This week, I terminated both Afshar and her daughter's legal status, and they are now in ICE custody, pending removal from the United States. The Trump Administration will not allow our country to become a home for foreign nationals who support anti-American terrorist regimes," he wrote.

The State Department said in a statement that Afshar's husband has also been barred from entering the United States.

Earlier in the month, Rubio also revoked the legal status of Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani, the daughter of the former Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran, Ali Larijani, and her husband, Seyed Kalantar Motamedi. Ali Larijani was killed in Israeli strikes in the ongoing war.

The arrests come days after President Donald Trump, in his address on Thursday, spoke at length about his decision to kill Qasem Soleimani during his first term in office. He suggested the current situation in Iran would have looked very different had Soleimani remained alive.

"I did many things during my two terms in office to stop the quest for nuclear weapons by Iran first, and perhaps most importantly, I killed General Qasem Soleimani in my first term. He was an evil genius, a brilliant person, a horrible human being; however, the father of the roadside bomb, and he lived just horribly, what he did. Iran would have been perhaps in a far better, stronger position," Trump said.

"Had he lived, we would have had probably a different conversation tonight, but you know what? We'd still be winning and winning big," he added.

Who Was Qasem Soleimani?

Soleimani headed the Quds Force, the external operations arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, and was considered one of the most powerful military figures in the region.

He had wielded significant regional influence since at least 2018, when it emerged that he had been directly involved in top-level negotiations over the formation of the Iraqi government.

He was widely popular inside Iran and regarded as a dangerous adversary by the United States and its allies before being killed in a US drone strike in Baghdad in January 2020.