Pompeo: Saudi attack was ‘act of war’ by Iran
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday accused Iran of having carried out an “act of war” with aerial strikes on oil facilities in Saudi Arabia last weekend, and he said the United States was working to build a coalition to deter further attacks.
Pompeo’s words were the strongest so far from a U.S. official regarding the attack Saturday in Saudi Arabia, which severely impaired production and raised fears that tensions between Iran and the United States could escalate into war.
President Donald Trump, meanwhile, said he is moving to increase financial sanctions on Tehran over the attack. He was noncommittal on whether he would order U.S. military retaliation.
Asked about a possible U.S. attack on Iran, Trump told reporters in Los Angeles: “There are many options.
There’s the ultimate option, and there are options a lot less than that.”
In Saudi Arabia, military officials displayed what they described as physical evidence that Iran had been responsible for the attack, but they did not specify how they intended to respond or what they expected from their U.S. allies.
The Houthi rebels in Yemen, who have been fighting a Saudi-led coalition for more than four years, have said
they were responsible for the attack. Iran, a strong ally of the Houthis, has denied any responsibility. U.S. and Saudi officials have said the Houthis had neither the sophistication nor the weapons to carry it out.
“This was an Iranian attack,” Pompeo said. “We were blessed there were no Americans killed in this attack, but anytime you have an act of war of this nature, there’s always a risk that could happen.”
Pompeo spoke to reporters at the end of a flight to Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, where he met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to discuss the intelligence on the attack and possible actions. Pompeo also planned to visit the United Arab Emirates on his emergency trip before returning to Washington.
“That’s my mission here, is to work with our partners in the region,” he said.
“We’re working to build out a coalition to develop a plan to deter [attacks],” Pompeo added. “We want to work to make sure infrastructure and resources are put in place such that attacks like this would be less successful than this one appears to have been.”
He dismissed the claim by the Houthis that they had attacked the oil facilities. “The intelligence community has high confidence that these were not weapons that would have been in the possession of the Houthis,” Pompeo said.
The State Department said in a statement after their meeting that Pompeo and Crown Prince Mohammed had “agreed that this was an unacceptable and unprecedented attack that not only threatened Saudi Arabian national security, but also endangered the lives of all the American citizens living and working in Saudi Arabia, as well as the world’s energy supply in general.”
It said they “discussed the need for the international community to come together to counter the continued threat of the Iranian regime.”
SAUDIS’ EVIDENCE
Earlier, at a news conference in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, the Saudi Defense Ministry showed what it described as debris from the attack site and videos that appeared to be from surveillance cameras on the ground.
“This attack was launched from the north and was unquestionably sponsored by Iran,” said Col. Turki al-Maliki, a spokesman for the Defense Ministry.
He said Saudi officials were still trying to determine exactly where the strikes originated.
The French government announced that President Emmanuel Macron promised in a telephone call Tuesday with Crown Prince Mohammed that French experts would go to Saudi Arabia to assist in the investigation, at the request of the Saudis.
The attack Saturday, which Saudi officials said involved about two dozen drones and cruise missiles, temporarily cut Saudi oil processing in half, shaking global markets and worsening the tensions between the United States and Iran that have prevailed since Trump took office.
Trump has already imposed punishing economic sanctions on Iran and some of its top officials in what the administration has described as a “maximum pressure” campaign to force Iran to negotiate new limits on its nuclear program and to stop its sponsorship of militant groups across the Middle East.
On Wednesday morning, Trump wrote on Twitter that he had told Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin “to substantially increase Sanctions on the country of Iran.” It was not immediately clear how extensive a new round of penalties would be, but Trump later said details would be released within 48 hours.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif responded to the announcement on Twitter, writing that Trump was “escalating U.S. economic war on Iranians.”
Iran and the Houthis have described the strikes on Saudi Arabia as retaliation for extensive bombing by the Saudis that has killed thousands of people in Yemen.
U.S. and Saudi officials have said that the weekend attack clearly used Iranian weapons. The Americans have also said that evidence that has not been made public points to strikes launched from Iran, to the north, not from Yemen, to the south.
“This is the kind of weapon the Iranian regime and the Iranian IRGC are using against the civilian object and facilities infrastructure,” al-Maliki, the Saudi spokesman, said, referring to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.
He added: “This attack did not originate from Yemen, despite Iran’s best effort to make it appear so.”
He also said that 18 drones hit one site and four cruise missiles hit another. He said three missiles fell short.
On Tuesday, a senior Trump administration official said in Washington that an oil facility was struck at least 17 times and that a second facility was struck at least twice by cruise missiles.
U.N. SESSION
Trump and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani have been expected to attend the annual U.N. General Assembly session in New York next week, and there was even speculation this summer about a possible face-to-face encounter between them.
But Wednesday, Iranian state media reported that U.S. obstruction might force Rouhani to miss the meeting.
The official Islamic Republic News Agency reported that an Iranian advance team had been unable to go to New York to prepare for the meeting because the United States had not granted visas. As a result, it said, Rouhani and his delegation might not attend the gathering, which runs from Tuesday through the following Monday.
Pompeo declined to comment on the visa situation. Asked about it at the United Nations, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told reporters: “We have been in contact with the host state in order to solve all outstanding visa problems in relation to delegations,” adding he hoped that would “solve the problem.”
Trump has said he is open to a meeting with Rouhani, but Rouhani has said that Iran would not agree until the United States lifted economic sanctions.
Rouhani sent a formal note Monday to the United States denying an Iranian role in the drone attack and warning that any U.S. action against Iran would bring retaliation, Iranian state news media reported Wednesday. The note went through Swiss envoys who act as go-betweens because the United States and Iran do not have diplomatic relations.
“Iran’s response will be prompt and strong, and it may include broader areas than the source of attacks,” the Mehr News Agency reported the official note as saying.
Iran’s Fars News Agency said any response would be “rapid and crushing” and would target “more extensive areas than the origin of the attack.” There have long been fears that Iranian proxy forces in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere might attack U.S. forces in the region.
In remarks to his Cabinet, Rouhani said the Houthi rebels were only responding to years of attacks and airstrikes.
“The Yemeni nation was not the source of the conflict, but it was Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the Americans,” he said, according to Iranian media.
The tensions in the region center on a rivalry between Saudi Arabia and regional heavyweight Iran, especially in the Persian Gulf, a key international waterway for oil shipments. The United Arab Emirates is allied with the Saudis in that confrontation.
The United States has said Iran is behind attacks on ships moving through those waters over the summer — an accusation that Iran denies.
“This attack was launched from the north and was unquestionably sponsored by Iran.”
— Col. Turki al-Maliki, a spokesman for the Saudi Defense Ministry
Information for this article was contributed by Ben Hubbard, David D. Kirkpatrick, Richard Perez-Pena and Edward Wong of The New York Times; by Jon Gambrell, Aya Batrawy, Fay Abuelgasim, Robert Burns, Deb Riechmann, Darlene Superville and Angela Charlton of The Associated Press; and by John Wagner, Kareem Fahim, Paul Schemm and Carol Morello of The Washington Post.