Iranian cleric Shahab Moradi said that Iran would struggle to hit back against the US by striking a parallel figure to slain General Qassem Soleimani because it only has ‘fictional’ heroes.

“Think about it, are we supposed to take out Spiderman and SpongeBob?” he said in a live interview on Iran’s IRIB Ofogh channel.

The comments came after the US assassinated Soleimani in Iraq last Thursday.

The strike, orchestrated by President Donald Trump, was criticized by other US politicians, as well as leaders in Europe for being dangerous as they urged de-escalation.

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An Iranian cleric mocked the US by saying Iran would not be able to strike back in kind after the assassination of Qassem Soleimani because it only has fictional heroes such as Spiderman and SpongeBob Squarepants.

Cleric Shahab Moradi made the comments in a live TV interview on Iran’s IRIB Ofogh channel.

A clip of the segment was posted on Saturday evening on Twitter by the news platform Asranetv, but it is unclear when the original program was aired.

In the clip Moradi says:

“In your opinion, if anyone around the world wants to take their revenge on the assassination of Soleimani and intends to do it proportionately in the way they suggest- that we take one of theirs now that they’ve got one of ours, who should we consider to take out in the context of America?

“Think about it, are we supposed to take out Spiderman and SpongeBob? They don’t have any heroes. We have a country in front of us with a large population and a large land mass, but it doesn’t have any heroes, all of their heroes are cartoon characters, they’re all fictional.”

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Foto: The claim was made during a segmentsourceScreenshot/Asranetv/Twitter

The comment comes after a US airstrike assassinated Iran’s top General Qassem Soleimani on Thursday at Baghdad airport in Iraq, along with the Iraqi military commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.

Soleimani’s death has sparked fresh tensions between Iran and the US as the country promised to take revenge on the death of the revered general.

Supreme Leader of Iran Ali Khamenei announced three days of mourning in Iran following the death of Soleimani as well as ‘severe revenge’ in response, but it remains unclear how the country carry out this revenge.