Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders thinks President Trump’s decision to eliminate the imminent threat Iranian terrorist Qassem Soleimani posed to Americans and others across the Middle East is a lot like murdering political dissidents.

The elderly statesman made that argument to CNN when discussing last week’s U.S. drone strike that killed Soleimani, who laid siege to the U.S. embassy in Baghdad days prior and was reportedly plotting additional attacks.

“This guy was, as bad as he was, an official of the Iranian government,” Sanders told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Monday. “And you unleash then, if China does that, you know, if Russia does that. Russia has been implicated under Putin with assassinating dissidents.

“So once you’re in the business of assignation, you release some very terrible forces,” Sanders insisted.

On Friday, Sanders argued the U.S. should heed Iran’s demand to leave the Middle East.

“We must do more than just stop war with Iran,” he posted to Twitter. “We must firmly commit to ending U.S. military presence in the Middle East in an orderly manner. We must end our involvement in the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen. We must bring our troops home from Afghanistan.”

He described the elimination of Soleimani, the architect of countless attacks on U.S. solders and others in the region, as a “dangerous escalation” and “reckless foreign policy.”

Others intimately familiar with the destruction credited to Soleimani shared a different take on his death.

Middle East experts told CNBC Soleimani was considered the second most powerful man in Iran after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and he’s had a hand in most conflicts across the Middle East over his two decade career. When militants attacked the U.S. emassy in Baghdad last week, they were chanting “Qasem Soleimani is our leader.”

The State Department contends Soleimani is responsible for more than 600 American deaths in Iraq alone since 2003, according to the news site.

“The puppet master is dead; the strings have been cut,” Michael Knights, an expert on Iraq and the Persian Gulf who is now with the Washington Institute, told CNBC.

“Qasem Soleimani is a unique figure,” he said. “We don’t have anyone like him in the U.S., and because he was experienced, capable and had the complete trust of the supreme leader of Iran, they over-concentrated an awful lot of their capability and their prestige in one man.

“And that guy just got killed,” Knights said.

“Soleimani’s death is a game-changer for the Middle East,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow and Iran specialist at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “For over a decade, there has barely been a Middle Eastern hotspot that Soleimani didn’t have a proxy or militias fighting in. He was an agent of chaos.”