Iran will defeat the American and Israeli alliance, Iran’s Minister of Defense Amir Hatami said on Wednesday, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA). “We will defeat the American-Zionist front,” he said.
The official’s comments come amid spiraling U.S.-Iranian tensions and the arrival of a major U.S. aircraft carrier group to the region, and on the heels of a visit by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Moscow. The Kremlin said Pompeo’s visit failed to allay its concerns over the ongoing crisis.
Pompeo made surprise visit to Baghdad this month after U.S. intelligence showed Iran-backed Shi’ite militias positioning rockets near bases housing U.S. forces, according to two Iraqi security sources.
He told Iraq’s top brass to keep the militias, which are expanding their power in Iraq and now form part of its security apparatus, in check, the sources said. If not, the U.S. would respond with force.
As tensions between Washington and Tehran increase, Iraq finds itself caught between neighbouring Iran, whose regional influence has grown in recent years, and the United States.
“The message from the Americans was clear. They wanted guarantees that Iraq would stop those groups threatening U.S. interests,” a senior Iraqi military source with knowledge of Pompeo’s trip said.
Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Wednesday that Moscow is concerned over mounting tensions and defended Iran’s actions as a legitimate response to the U.S. decision to withdraw from the 2015 nuclear deal.
The USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier and its supporting group of ships arrived Wednesday at the Gulf of Oman, ahead of a planned passage through the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran has given European countries a 60-day deadline to negotiate a new nuclear deal Tehran or it would start enriching uranium to higher levels than outlined in the current agreement.
Also on Wednesday, the U.S. Embassy in Iraq says the State Department has ordered all non-essential, non-emergency government staff to leave the country right away amid escalating tensions with Iran.
A spokesperson for the German Defense Ministry said Wednesday that Germany is suspending military training operations in Iraq due to the increasing regional tensions.
The alert, published on the embassy’s website on Wednesday, comes after Washington last week said it had detected new and urgent threats from Iran and its proxy forces in the region targeting Americans and American interests.
On Sunday, the embassy advised Americans to avoid travel to Iraq, citing “heightened tensions.”
Meanwhile, a satellite image obtained by The Associated Press shows one of the two pumping stations attacked by drones in Saudi Arabia apparently intact.
The image from San Francisco-based Planet Labs Inc. that the AP examined on Wednesday shows Saudi Aramco’s Pumping Station No. 8 outside of the town of al-Duadmi. It’s 330 kilometers, or 205 miles, west of the capital, Riyadh.
The photo, taken Tuesday after the attack claimed by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, shows two black marks near where Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline passes by the facility. Those marks weren’t there in images taken Monday.
The facility otherwise appears intact.
The attack came as regional tensions flared, just days after what the kingdom called an attack on two of its oil tankers off the coast of the United Arab Emirates.
Source » haaretz