Culture Minister blasts Trump's threats against Iran’s cultural sites

AhlulBayt News Agency (ABNA): Iranian Culture and Islamic Guidance Minister Abbas Salehi strongly blasted US President Donald Trump’s threats against Iran’s cultural sites, saying Iran is an ancient civilization with deep cultural roots unlike the US.

“Trump has threatened the Iranian cultural sites once again. Culture is the entirety of Iran. Extent of multi-millennium history and multi-climatic geography of Iran. Which point does Trump want to target? Iran is not the US,” Salehi wrote on his Twitter account late on Monday.

In his tweet on Saturday, Trump said the targets represented 52 Americans who were held in Iran for acts of espionage following the 1979 takeover of the US embassy in Tehran by revolutionary students .

Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif took to Twitter Sunday to denounce Trump's “new breaches of JUS COGENS”, referring to peremptory norms of international law.

“Targeting cultural sites is a WAR CRIME; -Whether kicking or screaming, end of US malign presence in West Asia has begun,” he stressed.

“Those masquerading as diplomats and those who shamelessly sat to identify Iranian cultural & civilian targets should not even bother to open a law dictionary,” he added.

Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Qods Force Commander Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani, Deputy Commander of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), or Hashad al-Shabi, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, and eight others were martyred in a targeted assassination by US aircraft in Iraq's Baghdad on Friday.

Iranian officials branded Washington assassination operation an “act of international terrorism” and promised retaliation. Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei has stated that the Unites States must await a tough revenge.

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