Iran has warned Donald Trump to ‘be careful not to be eliminated’ after the US President said he did not believe the regime’s new Supreme Leader can ‘live in peace’.
Mr Trump told Iran to brace for ‘death, fire and fury’ for keeping the Strait of Hormuz shut before threatening its new leader Mojtaba Khamenei.
But the regime’s security chief Ali Larijani dismissed Mr Trump’s threat, claiming Iran ‘is not afraid of your empty threats’.
He added: ‘Even those greater than you could not eliminate the Iranian nation. Take care of yourself not to be eliminated!’
Mr Trump told Fox the new Supreme Leader will be unable to ‘live in peace’ and he was ‘not happy with the appointment’, having warned Iran he would have the final say over their leader.
‘If he doesn’t get approval from us he’s not going to last long,’ he said previously.
‘We want to make sure that we don’t have to go back every 10 years, when you don’t have a president like me that’s not going to do it.’
Mr Trump said Mojtaba’s appointment is ‘going to lead to just more of the same’, as he warned he was aiming a new wave of deadly strikes at the regime after Tehran said not ‘one litre of oil’ would be shipped from the Middle East if attacks continue.
Mojtaba, 56, the second son of the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was confirmed as the country’s new leader on Sunday after being appointed by the regime’s 88-person assembly.
The hardline cleric has close ties to the brutal Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corp and is viewed as even more extremist than his father.
The ‘vengeful’ leader is marked for assassination by Israel after it vowed to ‘eliminate’ whoever succeeded the slain Ayatollah, having killed him and Mojtaba’s wife Zahra Haddad-Adel in strikes on the first day of the conflict.
Mojtaba has already been wounded, with Iranian state TV reporting describing him as ‘janbaz’, or wounded by the enemy, in the ‘Ramadan war,’ which is how media in Iran refer to the current conflict.
Iranians have also protested the appointment of the Ayatollah’s son by shouting ‘death to Mojtaba’ from their houses.
On Monday, Mr Trump he said the US had inflicted serious damage on Iran’s military and predicted the conflict would end well before the initial four-week time frame he had laid out, though he has not defined what victory would look like.
This is a breaking news story. More to follow.
