The United States will call the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a "foreign terrorist group"

The United States will designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the Iranian military's elite body, as a foreign terrorist organization, according to three US officials, which would be the first time that Washington would describe the military group as third country. terrorist group

The US State Department is expected to announce this decision next week, sources said. Reuters in reaction to an article published this Friday by The Wall Street Journal. This maneuver has been rumored for years. The Pentagon declined to comment and forwarded the investigations to the state department, which also declined to answer questions.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called for a change in US policy as part of the Donald Trump government's tough stance on Tehran.

In addition, the announcement would be made before the first anniversary of Trump's decision to withdraw from the nuclear deal with Tehran – May 8, 2018 – and re-impose the sanctions that had paralyzed the Iranian economy.

The United States has already included in its blacklist dozens of entities and people related to the Revolutionary Guard, but the organization as a whole is not.

In 2007, the US Treasury designated the Qods Force, the unit of the Guardian in charge of overseas operations, "for its support of terrorism" and described it as the "main arm of the To carry out its policy ". support for insurgent groups ".

For its part, Iran warned against an "overwhelming" reaction if the United States accepted this designation.

Mohammad Ali Jafari, commander of the elite Iranian army, warned in 2017 that if Trump was acting with the manibora, "then the Revolutionary Guard will consider the US military as an Islamic state through the world".

These threats are particularly worrying for the US presence in places like Iraq, where Shiite militias aligned with Iran are located very close to US troops.

Former US Assistant Secretary of State Wendy Sherman said this measure would have consequences for US forces. "One could even suggest, because it's hard to see why this interests us, if the president is not looking for the basis of a conflict," he said. "The Iranian Revolutionary Guards are already fully sanctioned and this escalation endangers our troops in the region".

Established after the 1979 Islamic Revolution to protect the Shi'ite system of government, the Revolutionary Guard is the most powerful security organization in Iran. It controls large sectors of the Iranian economy and exerts a great influence on its political system.

It has an army of about 125,000 soldiers including units of the army, navy and air force and responds to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But it is the Qods Force, led by General Qbadem Soleimani, which operates outside of Iran and has attracted much attention from Washington for its role in countries such as Syria, Yemen and Iraq.

Pompeo has repeatedly referred to Soleimani and in 2017, when he was director of the CIA, he had written to him and to other Iranian leaders warning them that the United States United would hold them responsible for any attack on their interests in Iraq.

With Reuters information