“The US president said in one of his recent remarks that for 47 years America has been unable to eliminate the Islamic Republic; he complained about it to his own people. For 47 years, America has not been able to eliminate the Islamic Republic. That is a good admission,” Khamenei said at a meeting with people from East Azarbaijan province on Tuesday. “I say: You, too, will not be able to do this.”
His comments come days after Trump said regime change “would be the best thing that could happen.”
Khamenei also addressed repeated remarks by the US president that the American military is the strongest in the world.
“The strongest army in the world may at times receive such a slap that it cannot rise,” he said.
“They keep saying we have sent an aircraft carrier toward Iran. Very well, an aircraft carrier is a dangerous device, but more dangerous than the carrier is the weapon that can send it to the bottom of the sea.”
His remarks come amid heightened rhetoric between Tehran and Washington over military deployments and regional security and at the time a new round of negotiations mediated by Oman is underway in Geneva.
January protest remarks
In the same speech, Khamenei said those killed during the January protests are mourned as martyrs, dividing the dead into three groups and excluding what he described as “ringleaders and armed actors.”
“We are grieving. I say we are in mourning for the blood that was shed,” he said. “The circle of our fallen, whom we count as martyrs, is a wide one.”
Khamenei categorized the dead as security forces, bystanders and what he called “misled participants.”
He said, "only the instigators of sedition and the ringleaders and those who took money and weapons from the enemy” fall outside that circle.
He concluded by offering prayers for mercy and forgiveness for those he described as misled participants, framing the uprising as an enemy-driven plot rather than a domestic protest movement.
