WORLD AT WAR-WAW | Biden warns Iran against targeting US troops in the Middle East
WASHINGTON: President Joe Biden has sent a rare message to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warning Tehran against targeting US personnel in the Middle East, the White House said on Thursday after a spate of attacks on American forces in the region.“There was a direct message relayed,” White House spokesman John Kirby said at a news briefing, declining to elaborate.
Iran’s mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
US officials want to avoid a wider conflict in the Middle East following the Oct 7 attack by Hamas on Israel that killed at least 1,400 people, mostly civilians.
About 900 additional US troops are headed to the region or have recently arrived there to bolster air defences to protect US personnel amid a surge in attacks in the region by Iran-affiliated groups, the Pentagon said.
US troops have been attacked at least 12 times in Iraq and four times in Syria in the past week, it added.
On Wednesday, Biden said he had warned the ayatollah that the US would respond if US forces continued to be targeted but did not say how the message was communicated.
“My warning to the ayatollah was that if they continue to move against those troops, we will respond, and he should be prepared. It has nothing to do with Israel,” he told reporters.
In a comment posted on social media before Kirby spoke, an aide to Iran’s president Ebrahim Raisi disputed Biden’s account.
“The US messages were neither directed to the leader of the Islamic Revolution nor were they anything but requests from the Iranian side. If Biden thinks he has warned Iran, he should ask his team to show him the text of the messages,” Mohammad Jamshidi, a Raisi aide, wrote.
Separately, Iran’s state news agency IRNA cited an unnamed source as saying the US had sent Iran, as well as some Iranian allies like Hezbollah, messages that it was not seeking to expand the war and urging them to exercise restraint.
“The United States cannot both send military equipment to the Israeli regime and take charge of managing the war with one hand, while issuing political messages with the other hand, and speak about its opposition to the expansion of the war,” IRNA cited the unnamed source as saying, adding Iran’s allies “act independently and are not subject to Tehran’s orders.”
Israel has vowed to wipe out Hamas, which rules Gaza, in retaliation for the Oct 7 attack in which the Palestiniang group also took about 200 people hostage. Israel has struck Gaza from the air, imposed a siege, and is preparing a ground invasion.
Palestinian authorities say more than 7,000 have been killed, though Biden has voiced skepticism about such numbers. Reuters has been unable to independently verify the death toll.
On Thursday, Iran’s foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said at the UN that if Israel’s retaliation against Hamas in the Gaza Strip does not end, then the US will “not be spared from this fire.”
One way Iran projects power is by arming and funding Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Gaza Strip, the Houthis in Yemen, and Shiite fighters in Iraq.
In the last such known US retaliation, the US military carried out multiple airstrikes in Syria on March 23 against Iran-aligned groups it blamed for a drone attack that killed an American contractor, wounded another. and hurt five US troops. – Reuters
