23 years in prison for an American woman who leaked to Hezbollah the names of Washington agents in Iraq

A US court has handed down a 23-year prison sentence, on Wednesday, to an American translator who was working with the Pentagon.

The translator had admitted that she had leaked to a man linked to the Lebanese Hezbollah the names of informants for the US army in Iraq following the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in a US air strike in Baghdad.

The US State Department said in a statement that the translator, Mariam Thompson, 63, entered into an agreement with the Public Prosecution Office, in which she pleaded guilty to the charges against her.

The statement added that Thompson admitted that she had provided a Lebanese man with classified military information, knowing that he would, in turn, pass it on to Hezbollah.

In December 2019, this translator was placed in the service of US special forces in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan region in northern Iraq, at a time when the United States began launching strikes on pro-Iranian militias.

These strikes reached their climax on January 3, when a US drone assassinated the commander of the Quds Force in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, General Qassem Soleimani, near Baghdad airport.

The FBI arrested Thompson on February 27, 2020.