Suspending all commitments under MoU with US: Iranian minister

Tehran: Iran has suspended its commitments under the recently-signed Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the United States, country’s Deputy Foreign Minister for Legal and International Affairs, Kazem Gharibabadi, announced on Saturday.

“We were in negotiations, and unfortunately, the Americans themselves, in violation of their obligations under the Memorandum of Understanding, took these aggressive actions,” Gharibabadi said in response to a question about the future of negotiations with the US,” Iran’s leading Tasnim News Agency quoted the minister as saying on Saturday.

“For us, the solution now before us is to decisively defend the country and teach a lesson to the aggressors – the US has practically violated and suspended all of its commitments, and we have also suspended our commitments under that Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding and are not implementing our commitments,” Gharibabadi added.

Iran’s main military command, Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters, warned this week that any US attack on Iranian power plants and bridges would trigger a devastating response against all infrastructure across West Asia. The warning came as Iranian forces struck US bases in Kuwait, Bahrain and Jordan.

Ebrahim Zolfaghari, the headquarters’ spokesman, issued the warning in a video message carried by Iranian media in response to recent threats by Trump to attack Iran’s infrastructure if the country does not come to the negotiating table, Xinhua news agency reported.

“The powerful armed forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran will crush everything that has still remained intact owing to Iran’s decency,” he said, if the US President follows through on threats against Iranian infrastructure.

Zolfaghari stressed that the Iranian armed forces’ response will not be “an equal blow,” but “more severe, widespread, and devastating than ever.”

US President Donald Trump has said that the United States would expand its strikes on Iran to target power plants and bridges next week unless Tehran agrees to negotiate.

The US military has launched several waves of strikes against Iran’s southern provinces over the past few days, claiming that the attacks were in response to the Iranian armed forces targeting vessels in the Strait of Hormuz and aimed at “degrading Iran’s ability to threaten commercial shipping.”

IANS