NE NEWS SERVICE
DUBAI, JAN 18
The Revolutionary Guards of Iran can take their fight beyond Iran’s borders, the supreme leader said on Friday, responding to the US killing of his country’s most prominent commander and to anti-government unrest at home over the downing of an airliner.
In his first Friday prayers sermon in eight years, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei also told thousands of Iranians who chanted “Death to America!” that European powers could not be trusted in Iran’s nuclear standoff with Washington.
“Resistance must continue until the region is completely freed from the enemy’s tyranny,” Khamenei said, demanding that US troops leave neighbouring Iraq and the wider Middle East.
US President Donald Trump ordered the killing in a drone strike on January 3 of Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force, a unit of the Guards responsible for expanding Iran’s influence abroad. He built up regional militias that Washington has blamed for attacks on US forces.
Iran responded with missile strikes on US targets in Iraq on January 8. “The fact that Iran has the power to give such a slap to a world power shows the hand of God,” said Khamenei, in a reference to the strikes, adding that the killing of Soleimani showed Washington’s “terrorist nature”. In the tense aftermath of Iran’s missile strikes on US targets when Iranian forces expected US reprisals, the Guards’ air defences shot down a Ukrainian airliner in error, killing all 176 passengers including crew members on board, mostly Iranians or dual nationals.
Iran was spooked by reports of US F-35s, says Russia
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday that Iran’s saccidental shooting down of a Ukrainian airliner last week occurred at a time when Tehran was spooked by reports of advanced US stealth fighters in the area. “There were at least six (US) F-35 fighters in the air in the Iranian border area (at the time). This information has yet to be verified, but I’d like to underline the edginess that always accompanies such situations,” Lavrov said. Courtesy: Agencies
