*By 8pm Tuesday, If Iran Does Not Reopen Hormuz Strait, We’ll Take Out Entire Country, He Warns
*’If By Midnight, Tehran Has Not Signed A Ceasefire On Our Terms, US’ll Bomb Them Back To Stone Age’
US President Donald Trump yesterday repeated his usual claims about how well the Iran war is going and how well the US military is doing (“unbelievably well”, he said), and celebrated the “very historic” rescue of the second crew member of the US F-15 fighter jet downed over Iran last week.
Turning to his latest deadline for Tehran to open the strait of Hormuz (8pm ET on Tuesday), he added: “The entire country can be taken out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night.”
How US Airman Was Rescued
Going back to the “massive operation” that was mobilised to rescue the stranded second airman, Trump said he ordered US Armed Forces to do whatever was necessary to bring him home.
“We leave no American behind,” he said.
Both members of the crew ejected from the aircraft, and landed on Iranian soil, he recalled.
Rescue teams were under “very heavy enemy fire” and a helicopter now has “bullets in it”, he said.
“The flight crews and war fighters aboard those aircraft took extraordinary risks to rescue their fellow service members,” the President added, noting that the second airman was injured “quite badly” and “stranded in an area teeming with terrorists from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).”
The airman scaled cliff faces while bleeding profusely to transmit his location, Trump said.
He said that as part of the rescue mission, the military deployed 155 aircraft, four bombers, 64 fighters, 48 refuelling tankers and 13 rescue aircraft.
He said they exited the territory with the airman, who had been stranded for almost 48 hours, without taking any casualties.
“We are the most powerful military anywhere in the world by far,” he stressed.
Trump earlier warned that if Iran does not meet his deadline, it will have “no bridges” and “no power plants” and it will be like “the Stone Ages”, reaffirming his previous threat to send Iran “back to the Stone Ages.”
He later doubled down on his threat to strike all of Iran’s bridges and power plants from 8pm ET on Tuesday, suggesting it would only take four hours, if Iran doesn’t reach a deal to end the war “that’s acceptable to me.”
“Every power plant in Iran will be out of business, burning, exploding and never to be used again … I mean complete demolition by 12 o’clock. And it will happen over a period of four hours if we wanted to. We don’t want that to happen,” he said.
However, he also said he’s still open to a deal, adding that Iran is an “active, willing participant” in negotiations to potentially end the war.
“We may even get involved with helping them rebuild their nation,” he said.
*PHOTO CAPTION: Trump (l) at a media event.
