Ayatollah says US has failed to dominate Iran on eve of reinstatement of oil and banking sanctions

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Saturday that Donald Trump’s policies face opposition across the world as Washington prepared to reimpose sanctions on Iran’s vital oil-exporting and financial sectors, state television reported.

Khamenei said the United States had failed to reassert its domination over Iran since the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution that toppled the US-backed Shah.

“The world opposes every decision made by Trump,” Iranian state television quoted Khamenei, a Shia cleric with ultimate authority in Iran, as saying during a meeting with thousands of students. “America’s goal has been to re-establish the domination it had [before 1979] but it has failed. America has been defeated by the Islamic Republic over the past 40 years.”

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On Saturday, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailed Trump for reimposing sanctions against their mutual foe. “Thank you, President Trump, for this historic move. The sanctions are indeed coming,” Netanyahu said in a statement, presumably in reference to the US president’s Game of Thrones-style tweet earlier. “For years I’ve been calling for sanctions to be fully reimposed against Iran’s murderous terrorist regime, which threatens the entire world.”

Washington will on Monday reintroduce far-reaching sanctions on Iran’s oil sales and banking sectors to try to force it into negotiations to scrap its nuclear energy and ballistic missile programmes and end its support for proxies in conflicts across the Middle East.

However, the Trump administration said on Friday that eight importing countries would temporarily be allowed to keep buying Iranian oil when sanctions come back into effect. Iran is the world’s third biggest oil exporter.

Turkey said on Saturday that Ankara had received initial indications from Washington that it would be granted a waiver, but was awaiting clarification on Monday.

Indian oil minister Dharmendra Pradhan said his country and other leading oil importers would benefit from the US waivers.

Most international sanctions on Iran were lifted in early 2016 under a deal Iran signed with world powers the year before under which it curbed its uranium enrichment programme, widely seen abroad as a disguised effort to develop an atomic bomb.

But Trump denounced the nuclear deal, approved by Barack Obama, as flawed in Iran’s favour and withdrew Washington from the pact in May. Trump’s decision was welcomed by Washington’s Sunni Muslim Gulf Arab allies, involved in proxy conflict with Shia Iran for decades.

The United Arab Emirates’ minister of state for foreign affairs, Anwar Gargash, said on Saturday that Iran’s “aggressive policies” were “largely responsible” for the reimposition of US sanctions on Tehran.

Iranian foreign minister Mohammed Javad Zarif spoke by telephone with the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, and his counterparts from Germany, Sweden and Denmark about pending European measures to counter the US sanctions, Iranian state news agency IRNA reported.

General Qassem Soleimani, commander of the elite Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force that oversees its operations abroad, responded to Trump’s Game of Thrones-inspired tweet on Friday that warned, “Sanctions are Coming”.

“I will stand against you,” Soleimani said on Instagram, posting a similarly themed photo and repeating remarks made in July.

The EU, France, Germany and Britain – all co-signatories, along with Russia and China, to the nuclear deal with Iran – said in a joint statement on Friday they regretted Trump’s decision to restore sanctions on Iran.

Diplomats told Reuters last week the new EU mechanism to facilitate payments for Iranian exports should be legally in place by 4 November but not operational until early next year. They cautioned, however, that no country had volunteered to host the entity, which was delaying the process.

A senior French diplomat said on Saturday there was no way any trade with this mechanism could be conducted before the end of 2018. For now no other countries, including China, would be part of it although that could change over time.

The other parties to the nuclear deal see it as an important bulwark against the risk of wider war in the Middle East and have reaffirmed their commitment to it. Iran has said it could leave the pact if the EU could not protect its economic benefits.