Donald Trump has suggested US troops will remain in Iran even if a deal is brokered, to destroy the nation’s highly enriched uranium resources.
The US president insisted both sides were ‘very close’ to an agreement and that Iran had conceded on nuclear weapons, but ‘a couple of points’ remained.
He said he had insisted on a clause being inserted to the pact preventing Iran from being able to ‘buy, purchase or acquire’ nuclear weapons in addition to being banned from developing them.
Speaking to NBC, Trump said he found Iran’s new leadership ‘very smart, very rational’ and even favourably compared supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei with his late father Ali.
Mr Khamenei has not been seen in public since his father was killed on the first 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 failed to make a deal, Trump said he would ‘take them out militarily very harshly’.
He further suggested that he would be able to monitor any uranium activity from space.
‘You know, we have cameras on it, all over it. If anybody walked there, if you walked over there, I would be able to read your first name on 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 at the White House.
However he hinted that he could resurrect the original 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 they had been allowed for years to ‘get away with murder’.
‘I think they can’t believe they’re in this situation 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 some of the Islamic Republic’s coastal surveillance radar sites.
Meanwhile a ceasefire deal brokered between Israel and Lebanon has come under stress as both sides exchanged fire.
Israeli forces said at 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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