In 2015, Donald Trump had no clue who General Soleimani and confused Kurds with Quds

"Are you familiar with General Soleimani?" conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt asked Trump in a September 2015 interview.

Trump said he was familiar, but added that Hewitt should "go ahead, give me a little, go ahead, tell me."

"He runs the Quds Forces," Hewitt responded, naming the elite Iranian military fighting force Soleimani had long commanded.

"Yes, okay, right," Trump said, adding, "The Kurds, by the way, have been horribly mistreated."

Hewitt then interrupted to say he wasn't talking about the Kurds — the Middle Eastern ethnic group — and explained the Quds were part of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

Trump insisted he had misheard Hewitt and then launched into an attack on the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration.

But the radio host looped back around to his original question: Would Soleimani change his behavior as a result of the deal?

Later in the interview, Hewitt listed the names of other prominent Islamist militant leaders — Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah, Al Qaeda's Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Nusra Front's Abu Muhammad al-Julani, and the Islamic State's Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi — and asked Trump if he knew who they were.

He did not.

(Trump ordered the assassination of al-Baghdadi in October.)

Trump then argued that leaders like Soleimani will be dead, and therefore irrelevant, by the time he becomes president. And he suggested it wasn't important for him to know the difference between Islamic militant groups Hezbollah and Hamas.

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