The military adviser for the Iranian regime’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei said Iran will attempt to target “military sites” following the killing of the commander of the shadowy Quds Force, Gen. Qasem Soleimani, by the United States.
“The response for sure will be military and against military sites,” Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan told CNN on Sunday. “Let me tell you one thing: Our leadership has officially announced that we have never been seeking war and we will not be seeking war,” he said.
Claiming that it was the United States that “started the war,” he said that the United States should expect a violent reaction, but he didn’t elaborate. “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. Afterward, they should not seek a new cycle.”
Dehghan was addressing President Donald Trump’s warning on Saturday night that the United States will respond to any retaliation by targeting 52 Iranian sites, noting that some of the targets have major cultural significance.
“Iran is talking very boldly about targeting certain USA assets as revenge for our ridding the world of their terrorist leader who had just killed an American, & badly wounded many others, not to mention all of the people he had killed over his lifetime, including recently hundreds of Iranian protesters,” Trump wrote on Twitter over the weekend.
The president continued in saying that Soleimani “was already attacking our Embassy, and preparing for additional hits in other locations. Iran has been nothing but problems for many years.” Trump was referring to an attack on the U.S. embassy on Baghdad last week.
If the president made good on his threat, Dehghan said that “for sure no American military staff, no American political center, no American military base, no American vessel will be safe. And they are accessible to us.”
His remarks come after an Iranian member of Parliament, Abolfazl Abutorabi, called for Iran to attack the White House.
“We can attack the White House itself, we can respond to them on the American soil. We have the power, and God willing we will respond in an appropriate time,” Abutorabi told The Independent. He described the attack to kill Soleimani a “declaration of war.”
After the killing of Soleimani, the American-led coalition forces in the Middle East said they have stopped training Iraqi forces, saying they are still committed to working with Iraq to combat the ISIS terrorist group.
“Repeated rocket attacks over the last two months by elements of Kata’ib Hezbollah have caused the death of Iraqi Security Forces personnel and a U.S. civilian. As a result we are now fully committed to protecting the Iraqi bases that host Coalition troops,” the statement said. “This has limited our capacity to conduct training with partners and to support their operations against Daesh [ISIS] and we have therefore paused these activities, subject to continuous review.”
