US President Donald Trump threatened Iran on Saturday after the funeral of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei saw open calls for his killing, further underlining the tensions gripping the Middle East as an interim deal to end the war buckles under repeated crossfire in the region.
Trump made the comments on his Truth Social after senior U.S. officials demanded that Iran make a public statement saying the Strait of Hormuz is open and that ships crossing the vital corridor won’t be attacked any longer.
So far, Tehran has not done so, instead insisting that the route remain under its control and that it be allowed to charge ships moving through it, upending decades of precedent that consider the strait an international waterway.
There had been multiple days of US airstrikes targeting Iran, as well as Iranian retaliatory fire targeting nations across the Middle East. Those strikes had been sparked by Iran attacking three ships in the strait earlier this week.
A thousand “missiles are Locked and Loaded and aimed at the Islamic Republic of Iran, with thousands of more to immediately follow, should the Iranian Government act on its threat,” Trump wrote on his website.
The US president said his threat was in response to threats “to assassinate, or attempt to assassinate” him. During Khamenei’s funeral, mourners repeatedly held posters or banners calling for him to be killed along with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Iran war’s opening moments on Feb. 28 saw an airstrike that killed Khamenei, 86. Iran only buried Khamenei this week following a dayslong funeral ceremony that saw his body taken to cities in both Iran and Iraq.
Trump added in his post that the U.S. military would “completely decimate and destroy all areas of Iran — PRAISE BE TO ALLAH!”
Trump, repeatedly during the war and its uneasy ceasefire, has invoked the name of God in Arabic, as well as threatened to destroy Iran’s very civilization. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a nationwide advocacy group, has in the past criticized Trump’s “deranged mocking of Islam.”
