Washington, May 27:
President Donald Trump insists a peace deal is close on the 88th day of the Iran war, but Iran on Tuesday denounced US airstrikes a day earlier as a sign of “bad faith and unreliability” as negotiations continue toward a possible deal to end the war.
The US military has characterised Monday’s strikes in southern Iran as defensive, saying targets included missile launch sites and boats placing mines, and said the US acted with “restraint” in light of the weekslong ceasefire.
The strikes were done “to protect our troops from threats posed by Iranian forces,” but the military was “using restraint during the ongoing ceasefire,” Capt Tim Hawkins, the spokesman for the US military’s Central Command, said in a statement.
Iran’s foreign ministry called the strikes a ceasefire violation and warned that Washington would bear responsibility for “all consequences”, without details.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran will leave no act of aggression unanswered,” it added in a statement.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard on Tuesday said it had shot down and deterred drones and a fighter jet that entered its airspace, according to Iran’s official Mizan news agency, which did not specify when the incident occurred.
It wasn’t immediately clear what the developments would mean for negotiations. The strikes came after Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf went to Qatar as part of the talks, which Trump said Monday were “proceeding nicely”.
The strikes were the latest flare-up in the fragile ceasefire that began April 7 and has largely held.
Negotiations centre in part on the Strait of Hormuz, the crucial waterway off southern Iran through which a fifth of the world’s crude oil and natural gas passed before the war began with US-Israeli strikes in February. Tehran retaliated by effectively closing the strait, stranding hundreds of ships and shocking the global economy.
The strait has become a powerful lever for Tehran in talks, joining the long-running issue of Iran’s nuclear programme and highly enriched uranium. Iran in turn wants the US to lift its military blockade of Iranian ports that began on April 17.
The strait also is cause for growing concern as supplies of fertilizer are also badly affected for vulnerable global farmers.
“What we are witnessing today is not only a geopolitical crisis, it is a systemic shock to the global agrifood system,” the director-general of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, Qu Dongyu, said Tuesday.
Trump has introduced a new angle in negotiations for a deal on the war, saying any agreement to end the war should include a requirement for several additional countries, including Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, to join the Abraham Accords, a series of US-brokered diplomatic, economic and security agreements aimed at normalising relations with Israel.