A US Republican politician has urged the Biden Administration to carry out a huge attack on Iran in an attempt to wipe the country “off the map”. Senator Lindsey Graham told US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin to avoid showing “weakness” following Iran-backed militias’ attacks on US troops in the region.
Graham told Fox News on Wednesday that the US should attack Iran and its proxies, including the Yemen-based Houthis, to send a clear message to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah. He emphasised the need to go after the Houthis – and that he had been urging this “for months”, The Sun reports.
He said: “The Houthis are completely backed by Iran. Without Iran there are no Houthis. I have been saying for six months now…hit Iran. They have oil fields out in the open, they have the Revolutionary Guard headquarters you can see from space. Blow it off the map.”
Iran’s proxies have recently been attacking US military bases in Iraq and Syria, and Graham said: “If you really want to protect American soldiers, make it real to the ayatollah [that if] you attack a soldier through a proxy, we’re coming after you.”
Tensions have risen in the region after Iran’s senior military general, Sayyed Razi Mousavi, was killed on Christmas Day in Syria – allegedly by an Israeli airstrike. Tehran responded by saying Israel “will certainly pay for this crime”, while Iran’s Foreign Minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, wrote on X/Twitter that “Tel Aviv faces a tough countdown”.
Iran has been mourning military general Mousavi, with thousands gathering in the streets. His funeral took place on Thursday, and the chief of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, General Hossein Salami, told the country live on TV: “Our revenge for the martyrdom of Sayyed Razi will be nothing less than the removal of the Zionist regime.”
He continued: “I am hopeful that soon, God permitting, the great and honourable Palestinian fighters will wipe out the geographical and political name of this evil and fake regime.”
Protestors agreed and chanted “Death to America, Death to Israel.”
The tension comes amid fears the Israel-Hamas war could spill over into a broader Middle East conflict. Already, several of Iran’s proxy war groups, including Houthi, have joined Hamas in attacking Israel.
Lebanon-based Hezbollah and Israel have traded air strikes, while Houthi continue to attack ships linked to Israel and its allies, including the US and UK, to disrupt trade. These are regularly occurring in the Yemen-bordering Red Sea, which leads up to the Suez Canal if travelling towards Europe.
Iran also claimed that Hamas’s October 7 attacks were revenge for a Donald Trump-imposed 2020 assassination of a top Iranian general, Qasem Soleimani. However, Hamas denies this, saying they weren’t motivated by that.
Instead, Hamas says the massacres were related to “the dangers threatening the Al-Aqsa Mosque”, which is the key Islamic site on the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem.
