US President Donald Trump has authorised new sanctions against Iran.
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. “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.
The latest sanctions follow a string of attacks last summer in the Persian Gulf on oil tankers, the takedown of an unmanned U.S. surveillance drone and strikes in Saudi Arabia on the world’s largest crude oil processing plant.
At the White House on Friday, Mnuchin pushed back on concerns that the existing sanctions on Tehran were ineffective.
“The economic sanctions are working,” Mnuchin said. “If we didn’t have these sanctions in place, literally Iran would have tens of billions of dollars. They would be using that for terrorist activities throughout the region.”
“There is no question that by cutting off the economics to the regime we are having an impact,” he added.
