Iranian Supreme Leader's Tweet Suggests A Revenge Drone Assassination Of A Golfing Trump

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Iranian Supreme Leader’s tweet suggests a revenge drone assassination of a golfing Trump:

Link to tweet

Iranian Supreme Leader’s Tweet Suggests A Revenge Drone Assassination Of A Golfing Trump

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was slapped with a Twitter suspension for the image that called for revenge against the former U.S. president.

BY THOMAS NEWDICK JANUARY 22, 2021

An image highly suggestive of a drone targeting former U.S. President Donald Trump on a golf course in a “vengeance” strike in retaliation for the death of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani led Twitter to ban an account for Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei today. The U.S. military killed Soleimani in a drone strike in Iraq in January 2020, which had already prompted public threats from Iranian officials, including against Trump specifically.

Twitter took action to suspend the @khamenei_site account around 15 hours after the post with the image first appeared on January 21, 2020. Another official account, @Khamenei_tv, currently remains publicly visible. The same post was also removed from the Supreme Leader’s page on Instagram, which Facebook owns, but that account also remains accessible to the public. The image, which is now circulating widely online, remained visible for a while longer on the Twitter account of Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news outlet, before being taken down there, as well.

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While the image is presumably not expected to be taken entirely literally, it is worth remembering that using a drone to assassinate a leader is not restricted to the realms of fantasy. Indeed, back in 2018, The War Zone examined in detail just such an assassination attempt on the Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro. This, though unsuccessful, proved that the threat posed, in particular, by small drones is very real and is only likely to grow as we enter the era of the “drone swarm.”



The Iranian Shahed-161, from a family of flying-wing drones allegedly reverse-engineered from the RQ-170.

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