After “officially putting Iran on notice” over Tehran’s missile test, the Trump administration Friday imposed new sanctions against the Islamic Republic.
National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had said this week that the U.S. was “officially putting Iran on notice,” in a statement that made a clear break with the previous Obama Administration’s policy approach to the oil-rich Persian country during and after negotiating the nuclear deal aimed at stopping Tehran’s development of weapons of mass destruction.
The first new sanctions under the US Administration come in response to Iran’s ballistic missile program as well as its continued support for organizations designated by Washington to be terrorist groups, senior administration officials said during a background briefing with reporters.
Tehran’s recent test of a ballistic missile, which the U.S. considers to be a violation of a United Nations Security Council resolution, was the triggering event for the sanctions, one of the officials said.
In a statement, the US Treasury Department said Friday it has published a list of 13 Iranian figures and 12 entities facing new sanctions.
According to the statement, the entities include companies based in Tehran, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon and China.
US administration officials say sanctions imposed against Iran were only the “initial steps in response to Iranian provocative behavior.”
President Donald Trump has said “nothing is off the table” in terms of a response to Iran’s latest ballistic missile test.
On Friday, Trump accused Iran of “playing with fire.”
“Iran is playing with fire — they don’t appreciate how ‘kind’ President Obama was to them. Not me!,” Trump tweeted.
Reacting to the latest US action, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said Tehran is “unmoved” by the Trump administration’s threats and only relies on its own defence means.
“Iran is unmoved by threats as we derive security from our people,” Zarif said in a post on his Twitter account on Friday.
“We will never initiate war, but we can only rely on our own means of defence,” the foreign minister pointed out.
The United States believes Iranian ballistic missile test violate the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1 group of countries. Iran does not agree with the interpretation and says it is legal for it to conduct such tests.
