Iran will sink American ships in the Strait of Hormuz if the United States decides to “monitor” the key shipping bottleneck, a military advisor to Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei warned on Wednesday.
The United States imposes a military blockade on the Strait of Hormuz after Iran blocked shipping during more than six weeks of war in a pending conflict with a fragile ceasefire lasting for two weeks.
He asked, “Mr. Trump wants to become a policeman in the Strait of Hormuz. Is this really your job? Is this the job of a powerful army like the United States?” Mohsen Rezaei, the former supreme commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, who Khamenei appointed last month as a military adviser, told state television.
Rezaei, who was wearing his military uniform, told state radio, “These ships of yours will be sunk by our first missiles and pose a great danger to the American army. They can certainly be exposed to our missiles and we can destroy them.”
Rezaei, long considered a hardliner even within the Revolutionary Guards, Iran’s ideological army, said it would be “great” if the United States launched a ground invasion of Iran in which “we will take thousands of hostages and then we will get a billion dollars for each hostage.”
He added, without further details, “I do not support extending the ceasefire at all, and this is a personal point of view.”
Rezaei was a veteran and prominent figure in Iran, and headed the Revolutionary Guard from 1981 to 1997.
The first and so far only round of Iranian negotiations with the United States after the outbreak of war was led in Pakistan by Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, the former commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ air forces.
