Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Speaks

“You can’t do anything,” [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader] said in a speech in Tehran [on Wednesday], according to his website, adding: “If the Islamic Republic decides to challenge and fight, it will do so unequivocally.”

[snip]

Mr. Khamenei, addressing Mr. Trump, said, “If you were logical — which you’re not — you would see that your crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan” and elsewhere “have made nations hate you,” the ayatollah’s website reported.

Iraqi militias — in theory under the umbrella of the national military, but often quite independent — played a major role in the fight against the Islamic State, or ISIS. While many of are Shiite Muslim groups backed by Iran, a Shiite theocracy at odds with the United States, they had goals in common until the Islamic State lost its territory.

Mr. Khamenei, said the United States was “taking revenge on the Popular Mobilization Forces for defeating ISIS,” a group that he claimed “the U.S. had created.”

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