The White House said Donald Trump ordered an air strike that killed Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad in the early hours of Friday. 

In the attack against Baghdad airport, the Pentagon said that Soleimani's associate, deputy head of the Popular Mobilisation Units (Hashd al-Shaabi), Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, was also killed.

General Soleimani was commander of the Quds Force, the elite, external wing of the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which the Trump administration designated as a terror organisation in April last year.

The attack marks a dramatic escalation of an already bloody struggle between Washington and Tehran for influence across the region.

According to reports, Soleimani, who ran Iranian military operations in Iraq and Syria, was targeted while being driven from Baghdad airport by local allies from the Popular Mobilisation Units (PMU). The deputy head of the PMU, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandes, a close Suleimani associate, was also killed in the attack.

Minutes before the statement Trump tweeted a US flag without comment. Later, the White House put out a statement saying the strike was a “decisive defensive action” carried out “at the direction of the president”.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, ordered three days of mourning and vowed that the US would face “severe revenge” for the killing.