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Even before a U.S. airstrike “obliterated” a trio of Iranian nuclear facilities over the weekend, the country’s radical Islamist government was already leveling death threats and allegedly plotting assassinations on American soil.
Federal authorities have called Iran the world’s largest state sponsor of terror, and the FBI says the Iranian government has both imprisoned Americans within its territory on unsubstantiated charges and harassed and even killed dissidents in exile.
“Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated,” President Donald Trump said during a nationally broadcast statement from the White House Saturday after American stealth bombers blasted three facilities. “And Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace. If they do not, future attacks would be far greater and a lot easier.”
The bombings came amid an increasingly deadly conflict involving Iran and Israel, which is at war with the Iran-backed terror group Hamas.
Another suspected Iranian agent is Asif Merchant. The Pakistani man is accused of posing as an international clothing salesman and trying to hire hit men in Brooklyn nightclubs in an alleged assassination plot targeting key U.S. figures, possibly even Trump.
“For 40 years, Iran has been saying, ‘Death to America, death to Israel.’ They have been killing our people, blowing off their arms, blowing off their legs with roadside bombs,” Trump said Saturday. “That was their specialty. We lost over a thousand people, and hundreds of thousands throughout the Middle East and around the world have died as a direct result of their hate in particular.”
Other threats may not have directly come from Iran but appear to have been, at least in part, inspired by the regime there.
In March 2022, an Iranian-born Texas 23-year-old named Nika Nikoubin lured a man into a Las Vegas hotel for sex and stabbed him in the neck. She initially told police the stabbing came as revenge for the U.S. drone strike that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani – a designated terrorist leader who the Defense Department blames for the deaths of hundreds of American troops and thousands of severe injuries overseas.
Days before Trump ordered the drone strike that killed him, Soleimani had orchestrated a deadly attack on a U.S. base in Iraq. Authorities have said Iran has been seeking retaliation for his death for years. Also in 2022, federal prosecutors charged another Iranian agent with trying to have former White House national security advisor John Bolton killed for $300,000.
With $100,000 from Iran’s Quds Force, the Iranian military division run by Soleimani, Arbabsiar tried to hire an assassin from a Mexican drug cartel who was actually a DEA informant.
Iranian Big. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, head of the country’s “Aerospace Force,” had called for the deaths of Trump, former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other U.S. officials in the aftermath of Soleimani’s death. He was one of several high-ranking Iranian leaders killed in Israeli airstrikes last week.
Federal prosecutors have also blamed Iranian agents for cybercrimes, including attacks on presidential campaigns from both parties.
On Monday, Iran fired missiles toward the U.S.-run Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar – the Pentagon’s largest military installation in the Middle East.
None of them reached the base, Fox News reported.
Fox News’ Liz Friden and Emma Colton contributed to this report.
The post US airstrike on nuclear facilities follows years of Iranian plots on American soil appeared first on Fox News.
