Trump: Washington is monitoring Iran “very closely.” Tehran’s prosecutor-general: No execution have been canceled.
The U.S. military continued bolster its forces in the Middle East throughout the weekend, with assessments that their deployment will be completed in the coming days ahead of a possible strike on Iran. U.S. President Donald Trump warned on Friday aboard the Air Force One that “We have a lot of ships going that direction just in case … and we’ll see what happens. We have a big force going toward Iran; I’d rather not see anything happen, but we’re watching them very closely. He reiterated that his threats prevented the execution of 837 people whom Iranian authorities arrested during the nationwide protests that shook the Islamic Republic earlier in January.
“They would have been dead, every one of them would’ve been hung. This is like from a thousand years ago. … Mostly young men were going to be hung on Thursday, and I said if you hang those people you’re going to be hit harder than you’ve ever been hit. It will make what we did to your Iran nuclear look like peanuts,” the president said in reference to the U.S. airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in June.
Meanwhile, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has moved into an underground shelter in Tehran, Iran International, an opposition-affiliated outlet, reported on Saturday. It cited two sources close to the government as saying that the underground facility is a “fortified site with interconnected tunnels.” Khamenei’s third son, Masoud Khamenei, has assumed the roles of the supreme leader’s office, they added. The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and three accompanying destroyers are on their way to Iran in the Indian Ocean. The carrier strike group is expected to join three littoral combat ships, which ported in Bahrain on Friday, The Independent reported. (Read More)
