President Trump today imposed sanctions on Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s son, seeking to intensify pressure on the theocratic leader 40 years after the revolutionary Shiite regime came to power.
“This anniversary is an excellent opportunity for the Iranian regime to renounce its abhorrent practice of hostage taking and immediately and unconditionally release all unjustly detained Americans on Iranian soil in a sign that they are truly ready to rejoin the international community,” a senior administration official told reporters Monday.
Treasury Department officials blacklisted Mojtaba Khamenei, 50, and other key figures in the regime’s efforts to maintain power at home and foment conflict in neighboring states. The announcement, four decades after Iranian militants seized 52 Americans in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, continued Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran, even as the pariah regime unveiled new steps to ramp up its nuclear program.
“I think the designations today of the supreme leader’s inner circle is an extremely important demonstration of our recognition that the Iranian regime is completely unchanged from 40 years ago,” the senior administration official said. “This is the same crowd of corrupt revolutionaries that came into power in 1979.”
Mojtaba Khamenei is one of the Ayatollah’s six children. The second oldest son, he works with Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Quds Force, which the Trump administration designated last year as a foreign terrorist organization.
Also on Monday, the administration sanctioned Hossein Dehghan, who commanded the Guard during the 1983 Beirut bombing that killed 241 American service members; and Ali Akbar Velayati, one of the “ideological masterminds” of a 1994 attack on a Jewish community center in Argentina that killed 85 people.
“Today the Treasury Department is targeting the unelected officials who surround Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and implement his destabilizing policies,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in an official bulletin. “This action further constricts the Supreme Leader’s ability to execute his agenda of terror and oppression.”
In tandem, the State Department announced a $20 million reward for information leading to the release of Robert Levinson, a retired FBI special agent who went missing on Iran’s Kush Island in 2007.
“Iran has unjustly detained and tortured U.S. citizens as part of its ruthless efforts to exert political pressure on the United States,” another senior administration official said.
Iranian officials marked the anniversary of the hostage crisis with celebrations, staging rallies across the country. Tehran also announced the launch of advanced centrifuges — another step to ramp up their nuclear program — in an effort to pressure European countries to defy U.S. sanctions by trading with Iran.
“This rational way closes the Americans’ way to infiltrate into Iran again, proves Iran’s real awe and might to the world and ruins the other side’s hollow awe before the world,” Khamenei, the Iranian autocrat whom the Trump administration sanctioned in June, said Monday.
Trump has hoped that the renewal of economic sanctions following his withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear agreement last year would pressure the regime to begin new talks about additional restrictions.
“Our policy is to change the regime’s malign behavior and to make them a responsible member of the international community,” the first senior administration official said. “Everything we’ve asked them to do is absolutely in their own best interest.”
