Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced new sanctions Friday on Iran's metal exports and eight senior Iranian officials. The penalties came days after Iran fired missiles at U.S. targets in Iraq in retaliation for an American airstrike in Baghdad that killed Iran's top military leader, Qasem Soleimani, last week. After the missile strikes, President Donald Trump said Wednesday that the U.S. will "immediately impose additional punishing economic sanctions on the Iranian regime." The Iranian officials targeted for the new sanctions "have advanced the regime's destabilizing objectives," the Treasury Department said in a statement. The officials include the secretary of Iran's supreme national security council and the deputy chief of staff of Iranian armed forces. "The United States is targeting senior Iranian officials for their involvement and complicity in Tuesday's ballistic missile strikes," Mnuchin said in the release. Treasury also designated 17 Iranian metals producers and mining companies, along with entities based in China and the Seychelles, for other penalties.

The sanctions are the latest move in aggressive tit-for-tat exchanges between Tehran and Washington that began in 2018, when Trump unilaterally withdrew from a 2015 international agreement to limit Iran's nuclear program, and escalated sharply over the past few weeks. Trump's decision to kill Soleimani came after pro-Iran protesters stormed the compound of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, which was itself borne of rage against a previous round of American strikes that killed members of an Iranian-backed militia. Those strikes followed a Dec. 27 rocket attack by Iran-supported fighters that killed an American contractor in Iraq. Soleimani has been blamed for hundreds of American deaths, and the Pentagon claimed last week that the slain general was "actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region." The "imminent" threat has been a key part of the administration's justification for killing him. Defense Secretary Mark Esper claimed that Soleimani "for sure" had plans to attack U.S. targets "days" before he was killed. But Pompeo said this week that "we don't know precisely when and we don't know precisely where" Soleimani had planned to attack Americans next. He maintained, however, that Soleimani was plotting "a series" of imminent attacks. "Those are completely consistent thoughts," Pompeo told reporters at the White House on Friday after Mnuchin announced the new sanctions. "This was going to happen, and American lives were at risk," Pompeo said. Trump, meanwhile, claimed in an interview that he thinks attacks on multiple U.S. Embassies had been planned before Soleimani was killed. "I can reveal that I believe it would have been four embassies," he told Fox News opinion host Laura Ingraham in a video clip that aired Friday afternoon.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announce new sanctions on Iran in the Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, U.S., January 10, 2020. Kevin Lamarque | Reuters