BICOM

The US Treasury placed new sanctions on Iranian individuals and groups supporting Iran’s ballistic missile programme and Iranian non-state military groups yesterday.

The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and the State Department identified 18 cases of individuals or organisations supporting Iranian criminal military activity and providing support to Iran’s ballistic missile programme.

State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert expressed the US government’s concern “about Iran’s malign activities across the Middle East which undermine regional stability, security, and prosperity”. Her statement continued by listing these activities, including supporting “terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad,” maintaining “its steadfast support for the Assad regime, despite Assad’s atrocities against his own people” and Iranian efforts “to test and develop ballistic missiles, in direct defiance of UN Security Council Resolution 2231”.

Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin said that “these sanctions … send a strong signal that the United States cannot and will not tolerate Iran’s provocative and destabilising behaviour”.

The decision to place these new sanctions follows a recent statement by the administration of US President Donald Trump in Congress, which criticised Iran for violating the spirit of the JCPOA nuclear agreement, though not its actual conditions.

On Monday the Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, Major General Mohammad Bagheri, threatened action against the US threatened military action against US forces in the region, saying: “Putting the Revolutionary Guard in the terrorist lists with terrorist groups can be very costly to the United States and its military bases and forces in the region.”

Bagheri also called the Iranian missile programme “defensive” and “non-negotiable under any condition”.