Donald Trump has suggested US troops will remain in Iran even when a deal is brokered, to destroy the nation’s highly enriched uranium resources.
The US president insisted either side were ‘very close’ to an agreement and that Iran had conceded on nuclear weapons, but ‘a few points’ remained.
He said he had insisted on a clause being inserted to the pact stopping Iran from having the ability to ‘buy, purchase or acquire’ nuclear weapons along with being banned from developing them.
Talking to NBC, Trump said he found Iran’s recent leadership ‘very smart, very rational’ and even favourably compared supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei together with his late father Ali.
Mr Khamenei has not been seen in public since his father was killed on the primary day of the war on February 28.
But Trump insisted US troops would remain in Iran until ‘completion’.
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He said: ‘If we make a deal that now we’re friendly, we’ll all go together. It’ll be our equipment. We’ll take it out and destroy it, whether it’s on-site or whether we take it off-site.’
If Iran did not make a deal, Trump said he would ‘take them out militarily very harshly’.
He further suggested that he would give you the chance to observe any uranium activity from space.
‘You recognize, we’ve cameras on it, throughout it. If anybody walked there, should you walked over there, I’d give you the chance to read your first name in your lapel’, the president insisted.
Trump has repeatedly blamed his predecessors, including Barack Obama, whose agreement with Iran he ripped up during his first term on the White House.
Nonetheless he hinted that he could resurrect the unique deal’s commitment to unfreeze Iranian assets if Iran’s leadership ‘behave’.
Asked why Iran hadn’t put pen to paper yet, Trump replied it was a ‘very hard thing for them’ after he claimed that they had been allowed for years to ‘get away with murder’.
‘I believe they’ll’t consider they’re in this case where they’re virtually decapitated’, he said.
On Saturday, the US military central command said it had shot down several Iranian drones and missiles launched towards the Strait of Hormuz and Gulf states.
It said it had also targeted a few of the Islamic Republic’s coastal surveillance radar sites.
Meanwhile a ceasefire deal brokered between Israel and Lebanon has come under stress as either side exchanged fire.
Israeli forces said at the least five projectiles fired from Lebanon had either been intercepted or fallen in open areas.
The IDF also launched strikes at several areas in southern Lebanon in response to the Hezbollah missiles.
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