US Must Stop Arms Sales to Region, Massacre of Children in Yemen: Zarif
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – The US must reduce weapons sales to the region and stop the massacre of children in Yemen, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said, stressing that Washington should also stick to the original conditions of the 2015 nuclear deal.
The 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and world powers, officially known as the JCPOA, did not include Iran’s defensive capabilities because the US was not prepared to stop its arms sales to the region as a precondition, Zarif said in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Monday evening, when asked about the US call for inclusion of non-nuclear issues in the JCPOA.
“The nuclear deal was negotiated based on what we could agree and what we could not agree. This is the deal that was made,” Zarif said.
“The United States has to accept that ... we decided not to agree upon certain things, not because we neglected them, but because the United States and its allies were not prepared to do what was necessary. Is the US prepared to stop selling arms to our region?”
Zarif said Iran “spends a seventh of Saudi Arabia on defense, with 2.5 times its population."
“If it wants to talk about our defense … is the US prepared to reduce hundreds of billions of dollars of weapons it is selling to our region? Is the US prepared to stop massacre of children in Yemen if it wants to talk about the situation in Yemen,” he added.
“The United States was not prepared to discuss these issues when we negotiated the nuclear deal. That's why we agreed to limit the deal,” Zarif noted.
Zarif also reiterated Iran’s stance regarding the country’s ideological views that rejects seeking a nuclear weapon on Monday.
"If we wanted to build a nuclear weapon we could have done it some time ago," he said. "But we decided that nuclear weapons are not, would not augment our security and are in contradiction to our, eh, ideological views. And that is why we never pursued nuclear weapons."
Zarif said the reason why Iran has moved away from its JCPOA commitments is the US' move to impose a full economic war against Iran.
“First of all the United States must establish its bona fide, to come back to the nuclear deal... The US is not in the nuclear deal because of its own decision to withdraw without taking the routes that were available to it within the nuclear agreement,” he added.
Earlier on Friday, Zarif had noted that Iran will not accept the US demand that it resume full nuclear compliance before Washington lifts sanctions on Tehran.
The demand “is not logical and will never happen”, he said at a joint news conference in Istanbul with his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu.
Former US President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew America from Iran’s nuclear deal in 2018. Under the deal, Tehran had agreed to limit its uranium enrichment in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions.
After the US then ramped up sanctions, Iran gradually and publicly abandoned the deal’s limits on its nuclear development.
New President Joe Biden, who was vice president when the deal was signed during the Obama administration, has said he hopes to return the US to the deal. But new US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday the US will only return to the nuclear deal once Tehran honors its nuclear commitments.
