Iraqi IRGC operative behind attacks on Jewish targets plotted to kill Ivanka Trump — report

NY Post says Kataeb Hezbollah’s Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi, who is being held in US, pledged to assassinate president’s daughter to avenge 2020 killing of Qassem Soleimani

Ivanka Trump, the daughter of US President Donald Trump and the wife of key US negotiator Jared Kushner, was the target of an Iranian assassination plot, the New York Post reported Friday.

The newspaper identified the suspect as Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi, a 32-year-old militia commander in Iraq’s Kataeb Hezbollah and operative of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), who was arrested and charged last week by the US Justice Department for several recent attacks on Jewish targets in Europe and North America.

According to the report, al-Saadi made a “pledge” to kill Ivanka Trump in retaliation for the killing of IRGC Quds Force chief Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad in 2020 during her father’s first term in office.

A former Iraqi defense official was quoted as saying that al-Saadi told several people after Soleimani’s assassination that “we need to kill Ivanka to burn down the house of Trump the way he burned down our house,” adding that “we heard that he had a plan of Ivanka’s house in Florida.”

The report noted al-Saadi previously shared a satellite image of the Florida enclave where Ivanka Trump and Kusher, which was accompanied by the threat in Arabic for Americans to “look at this picture and know that neither your palaces nor the Secret Service will protect you.”

“We are currently in the stage of surveillance and analysis. I told you, our revenge is a matter of time,” he added in the 2021 post.

The report comes after al-Saadi was arrested in Turkey before being extradited to face US federal charges relating to nearly 20 attacks and attempted attacks throughout Europe and the United States.

Al-Saadi is also suspected of being behind several recent terror plots against Jewish targets. According to US prosecutors, al-Saadi and unnamed associates planned, coordinated and claimed responsibility for the attacks in the name of Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiya, a component of Kataeb Hezbollah, since the start of the US-Israel war with the Islamic Republic in late February.

Attacks linked to al-Saadi include arson against a synagogue in North Macedonia, the stabbing of two Jewish men last month in London’s Golders Green, the bombing of a Bank of New York Mellon building in Amsterdam in mid-March and a thwarted bomb attack on a Bank of America office in Paris on March 28, according to US law enforcement. Teenage suspects were previously arrested in both cases.

Al-Saadi also allegedly attempted terror attacks against Jewish institutions in the United States, the Justice Department said.

Through his lawyer, al-Saadi has claimed he is a political prisoner and a prisoner of war and said the US was persecuting him for his relationship with Soleimani, who was responsible for backing Iranian proxies across the region and plotting overseas attacks.

Agencies contributed to this report.