Iran’s foreign minister said on Saturday “there will be no war” with the US, since “nobody in the region is suffering from a hallucination to think that he is able to confront Iran”.
Nonetheless, US diplomats warned commercial airliners flying over the Persian Gulf that they faced a risk of being “misidentified” amid heightened tensions between Washington and Tehran.
The US has ordered bombers and an aircraft carrier to the Gulf over an unexplained perceived threat, raising tensions a year after Donald Trump pulled out of the nuclear deal between world powers and the Islamic Republic.
In remarks quoted by the state-run IRNA news agency at the end of his trip to China, the foreign minister, Mohammed Javad Zarif, said the Islamic Republic was “not seeking war”, adding: “In fact, as the supreme leader said, there will be no war since we are not seeking war and nobody in the region is suffering from a hallucination to think that he is able to confront Iran.”
He added that though Trump has said he is not seeking war, “some that have sat around him” are pushing such a conflict. » | Associated Press in Washington | Saturday, May 18, 2019
