Decision to remove Qassem from battlefield saved many American lives: Pompeo

US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo on Saturday said that the decision to kill Iran's elite IRGC Qassem Soleimani by Donald Trump administration saved many American lives.

"US President's decision to remove Qassem from the battlefield saved many American lives. It was imminent, this was an intelligence-based assessment,'' said Pompeo, in an interview to CNN.

"The risk of doing nothing was enormous. The risk was not just in Iraq, this was throughout the region. It was using these proxy forces that Qassem has manipulated for so long to bring so much destruction," he added.

Pompeo also accused Qassem of inflecting enormous harm not only on American lives but of creating destructive action activities throughout the middle-east region.

He further accused him of the supporting "the Lebanese Hezbollah, Hamas and all of the bad actors in the Middle East."

This statement comes at a backdrop of Washington's strike carried out near Baghdad's international airport killing Soleimani, a US-designated terrorist, along with six others on the direction of President Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, Iran on Friday vowed to take a "vigorous revenge" over the killing of General Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran's elite IRGC.

The US had accused Soleimani of orchestrating several attacks on coalition bases in Iraq including the December 27 attack in which American and Iraqi personnel were killed.