Iran calls Trump’s response to attacks ‘repugnant’
Iran’s foreign minister denounced on Thursday the United States’ response to a pair of deadly assaults in Tehran as “repugnant,” as the death toll in the attacks rose to 17, with 52 others wounded.
Armed followers of the Islamic State group carried out brazen attacks on two high-profile sites Wednesday — the parliament building and the mausoleum of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic — adding to tensions in the Middle East. It was the first time the militant group had carried out a significant operation in Iran.
President Donald Trump issued a statement Wednesday morning the attacks, but added: “We underscore that states that sponsor terrorism risk falling victim to the evil they promote.”
That elicited an angry response Thursday from Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who helped negotiate a landmark nuclear deal that Iran, the United States and other countries reached in 2015. “Repugnant WH statement & Senate sanctions as Iranians counter terror backed by U.S. clients,” Zarif wrote on Twitter. “Iranian people reject such U.S. claims of friendship.”
Also on Thursday, the government released photographs of five men who were killed by security forces Thursday: four in the siege of parliament, and one in an assault on the mausoleum.
The five men left Iran to fight for the terrorist group in Mosul, Iraq, and in Raqqa, Syria, the group’s de facto capital, according to a government statement. They returned to Iran last July or August under the leadership of a commander with the nom de guerre Abu Aisha and “intended to carry out terrorist operations in religious cities.”
The statement did not disclose the nationalities of the five men. Reza Seifollahi, deputy chief of the Supreme National Security Council, told the independent newspaper Shargh they were Iranian, but at least one state news agency reported that one of the attackers was not Iranian.
Several witnesses reported the attackers spoke Arabic with an Iranian accent, suggesting they were ethnic Arabs living in Iran.
On Thursday, the Iranian government said the five men who carried out the attacks in Tehran were “long affiliated with the Wahhabi,” the ultraconservative form of Sunni Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia — but it stopped short of directly blaming Saudi Arabia, its rival for supremacy in the region.