The Islamic Republic on Monday morning issued threats to Israel and the United States amid Israel’s ongoing military operation against Iran’s nuclear program.
“The Zionist enemy has made a grave mistake, has committed a great crime; it must be punished, and it is being punished. Even now, it is being punished,” Iranian dictator Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s X account stated, alongside an apparently AI-generated photo of a Star of David engraved on a large skull, on top of a battered city with trails of fire raining down from the sky.
Khamenei’s senior adviser Ali Akbar Velayati warned that “there will no longer be any place for the presence of the United States and its bases” in the region in the wake of the American military’s airstrikes against three Iranian nuclear facilities on June 21, Iran’s IRNA news agency reported, according to the BBC.
Velayati further stated that other countries “will become legitimate targets” for Tehran if they assist U.S. actions.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) said that Tehran has “identified the location from which the aggression took place,” according to the IRGC-affiliated Tasnim news agency.
U.S. military bases in the region are not “strength” but “vulnerability,” the statement added.
According to the BBC, the United States has bases in Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan and Syria.
In 2020, Iran fired ballistic missiles at U.S. air bases in Iraq in response to Washington’s killing of IRGC commander Qassem Soleimani during U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term.
Soleimani was the chief of the IRGC’s extraterritorial division, the Quds Force, and considered to be one of the most powerful military leaders in Iran.
Trump on Sunday praised the “spectacular military success” of the U.S. strikes, “taking the ‘bomb’ right out of [Iranian] hands (and they would use it if they could!)… Thank you to our incredible military for the AMAZING job they did last night. It was really SPECIAL!!!” he wrote on Truth Social.
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Sunday that the U.S. strikes had “obliterated” Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. The U.S. military had completed its mission to “destroy or severely degrade Iran’s nuclear program,” continued Hegseth.
