Tehran has fired back at Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s “hypocritical gesture” to visit the country and address the Iranian people, AP/Fox News informed.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif replied to the top American diplomat on Wednesday, saying “You don’t need to come to Iran.”
Zarif instead suggested Pompeo should grant visas to the Iranian media to travel to the U.S. and interview him, accusing the government of rejecting their requests.
The comments come amid Pompeo’s tweets on Monday, where he said that “we aren’t afraid of (Zarif) coming to America where he enjoys the right to speak freely.”
“Are the facts of the (Khamenei) regime so bad he cannot let me do the same thing in Tehran?” he added, referring to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “What if his people heard the truth, unfiltered, unabridged?”
Tensions between the U.S. and Iran have been heightened ever since the Trump administration pulled out of the 2015 nuclear deal and then imposed punitive sanctions on the Iranian regime, AP/Fox News writes.
However, in recent months, Washington and Tehran were on a constant brink of war after the regime attacked oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz and later shot down an unmanned American drone.
The attack on the drone prompted President Donald Trump to order military strikes on the regime, only canceling them at the last minute over concerns of potential casualties on the Iranian side.
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