The US Treasury Department on Thursday announced new sanctions on Iranian officials accused of being responsible for the response to protests inside Iran, a largely symbolic move since it’s unlikely senior Iranian officials have assets in the US or plan on traveling to the country.
Among the Iranian officials hit with sanctions was Ali Larijani, the Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. Other officials who were targeted include law enforcement and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders. The US also targeted 18 individuals and entities it accused of facilitating money laundering on behalf of the Iranian government.
“At the direction of President Trump, the Treasury Department is sanctioning key Iranian leaders involved in the brutal crackdown against the Iranian people. Treasury will use every tool to target those behind the regime’s tyrannical oppression of human rights,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement on the sanctions.
The announcement of the sanctions comes after President Trump appeared to back down on his threat to bomb Iran over the protests, saying he was told the “killing” had stopped. Iran’s position is that the violence was due to armed attacks against Iranian security forces. Both government sources and Western-backed NGOs have said more than 100 Iranian law enforcement and military personnel have been killed in the unrest.
“When terrorist elements led from outside, entered this, you know, protests and started to shoot, you know, police forces, police officers and security forces. And there were terrorist cells. They came in, they used Daesh-style terrorist operations,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi said in an interview with Fox News on Wednesday evening.
“They got police officers, burned them alive, they beheaded them, and they started shooting at police officers and also to the people. So as a result, for three days, we had, in fact, fighting against terrorists, and not with the protesters,” Aragchi added.
The Iranian diplomat also claimed the violence was part of an Israeli plot to get the US into a war with Iran. “They wanted to increase the number of deaths. Why? Because President Trump has said that if there are killings, he would intervene. And they wanted to drag him into this conflict,” he said. “And that was exactly an Israeli plot. They started to increase the number of deaths by killing ordinary people, by killing police officers, by starting a kind of, you know, fighting inside the different cities
