Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood Al-Saadi, who was charged with planning a series of attacks against Jewish and American targets, plotted to assassinate Ivanka Trump, the daughter of U.S. President Donald Trump, the New York Post reported Friday night. The newspaper said Al-Saadi, a 32-year-old Iraqi terrorist trained by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, had “vowed” to target her in revenge against the president for the killing of Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad nearly six years ago.
“After Qasem was killed, he [Al-Saadi] went around telling people ‘we need to kill Ivanka to burn down the house of Trump the way he burned down our house,’” Entifadh Qanbar, a former deputy military attache at the Iraqi Embassy in Washington, told the Post. According to Qanbar, Al-Saadi also had plans of her Florida home. The newspaper said another source confirmed his plan to assassinate the president’s daughter.
Al-Saadi, a commander in the Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah militia, was charged with planning attacks against a prominent synagogue in New York and targets in Los Angeles in revenge for the strikes in Iran, as well as planning 18 attacks in Europe and two in Canada. He arrived in the United States after being extradited from Turkey.
According to the Post report, Al-Saadi posted on X a map showing the Florida enclave where Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, own a $24 million home, alongside a chilling threat in Arabic: “I say to the Americans 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.”
Close ties to the Quds Force commander — and a diplomatic passport
Qanbar, the former deputy attache who now heads the Future Foundation, a nonprofit that works to strengthen ties between the United States and Iraqi Kurds, told the Post that Al-Saadi was close to Soleimani and saw him as a father figure after the death of his own father, Iranian Gen. Ahmad Kazemi, in 2006. Qanbar said Al-Saadi founded a travel agency specializing in religious trips, which allowed him to travel around the world to “connect with terror cells.”
When he was arrested in Turkey last week, he also had an Iraqi service passport, a special travel document issued to government employees and public servants that can be obtained only with the approval of Iraq’s prime minister, Qanbar added. The passport allowed him to travel freely, undergo minimal or no security checks at Iraqi airports and gain access to VIP airport lounges.
Although passport holders are still required to undergo security checks elsewhere, Al-Saadi could have easily obtained visas to the various countries where he allegedly planned terrorist attacks, Qanbar claimed. According to reports, Al-Saadi was on his way to Russia when he was arrested.
Active on X: ‘I will leave until America is defeated’
Surprisingly for an alleged high-profile terrorist figure, Al-Saadi was highly visible on social media. His posts show him standing near tourist attractions, including the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, as well as taking selfies in kayaks and posing in front of a missile with his hand on his heart.
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Image of Ivanka and Kushner’s villa, and the threat: 'Our revenge is only a matter of time'
(Photo: From X)
The federal indictment against Al-Saadi also includes photos of him consulting with Soleimani, apparently at a military facility, while studying maps and other equipment. He posted the images on his Snapchat account, according to court documents. In August 2020, seven months after Soleimani was killed, Al-Saadi posted on X a photo of Soleimani and another military figure killed in the same U.S. drone strike, held by gunmen carrying AK-47s. The caption read: “I will leave social media and turn off all my phones until the American enemy is defeated …victory or martyrdom.”
But his social media break did not last long. In a 2025 post on X, which he described as his “last tweet,” Al-Saadi referred to Soleimani and other Iranian military leaders killed in U.S. strikes as “martyrs.” “I address you while in great shock and intense weakness, a feeling I have never experience in my life except once, at the martyrdom of …Qasem Soleimani,” he wrote.
Messages seen by the Post also show that Al-Saadi targeted and threatened potential victims through Snapchat messages and social media posts, often sending them an image of a handgun fitted with a silencer.
‘Kill anyone who supports the US and Israel’
The suspect is now being held in solitary confinement at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where other high-profile detainees are held, including former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and Luigi Mangione, who is accused of killing the CEO of insurance giant UnitedHealthcare.
Al-Saadi is also accused of planning attacks on Jewish targets in revenge for the war in Iran. Prosecutors’ documents show that in February, he posted a call on social media for violent action against Israel and the United States. “Do not abandon the blood of your imam, O Shiites of Iraq,” he wrote. “Kill anyone who supports America and Israel. Leave none of them alive. Civilian and military targets, as well as voices of dissent, kill them everywhere.”
Kataib Hezbollah, the militia to which he belongs, is designated by the United States as a foreign terrorist organization. Its members are among those behind the abduction of Israeli-Russian researcher Elizabeth Tsurkov. Secretary of State Marco Rubio also said in March that the group had abducted and later released American journalist Shelly Kittleson in Baghdad.
As part of his activity in Europe, Al-Saadi led the firebombing of a Bank of New York Mellon building in Amsterdam, an attempt to detonate improvised explosive devices at a Bank of America branch in Paris and was also behind a stabbing attack in London in which two people were wounded, including an American citizen of Jewish descent. The indictment says his main objective in the United States was to harm Americans and Jews.
To advance the attack in New York, Al-Saadi promised to pay thousands of dollars to a person he believed would carry out the attack on the synagogue. He showed the person photos and maps of the target. But the person he was speaking with turned out to be an undercover law enforcement agent. In a recorded phone call on April 1, Al-Saadi was heard asking how much it would cost to hire someone “to carry out a bombing operation” in the United States. In the same call, he added: “I mean, we provide him with a Jewish temple, a Jewish center.”