Risking American life abroad 'won't divert attention from catastrophic failures at home': Iran blasts Trump's threats

Military adventurism and threats against Tehran won't help US President Donald Trump to divert attention from the “catastrophic failures” in America's Covid-19 response, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has said.

Iran's top diplomat took to Trump's social media of choice, Twitter, to take a jab at his hostile rhetoric on Thursday.

“Putting your own citizens at risk abroad won't divert attention from catastrophic failures at home,” Zarif wrote, accompanying the message with a collage of Trump's own tweets.

The tweets, which date back to the early 2010s and target then-US President Barack Obama and his stance on Iran, don’t exactly appear to have aged well, given Trump's own policy towards Tehran. His administration has been engaged in a so-called “maximum pressure” campaign against the Islamic Republic and regularly imposes new sanctions on the country.

Zarif also posted a picture showing a list of the highest single day death tolls America has suffered, with events like the 9/11 terrorist attacks listed among the Covid-19 deaths. The US, by far, is the worst coronavirus-hit nation in the world with nearly 18.5 million cases registered and more that 320,000 deaths, the latest figures by Johns Hopkins University show.

The cheeky message apparently came in response to the new batch of threats against Iran issued by Trump late on Wednesday. The president has squarely blamed the recent shelling of the US embassy in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad on Tehran, promising to hold it accountable if any American is killed in similar attacks.

“Some friendly health advice to Iran: If one American is killed, I will hold Iran responsible. Think it over,” Trump wrote.

Multiple rockets were fired into Bagdad’s 'Green Zone' on Sunday, where the heavily fortified US embassy is located. The attack, which US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blamed on “Iran-backed militias,” triggered the activation of the facility's defense systems, with autocannons raining shells on the incoming rockets, multiple videos shared in the media have shown.

The US military and diplomatic installations across Iraq have repeatedly come under attack over the course of 2020. The incidents came after the US assassination of top Iranian General Qassem Soleimani early in January. Soleimani, the late chief of the elite Quds force with Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), was killed alongside several other high-ranking officials outside Baghdad in a drone strike personally ordered and widely celebrated by Trump.

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