FM Zarif
"You claim you eliminated Daesh. You killed Daesh’s number one enemy in a wretched act, with utmost barbarity,” Zarif said, addressing the U.S. during a ceremony.
General Soleimani, the former commander of the Quds Force, and his companions were assassinated in a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad on January 3.
The attack came while the Iranian commander, who had earned a reputation as the region’s most prominent anti-terror figure, was on an official visit to the Iraqi capital.
Washington and its allies claim to be fighting terrorists in Iraq and Syria, but repeated eye witness accounts have indicated that they are in fact handling the macabre extremists, even assisting them whenever they deem necessary.
It was, however, the Islamic Republic that rushed to the assistance of the two countries right after Daesh ran amok through the region in 2014, helping them defeat the terrorist group in late 2017 under General Soleimani’s watch.
Zarif asserted that the Iranian nation relies on a "profound culture of sacrifice and martyrdom.”
It is this culture that has helped the people resist foreign pressure and aggression ever since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, including during the Iraqi war which Western and regional countries supported against Iran, he added.
"It is the culture of sacrifice and martyrdom that has sustained this people,” the foreign minister said.
On Sunday, Zarif said Washington is simply lying when it claims its unilateral sanctions have had no impact on the delivery of humanitarian items to the Iranian people.
"Whatever the Americans are saying about their sanctions not affecting humanitarian items is just a lie,” the Iranian foreign minister told Russia Today.
Zarif said the United States has not only hindered Iran’s oil export, but it has also denied the Islamic Republic access to its "own money”.
"The United States first of all limited our financial resources by preventing us from selling oil and, secondly, it is preventing us from having access even to our own money.”
Iran, he said, has "quite a bit of money stashed in countries abroad,” but the U.S. has prevented Tehran from spending its own money to buy medicine.
The foreign minister said the sanctions have prevented Iran from purchasing critical medical supplies and therefore impeded its fight against the deadly coronavirus pandemic.
"We have been trying to transfer money for the COVID-19 COVAX – the WHO vaccine – we haven’t been able to do that,” he said, adding, "Similarly, Tehran has not been able to transfer money to buy influenza vaccine.”
"So, it’s basically medical terrorism that the U.S. is engaged in.”
Earlier this month, President Hassan Rouhani condemned the U.S. sanctions amid the global pandemic, saying the White House knows nothing about humanity.
At least 190 more coronavirus-related fatalities raised the death toll in Iran to 25,779, the country’s Health Ministry said on Monday.
Some 3,512 more people tested positive for COVID-19 over the past 24 hours, pushing the overall count up to 449,960, ministry spokeswoman Sima Sadat Lari said.
In response to a question about Washington’s efforts to internationalize an arms embargo on Iran, Zarif said, "Iran does not buy a lot of arms, we are not Saudi Arabia. I mean, they spend 67 billion dollars more than Russia did, on their military.”
Iran, he said, does not have that much money to spend, but "we produce most of the weapons we need ourselves.”
Zarif emphasized that Iran has not been under an arms embargo, but there were restrictions, which were set to be lifted in accordance with an agreement signed between Iran and major world powers in 2015.
"There were restrictions; we needed to get permission from UN Security Council to buy and sell weapons and that restrictions will be lifted in mid-October and that is the most important thing. If we need to procure weapons, to buy weapons from our friends, then there are no legal limits,” Zarif said.
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