Amid growing signs that another US-Israeli attack on Iran is coming, Iranian officials are warning that their retaliatory attacks will hit new targets and expand “geographically,” as they stress that Tehran is ready to face another heavy bombing campaign.
Mohsen Rezaei, the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said that in the event of another attack, Iran could hit US-linked data centers and other technological infrastructure in the region. Iran did hit such targets during previous exchanges, but it wasn’t a focus of its strikes.
“The pulse of the American economy in this region runs through our part of the world,” Rezaei told Iran’s PressTV. “We have not yet included these assets among our targets. But if war breaks out, many of these cables, data centers, artificial intelligence facilities, and numerous other sites will be destroyed.”
Mehdi Mohammadi, an adviser to Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Ghalibaf, warned that Iran’s retaliatory attacks could hit a wider geographical area. “We see the next conflict as an existential threat. The third war in two years means a threat to existence. Our strategy is ‘zero red lines,’” he said, according to The Guardian.
“We break the temporal and spatial dimensions of the conflict. The war will continue longer and in a wider geographical area than the enemy anticipates,” Mohammadi added.
Rezaei said that Iran’s goal “is not to make it to 2029” but to “end the war on terms that reduce the likelihood of another war.”
The comments came after The New York Times reported that the US and Israel have drawn up plans to renew the bombing campaign after the November 3 midterm elections, though other reports and the US decision to remove personnel from military bases and diplomatic facilities across the region suggest the attack could come sooner.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also ramped up his rhetoric before the October 27 Knesset elections in Israel, declaring on Wednesday that he has ordered the Israeli military to “overthrow the regime in Iran.”
