Hezbollah vows US revenge
Iran swears tit-for-tat for general’s murder, saying enemy soldiers will ‘return in coffins’
HEZBOLLAH leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said yesterday that US military in the Middle East would pay the price for the killing of Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani, and US soldiers and officers would “return home in coffins”.
Nasrallah, speaking in a televised address marking Soleimani’s death in a targeted US military air strike, said responding to the killing was not only Iran’s responsibility, but the responsibility of its allies in the region as well.
He said attacks on the US military in the Middle East would be “fair punishment” for the killing of Soleimani.
He listed US military bases, naval ships and military personnel.
Founded by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in 1982, Hezbollah is a critical part of an Iranian-backed regional military alliance.
The US has designated Hezbollah as a terrorist group.
“When the coffins of American soldiers and officers begin to be transported ... to the US (President Donald) Trump and his administration will realise that they have really lost the region and will lose the elections,” Nasrallah said, referring to America’s 2020 presidential election.
Nasrallah said such an approach would force the US to withdraw from the Middle East “humiliated, defeated and in terror... as they left in the past”.
Nasrallah also said that US civilians in the region “should not be touched”, because this would serve Trump’s agenda.
Iran condemned Trump yesterday as a “terrorist in a suit” after the US president threatened to hit 52 Iranian sites hard if Tehran attacked Americans or US assets in retaliation for killing Soleimani. As the two countries assailed each other in a war of words, the EU, Britain and Oman urged both to make efforts to defuse the crisis.
Soleimani, Iran’s pre-eminent military commander, was killed on Friday in a US drone strike on his convoy at Baghdad airport.
The attack took long-running hostilities between Washington and Tehran into uncharted territory and raised the spectre of wider conflict in the Middle East.
Heightened fears of war drove Gulf stocks sharply lower yesterday.
Hundreds of thousands of mourners, many chanting, beating their chests and wailing in grief, turned out across Iran to show their respects after
Soleimani’s body was returned home to a hero’s welcome.
“Like Isis (Islamic State), like Hitler, like Genghis! They all hate cultures. Trump is a terrorist in a suit,” Information and Telecommunications Minister Mohammad Javad Azari-Jahromi tweeted.
Soleimani was the architect of Tehran’s clandestine and military operations abroad as head of the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force. Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei promised on Friday that Iran would seek harsh revenge for his death.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that if there were further Iranian attacks on US targets Washington would respond with strikes.
“The intelligence assessment made clear that no action, allowing Soleimani to continue his plotting and his planning, his terror campaign, created more risk than taking the action that we took last week,” Pompeo said on ABC’s This Week news show.
Democratic Party critics of the Republican president have said the strike that Trump authorised was reckless and risked more bloodshed in a dangerous region.
Trump tweeted on Saturday that Iran “is talking very boldly about targeting certain US assets”.
Iran summoned the Swiss envoy in Tehran yesterday to protest at “Trump’s hostile remarks”, according to Iranian state television.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell urged Iran’s foreign minister by phone to work to de-escalate the situation.
Iran was set to decide yesterday on its next step to further roll back its commitments to its 2015 nuclear containment deal, foreign ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi was quoted as saying.
“Considering the recent threats (by America) it should be underlined that in politics, all developments and threats are linked to each other,” state news agency Irna quoted him as saying.