Tensions between Tehran and Washington further deteriorated in early January, when top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani was assassinated in a US drone strike on his car in Baghdad.
Major General Hossein Salami, Chief Commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), has urged the US to use its military for domestic purposes instead of sending it abroad.
“When the Americans are in the region, they will both harm themselves and the nations [in the region], and their existence results in nothing but the deterioration of their own power and damage to these nations”, Salami pointed out on Saturday.
He referred to an IRGC missile attack on a US airbase in January, saying that some US officials announced after the strike that they “wanted to carry out limited operations against the Iranians, which was no more than a political bluff”.
Salami noted that after Washington “tested the power” of the Islamic Republic, the US “knows very well how Iran will react to any efforts to undermine it”.
He called on US officials to “really care about the lives of their people in New York and the states involved with coronavirus rather than thinking about Hollywood scenarios and killing people in Iraq”.
The statement followed Salami pledging last week that Iran will continue to respond to the US assassination of the top Iranian general in Iraq earlier this year.
“The Americans assassinated our great commander. We have responded to that terrorist act and will respond to it”, Salami said in a televised address.
Salami also commented on the economic situation in the country amid the tough US sanctions against Iran, stressing that Tehran’s enemies “have not been able to subjugate Iran through economic pressure”.
Source » nationpk