While President Trump traded barbs on Twitter with Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Friday, experts warned that the conflict between Washington and Tehran extends beyond social media.
“This crisis is far from over,” Thomas Warrick, a Middle East expert at the Atlantic Council, said.
“This is an ongoing proxy battle for control of Iraq,” a former senior administration official with direct knowledge of events told the Washington Examiner.
The United States, for its part, continues to seek and destroy enemy forces that threaten U.S. troops, the official said. “We are systematically removing senior Iranian-controlled militia leaders, which started the night that they crossed the Rubicon and killed an American.”
In Iran, the regime’s theocratic tyrant praised the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s Quds Force as “fighters without borders” and vowed to defy Trump’s demand for negotiations to restrain Tehran’s regional aggression.
“The dear Iranian nation should be determined to become stronger,” Khamenei said. “The only way before the Iranian nation is becoming more powerful.”
That statement was delivered as Khamenei led Friday prayers for the first time since 2012. His rare appearance came just days after Iranian protesters burned photos of Qassem Soleimani to demonstrate their outrage over the IRGC’s mistaken downing of a Ukrainian passenger jet. Khamenei, insisting that “those few hundreds of people” don’t reflect Iranian public opinion, tried to justify the IRGC’s foreign military operations.
“Yes, the combatants of the Quds Force go to Palestine, Gaza, and other areas that need help, but they provide security for our own country,” he said.
Those comments are an implicit attempt to rebut State Department arguments that the IRGC has financed terrorism “around the world at the expense of its own people.”
“We’re not surprised to see the threats that the supreme leader makes,” Brian Hook, the State Department’s point man for Iran, told reporters on Friday. “Iran was able to run an expansionist foreign policy under the Iran nuclear deal. Their expansion was funded by the Iran nuclear deal.”
Khamenei made clear that he isn’t abandoning those regional operations, directing part of his address to “our Arab brothers” in Iraq. He emphasized that the commander of Iraq’s popular mobilization units, a network of Iran-controlled militias that is technically part of the Iraqi military, was killed alongside Soleimani.
“Once again, Iraqi and Iranian blood was shed and mixed together in the fields,” Khamenei said.
Those militias vowed to continue fighting U.S. troops who serve alongside the Iraqi military.
“The resistance factions are completely prepared to inflict a great defeat on American forces if they go against the will of the Iraqi government and people,” Mahmoud al Rubaye, an Iraqi politician affiliated with one of the militias, said in an interview that was publicized by Iranian state-run media.
“Clearly, some inside the Iraqi government and Iraqi military have gotten the message that if you take the side of Iran, you may end up being a legitimate target,” the former senior administration official said. “But, at the same time, the Iranians still control certain militias.”
