WASHINGTON, Jan 11 (NNN-AGENCIES) — US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin jointly announced a new raft of economic sanctions against several senior Iranian officials and major companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The financial penalties came as a response to Iranian airstrikes against US bases in Iraq, which were in turn in retaliation for the assassination of Iran’s General Qassem Soleimani.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Soleimani had been the commander of the Quds Force, a special unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. He was also known to be in charge of attacks on US targets within Iraq.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“We don’t know exactly which day it would’ve been executed but it was very clear, Qassem Soleimani himself was plotting a broad, large-scale attack against American interests and those attacks were imminent,” Pompeo said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
New sanctions will target individuals and firms who own, operate, or assist “sectors of the Iranian economy including construction, manufacturing, textiles and mining,” Mnuchin said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The plan is also to target the “inner heart of Iranian security apparatus” with the sanctions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the Iranian airstrikes did not kill any US personnel, Pompeo said he believed it possible that the crash of a Ukrainian Airlines flight outside of Tehran on Wednesday that killed 176 civilians could have been caused by an Iranian missile launch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“We do believe it’s likely that plane was shot down by an Iranian missile. We are going to let the investigation play out before we make a final determination,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Government officials in the US, UK, and Canada have said there is evidence that the crash was caused by a surface-to-air missile, though with the caveat that the passenger jet was not necessarily downed on purpose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
During the press conference, Mnuchin said sanction waivers would be given to anyone wanting to “help facilitate the investigation” into the crash. — NNN-AGENCIES<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHINGTON, Jan 11 (NNN-AGENCIES) — US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin jointly announced a new raft of economic sanctions against several senior Iranian officials and major companies. The financial penalties came as a response to Iranian airstrikes against US bases in Iraq, which were in turn in retaliation for the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[208,215,217],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/namnewsnetwork.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58181"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/namnewsnetwork.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/namnewsnetwork.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/namnewsnetwork.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/namnewsnetwork.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/namnewsnetwork.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58181\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/namnewsnetwork.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/namnewsnetwork.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/namnewsnetwork.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}