Trump threatens Iran after calls for his killing at Ali Khamenei’s funeral
Mostafa Khamenei, centre, brother of Iran’s new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, leads a prayer over the coffin of his late father, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/AP)
US president Donald Trump has threatened Iran= after open calls for his killing at the funeral of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, further underlining the tensions gripping the Middle East as an interim deal to end the war buckles under repeated crossfire.
Mr Trump made the comments on his Truth Social after senior US officials demanded that Iran make a public statement saying the Strait of Hormuz is open and that ships crossing the vital corridor will not be attacked any longer.
Tehran has not done so, instead saying the route remained under its control and that it be allowed to charge ships moving through it, upending decades of precedence considering the strait an international waterway.
There had been several days of US airstrikes targeting Iran, as well as Iranian retaliatory fire targeting countries across the Middle East.
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Those strikes had been sparked by Iran attacking three ships in the strait earlier this week.
A thousand “missiles are Locked and Loaded and aimed at the Islamic Republic of Iran, with thousands of more to immediately follow, should the Iranian Government act on its threat”, Mr Trump wrote in his post.
The US president said his comments followed threats “to assassinate, or attempt to assassinate” him.
During Khamenei’s funeral, mourners repeatedly held posters or banners calling for him to be killed, along with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Khamenei, 86, was killed in the Iran war’s opening moments on February 28 during an airstrike. Iran only buried him this week in a days-long funeral ceremony during which his body was taken to cities in Iran and Iraq.
Mr Trump added in his post that the US military would “completely decimate and destroy all areas of Iran — PRAISE BE TO ALLAH!”
He has repeatedly, during the war and its uneasy ceasefire, invoked the name of God in Arabic, and threatened to destroy Iran’s very civilisation.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a nationwide advocacy group, in the past has criticised Mr Trump’s “deranged mocking of Islam”.
The US officials said the resumption of strikes this week came after what they described as a rogue faction of Iranian hard-liners trying to sabotage the ceasefire between Tehran and Washington.
However, Iran has said its theocracy is unified after the war under the country’s new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei.
The US officials said on Friday that Mr Trump was giving US negotiators limited time to reach a deal with Iran, but, in a sign of the challenges ahead, they underscored that the president had a wide range of options if talks fall apart.
Moments before the US officials spoke, however, Tehran’s diplomat at the United Nations told reporters that any activity in the Strait of Hormuz, including its opening or demining operations, “rests exclusively with Iran”.
Qatari mediators separately travelled to Iran to meet officials on Friday, Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said.
Iran has said the strait must now be under its sole control and that vessels should begin to pay fees to Tehran – even though the world for decades has considered it an international waterway.
About a fifth of all traded oil and natural gas passed through the strait before the war began.
Iran’s grip on the strait during the conflict led to a global energy crisis, though oil prices have sharply dropped since wartime highs of 120 dollars a barrel.
The US continues to urge mariners to travel on a southern route through Oman’s territorial waters to avoid Iranian waters and the commands of its paramilitary Revolutionary Guard.
That has angered Tehran and sparked the attacks in the strait.
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