The US President Donald Trump has once again threatened Iran with 'more harsh retaliation' after Tehran launched multiple attacks on Gulf Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, early on Friday.
“Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today," Trump wrote in a social media post.
“Iran's Navy is gone, their Air Force is no longer there, missiles, drones, and everything else are being decimated, and their leaders have been wiped from the face of the earth.”
The comments came a day after Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei vowed to “not refrain from avenging the blood” of the Iranians killed, and warned Gulf Arab nations to shut US bases, saying the notion of American protection was 'nothing more than a lie'.
Intense airstrikes landed around Iran's capital, Tehran, early of Friday, just before the rallies for the annual Quds Day event in support of the Palestinians. Israel said its air force had hit more than 200 targets in Iran over the past 24 hours, including missile launchers, defense systems and weapons production sites.
Iran has been attacking oil and other infrastructure around the Gulf region, and on Friday, Saudi Arabia said it had downed nearly 50 drones sent in multiple waves throughout the early morning hours. In Oman, two people were killed when two drones crashed in an industrial area in the region of Sohar.
In his Friday morning post, Trump said, "We are totally destroying the terrorist regime of Iran, militarily, economically, and otherwise. They've been killing innocent people all over the world for 47 years, and now I, as the 47th President of the United States of America, am killing them. What a great honor it is to do so!”
With growing global concerns about a possible energy crisis and no end to the war in sight, the price of Brent crude oil, the international standard, remained stubbornly over $100 per barrel as Iran kept its stranglehold on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic waterway through which a fifth of the world's oil transits on its way from the Persian Gulf to the open seas.
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