NEW DELHI: US secretary of state Michael R Pompeo has said that the US sanctions which went into effect at midnight Sunday "are the toughest sanctions ever put in place on the Islamic Republic of Iran." However, in separate interviews to Fox News and CBS, Pompeo sidestepped questions on whether India and China, two of Iran's largest oil importers which had been given "temporary" waivers from the sanctions, had agreed to cut down imports to zero within a specified timeframe.
Insisting that the sanctions were "aimed at a singular purpose: denying the world's largest state sponsor of terror the capacity to do things like they did this past couple of weeks, attempt an assassination campaign in the heart of Europe," he said: "These sanctions have already had an enormous impact. We've already reduced Iranian crude oil exports by over a million barrels per day. That number will fall farther." However, he agreed that some of some of the nations have already made significant reductions in their crude oil exports need a little bit more time to get to zero, and the US is going to provide that to them.
Indian officials declined comment when asked whether the US waiver was conditional on bringing oil imports from Iran down to zero within a specified timeframe. However, a Singapore based global oil market analyst was quoted as saying that India's crude oil imports from Iran dropped from 690,000 barrels per day in May to around 400,000 barrels per day in August.
Pompeo also clarified that businesses and entities that violated these sanctions, and not countries, would be punished under the sanctions. "These sanctions apply to those who conduct sanctionable transactions. The Treasury has a set of sanctions, the State Department has its own set of sanctions, and those will all come back into place on Monday of this week, and they'll be the toughest sanctions ever placed against the Islamic Republic of Iran," he said.
Iran, however, remained defiant, with foreign minister Jawad Zarif, tweeting: "Today, US defied UN top court & Security Council by reimposing sanctions on Iran that target ordinary people. But US bullying is backfiring, not just because JCPOA is important, but because the world can't allow Trump & Co. to destroy global order. The US-& not Iran-is isolated."
On Sunday, addressing a massive rally to mark the anniversary of the seizure of the US embassy during the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran's military chief, Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, warned the US and it's "weird president" over the sanctions. "I want to say something to America and its weird president.Never threaten Iran, because we can still hear the horrified cries of your soldiers in the [desert] . and you know it better, how many of your old soldiers in American society commit suicide every day because of depression and fear that they suffered in battlefields. So, don't threaten us militarily and don't frighten us with military threats,-" he said.