Washington/Riyadh
United States President Donald Trump targeted Iranian Supreme Leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other top Iranian officials with sanctions on
Monday, taking a dramatic, unprecedented step to increase pressure on Iran
after Tehran’s downing of an unmanned American drone.
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| U.S. President Donald Trump displays an executive order imposing fresh sanctions on Iran in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, U.S., June 24, 2019. |
With tensions running high between
the two countries, Trump signed an executive order imposing the sanctions,
which U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said would lock billions of
dollars more in Iranian assets.
Trump told reporters the sanctions
were in part a response to last week’s downing of a U.S. drone by Iran, but
would have happened anyway. He said Khamenei was ultimately responsible for
what Trump called “the hostile conduct of the regime” in the Middle East.
Trump said the sanctions “will deny
the Supreme Leader and the Supreme Leader’s office, and those closely
affiliated with him and the office, access to key financial resources and
support.”
John Smith, who was director of the
U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) before joining a law
firm last year, said the United States had never targeted an Iranian head of
state before and that was a sign Trump was getting personal.
“Generally, when you target a head of state
you’re not turning back. That is when you believe all options are at an end,”
Smith told Reuters.
Some policy analysts say earlier
sanctions issued under Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign are why Iran has
felt compelled to adopt more aggressive tactics as its economy feels the
crunch. The Trump administration wants to force Tehran to open talks on its
nuclear and missile programs and its activities in the region.
Iran would not accept talks with the
United States while it is under the threat of sanctions, Iranian ambassador to
the United Nations, Majid Takht Ravanchi, told reporters at the U.N.
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| Ayatollah Ali Khamenei |
The U.S. decision is another
indication it “has no respect for international law and order,” he said.
The U.N. Security Council met behind
closed doors on Monday at the request of the United States, whose acting
ambassador Jonathan Cohen said evidence showed Iran was to blame for attacks on
commercial tankers in the Gulf in May and June and urged the world to tell
Tehran its actions were unacceptable.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad
Javad Zarif, responding to the sanctions in a Twitter post, said hawkish
politicians close to Trump “despise diplomacy, and thirst for war.” Last year,
Trump withdrew the United States from a 2015 international accord to restrict
Tehran’s pathway to a nuclear bomb and has since been ramping up sanctions to
throttle the Iranian economy.
Mnuchin said Zarif would be targeted
with U.S. sanctions later this week.
The latest sanctions are aimed at
denying Iran’s leadership access to financial resources, blocking them from
using the United States financial system or having access to any assets in the
United States.
“Anybody who conducts significant
transactions with these sanctioned individuals may be exposed to sanctions
themselves,” the White House said.
Tensions worsened in May when
Washington ordered all countries to halt imports of Iranian oil.
“We call on the regime to abandon its nuclear
ambitions, change its destructive behavior, respect the rights of its people,
and return in good faith to the negotiating table,” Trump said in a statement.
Iran denies seeking nuclear weapons
and refers to a religious decree issued in the early 2000s by Khamenei that
bans the development or use of nuclear weapons.
Sanctions were also imposed on eight
senior commanders of Navy, Aerospace, and Ground Forces of the Islamic
Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the U.S. Treasury Department said.
“These commanders sit atop a
bureaucracy that supervises the IRGC’s malicious regional activities, including
its provocative ballistic missile program, harassment and sabotage of
commercial vessels in international waters, and its destabilizing presence in
Syria,” the department said in a statement.
Trump said the sanctions are a
“strong and proportionate response to Iran’s increasingly provocative actions.”
Iran said on Monday U.S. cyber-attacks
on its military had failed, as Washington sought to rally support in the Middle
East and Europe for a hardline stance that has brought it to the verge of
conflict with its longtime foe.
Iran denies responsibility for the
attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf. On Monday, the United States said it was
building a coalition with allies to protect Gulf shipping lanes.
A coalition of nations would provide
both material and financial contributions to the program, a senior U.S. State
Department official said, without identifying the countries.
“It’s about proactive deterrence,
because the Iranians just want to go out and do what they want to do and say
hey we didn’t do it. We know what they’ve done,” the official told reporters,
adding that the deterrents would include cameras, binoculars and ships.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
is in the Middle East to discuss Iran with the leaders of Saudi Arabia and the
United Arab Emirates, two Sunni Muslim allies aligned against Shi’ite Muslim
Iran.
“Freedom of navigation is paramount,”
Pompeo tweeted from the Saudi city of Jeddah.
Iran’s Zarif, in his Twitter post,
said: “@realDonaldTrump is 100% right that the US military has no business in
the Persian Gulf. Removal of its forces is fully in line with interests of US
and the world.”
It was an apparent reference to a
tweet in which Trump said other countries should protect their own oil shipping
in the Middle East rather than have the United States protect them.
The United States accuses Iran of
encouraging allies in Yemen to attack Saudi targets.
In a joint statement on Monday, the United
States, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Britain expressed concern over Middle East
tensions and the dangers posed by Iranian “destabilizing activity” to peace and
security in Yemen and the region.
The confrontation between Iran and
the United States heated up last Thursday when Iran shot down an American
drone, saying it had flown over its air space.
Washington, which said the drone was
in international skies, then appeared to come close to attacking Iranian
military targets, with Trump saying that he aborted a retaliatory air strike 10
minutes before it was to go ahead.
Trump said he decided the strike
would have killed too many people.
Both Iran and the United States have
said they do not want war and both have suggested they are willing to talk
while demanding the other side move first.
Allies of the United States have been
calling for steps to defuse the crisis, saying they fear a small mistake by
either side could trigger war.
“We are very concerned. We don’t
think either side wants a war, but we are very concerned that we could get into
an accidental war and we are doing everything we can to ratchet things down,”
British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said.
U.S. allies in Europe and Asia view
Trump’s decision to abandon the nuclear deal as a mistake that strengthens
hardliners in Iran and weakens the pragmatic faction of President Hassan
Rouhani.
France, Britain and Germany have sent
an official diplomatic warning to Iran if Tehran reduces its compliance with
the accord, two European diplomats said on Monday.
It was not immediately clear what
consequences Iran might face for non-compliance. - Reuters
