The United States is designating as a foreign terrorist organization the military force charged with zealously guarding and advancing the principles of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Monday that the designation against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — part of what he said is a “maximum pressure campaign” against Tehran — would go into effect in one week.
The IRGC includes the domestic-centered Basij militia, which has violently suppressed peaceful protests against the regime, and the Quds Force, which concentrates on operations abroad.
“This is the first time that the United States has designated a part of another government as an FTO. We’re doing it because the Iranian regime’s use of terrorism as a tool of statecraft makes it fundamentally different from any other government. This historic step will deprive the world’s leading state sponsor of terror the financial means to spread misery and death around the world,” Pompeo said at the State Department.
“The blood of the 603 American soldiers the Iranian regime has found to have killed in Iraq is on his hands and on the hands of the IRGC more broadly,” he said.
“A(nother) misguided election-eve gift to Netanyahu. A(nother) dangerous U.S. misadventure in the region,” Zarif added on Monday.
Pompeo dismissed Zarif’s reaction. “We have made clear both publicly and privately that an attack on the United States of America is something that they ought to think more than twice about,” he told reporters.