Trump scoffs at Iran’s demand for war reparations

President Donald Trump yesterday scoffed at Iran’s demand for reparations for the devastation caused by US and Israeli bombardment over the past five months, a demand he said Tehran’s negotiators had not raised until now.

Trump’s social media post yesterday came after Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei stressed that Iran would not reopen the Strait of Hormuz until the US met its conditions.

Tehran wants the US to end its blockade of Iranian ports, lift economic sanctions, and release Iran’s frozen assets. It has also said the US must pay compensation for war damage.

“It is up to the US side to stop and make amends for its illegal and destructive actions,” Baghaei said.

Trump responded that he is now demanding “compensation from Iran, for all of the people that they have killed and gravely wounded with their roadside bombs and many conflicts”.

The US government has blamed Iran-backed militants for the deaths and injuries of hundreds of Americans over several decades. They include a 1983 bombing that killed 241 US military personnel at a Marine compound in Beirut and the deaths of at least 603 US troops in Iraq between 2003 and 2011.

Trump said he also wants Tehran to compensate the families of Iranian protesters who were killed.

“I have instructed my representatives to put this firmly into any and all future negotiations,” Trump said in his post.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s traded oil supplies passed before the war, has kept energy prices a major focus of US politics ahead of November’s midterm elections.

Iran’s president said yesterday that the country’s supreme leader is calling for “unity and cohesion” as the Islamic Republic faces economic hardship and sanctions stemming from its war with the United States.

President Masoud Pezeshkian described a nearly seven-hour meeting with Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei in an interview with Iranian state television that aired amid apparent tensions among the Islamic Republic’s leaders.

Pezeshkian told the state-run IRIB that he and Khamenei discussed “people’s livelihoods, the state of the market, employment, people’s housing”, as well as “problems that are now being created as a result of the (US) sanctions”. He did not say when or where they met.

Most important, he said, was Khamenei’s emphasis on unity.

“All of the enemy’s plans are aimed at creating division,” Pezeshkian said. “What we have to do is prevent divisions from emerging.”

It is only the second time the Iranian president has said he met with the new supreme leader since Khamenei was appointed in March following a US-Israeli strike that killed his father. Khamenei, believed to have been wounded in the same attack, has not appeared in public since then.