‘AMERICAN military movements and rhetoric in West Asia are part of a calculated effort to destabilise the region,’ Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said yesterday.
‘The threats and psychological operations of the Americans are aimed at disrupting the security of the region and will achieve nothing other than instability,’ Pezeshkian.
The remarks followed the arrival of US aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln in the region and a series of escalatory threats from Washington.
US President Trump threatened Iran, warning that ‘time is running out’ and saying a ‘massive Armada’ is ‘moving quickly, with great power, enthusiasm, and purpose’.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi responded: ‘Conducting diplomacy through military threat cannot be effective or useful. If they want negotiations to take shape, they must certainly set aside threats, excessive demands and raising illogical threats, and talks must take place in conditions where threats and excessive demands are set aside.’
Senior Iranian commander, Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari, deputy chief of the Iranian Army for Coordination, stressed: ‘When the enemy does not achieve results through military actions, it continuously exerts pressure in the realm of software and hybrid war; however, we are not inexperienced in this field.’
Iraqi anti-terror group Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, vowed that the Arab country’s resistance forces would join the response to any attack on Iran, warning that any aggressive action against the Islamic Republic would drag Iraq and the Persian Gulf states into a broader regional conflict.
Firas al-Yasser, of Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba’s political bureau, described the role of resistance groups as pivotal to regional security and stability, stressing that these groups would immediately participate in the response from the very first moments.
‘Any action against Iran will push the region toward a broader confrontation that will also encompass the Persian Gulf countries and Iraq. These groups will not wait for the fire of the conflict to be drawn into Iraqi territory; rather, from the very first moments of any attack on Iran, they will take part in the response.’
Sheikh Naim Qassem, secretary general of the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah, said: ‘A war against Iran may this time set the entire region ablaze.
‘We will never be among those who facilitate such actions and we hope to neutralise them and through defence there is also hope for major possibilities.
‘The United States wants to dominate the entire world and, in cooperation with Israel, seeks to strike all resistance projects in the region.’
