WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump said in an interview aired Friday (Mar 13) that American forces would strike Iranian targets “very hard” in the coming days, signalling an intensification of the US-Israeli campaign as the war in the Middle East approaches its third week.
Washington and its ally launched the offensive on Feb 28 with strikes that killed Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei, triggering a widening regional war that has rattled global energy markets and drawn missile and drone attacks across the Gulf.
“We’re going to be hitting them very hard over the next week,” Trump told Fox News Radio, adding that he believed Iran’s leadership could eventually be toppled by its own people.
“I really think that’s a big hurdle to climb for people that don’t have weapons,” Trump said. “I think it’s a very big hurdle … It’ll happen, but it probably will be, maybe not immediately.”
Trump’s remarks came as US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said Washington and Israel had already struck more than 15,000 targets since launching an air campaign against Iran on Feb 28.
“Between our air force and that of the Israelis, over 15,000 enemy targets have been struck. That’s well over 1,000 a day,” Hegseth told reporters, adding that Friday would see the highest volume of strikes so far.
Hegseth said the campaign had sharply degraded Iran’s ability to retaliate.
Iran’s “missiles, their missile launchers and drones (are) being destroyed or shot out of the sky,” he said, adding that the volume of missile attacks had fallen by 90 per cent and drone strikes by 95 per cent.
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