Trump threatens to hit 52 sites in Iran

Iran yesterday vowed military response after US President Donald Trump threatened to hit 52 Iranian sites “very hard” if Iran attacks Americans or US assets to avenge the killing of a top military commander.

Stepping up pressure over the US killing, Iraq’s parliament, after passing a resolution, yesterday urged the government to oust thousands of American troops from the country.

Qassem Soleimani was killed on Friday in a US drone strike on his convoy at Baghdad airport, an attack that took US-Iranian hostilities into uncharted waters and stoked concern about a major conflagration.

Meanwhile, Iran said it would further roll back its commitments to a 2015 nuclear deal with six major powers, by enriching uranium without restrictions, but it will continue to cooperate with the UN nuclear watchdog.

State television said Iran would not respect any limits set down in the pact on the country’s nuclear work: whether the limit on its number of uranium enrichment centrifuges to its enrichment capacity, the level to which uranium could be enriched, or Iran’s nuclear Research and Development activities.

Iran has steadily overstepped the deal’s limits on its nuclear activities in response to the US withdrawal from the accord in 2018 and Washington’s reimposition of sanctions that have crippled Iran’s oil trade.

As Washington and Tehran, longtime foes, assailed each other with threats and counter-threats, the European Union, Britain and Oman urged them to make diplomatic efforts to defuse the crisis.

Parliamentary resolutions, unlike laws, are non-binding to the government. But this one is likely to be heeded: Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi, who heads a Shia-led government in Iraq, had earlier called on parliament to end foreign troop presence as soon as possible.

In a saber-rattling tweet that defended the Friday’s assassination, Trump said 52 represents the number of Americans held hostage at the US embassy in Tehran for more than a year starting in late 1979.

Trump said some of these sites are “at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD. The USA wants no more threats!”

The military adviser to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei hit back saying the Islamic republic’s response to the killing of  Soleimani will be military, CNN reported.

“The response for sure will be military and against military sites,” Brigadier General Hossein Dehghan told CNN in Farsi, according to a translation by the US news network.

Dehghan said: “It was America that has started the war. Therefore, they should accept appropriate reactions to their actions.”

“The only thing that can end this period of war is for the Americans to receive a blow that is equal to the blow they have inflicted,” said the former Iranian defence minister.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo acknowledged the possibility.

“We think there is a real likelihood Iran will make a mistake and make a decision to go after some of our forces, military forces in Iraq or soldiers in northeast Syria,” he told Fox News in remarks aired yesterday.

On Saturday, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said Washington had asked Tehran to respond “in proportion” over Soleimani’s killing. Tehran has vowed to avenge his death in the “right time and place”.

Iran-US tensions have escalated sharply since 2018 when Trump withdrew America from a landmark nuclear agreement and reimposed crippling sanctions on the Islamic republic.

Trump spoke out after pro-Iran factions ramped up pressure on US installations across Iraq with missiles and warnings to Iraqi troops -- part of an outburst of fury over the killing of Soleimani, described as the second most-powerful man in Iran.

His killing was the most dramatic escalation yet in spiraling tensions between Washington and Tehran and has prompted fears of a major conflagration in the Middle East.

In the first hints of a possible retaliatory response, two mortar rounds hit an area near the US embassy in Baghdad on Saturday, security sources told AFP.

Almost simultaneously, two rockets slammed into the Al-Balad airbase where American troops are deployed north of Baghdad, security sources said.

The Iraqi military confirmed the missile attacks in Baghdad and on al-Balad and said there were no casualties. The US military also said no coalition troops were hurt.

While no one claimed Saturday’s attacks in Baghdad, a hardline pro-Iran faction in Iraq’s Hashed al-Shaabi military network shortly after urged Iraqis to move away from US forces by Sunday at 5:00 pm local time. The deadline coincides with the parliament session which voted to oust US troops.

The attacks appeared to be precisely the reaction Iraqis had long feared: tit-for-tat strikes between the Hashed and the US on Iraqi soil.

Earlier Saturday, the Hashed claimed a new strike hit their convoy north of Baghdad, with Iraqi state media blaming the US. But the US-led coalition denied involvement, telling AFP: “There was no American or coalition strike” on Saturday.

Washington has blamed the vehemently anti-American group for a series of rocket attacks in recent weeks targeting US diplomats and troops stationed across Iraq.

“This is no longer a proxy war,” said Erica Gaston, a non-resident fellow at the New America Foundation.

“What you have is America attacking an Iranian general directly, and groups are now openly fighting for Iran to avenge him. This is a direct war,” she told AFP.

The US strike on Baghdad international airport early Friday killed a total of five Iranian Revolutionary Guards and five members of Iraq’s Hashed. Among the dead was Hashed’s deputy head Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a top adviser and personal friend to Soleimani.

As head of the Guards’ foreign operations arm, the Quds Force, Soleimani was a powerful figure domestically and oversaw Iran’s wide-ranging interventions in regional power struggles.

Hundreds of thousands of mourners, many chanting, beating their chests and wailing in grief, turned out across Iran to show their respects after Soleimani’s body was returned home to a hero’s welcome.

Trump has said Soleimani was planning an “imminent” attack on US personnel in Baghdad and should have been killed “many years ago”.

Tehran has slammed the strike as an “act of war” and Abdel Mahdi said it could bring “devastating” violence to Iraq.