Washington, Dec. 24, (dpa/GNA) – US President Donald Trump warned Iran over repeated rocket attacks on the country’s embassy in Baghdad, Iraq, saying he would not tolerate any deaths of US personnel.
“Some friendly health advice to Iran: If one American is killed, I will hold Iran responsible. Think it over,” Trump said on Twitter, charging that the rockets used in recent attacks came from Iran.
Iranian-backed Shia groups in Iraq are being blamed for the rocket attacks, but Tehran denies the allegations.
Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted that Trump was attempting to “divert attention from catastrophic failures at home,” attaching a graphic showing Covid-19 death tolls in the US.
The threat by the US president comes just ahead of the one-year anniversary of the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani. Washington carried out the strike in January of last year in Iraq.
Iran seems to be looking past the end of Trump’s time in office and is urging incoming president Joe Biden to return to the nuclear deal.
This would also mean lifting the sanctions, and it remains unclear if Biden would immediately unwind all the restrictions and simply go back to the era before Trump, with the current administration’s increasing network of restrictions making it ever harder.
Biden was vice president under Barack Obama, who reached the 2015 agreement. On the campaign trail, Biden said that if Iran returns to “strict compliance” with the nuclear deal, he would rejoin the deal as a starting point for further negotiations.
GNA