- This should come as no surprise after the much-publicized military command reshuffle of a week ago, but a top Iranian official has told Reuters that the country is shifting from a defense posture to a "fully offensive" one in its conflict with the United States:
Iran has decided to shift its policy from defensive to a “fully offensive” one, a senior Iranian official tells Reuters
Iran has set a deadline of a few weeks for the full implementation of the MoU by the US, the official says
All Iranian entities will be prepared to escalate tensions in the Strait of Hormuz and the region if diplomacy fails, the official warns
Iran will not wait for the US to continue the naval blockade indefinitely, the official adds
While bonds and stocks moved on the headline, oil was left little impacted - again perhaps become Tehran had already for days been signaling this new 'offensive' messaging as a policy shift...
And strangely, there was this development:
Iranian drones target Barzani's Erbil office. Masrour Barzani stated: "my personal office and the home of the head of the Security and Intelligence Agency were targeted by Iranian drone attacks." No casualties were reported.
This is after Axios reported that Nechirvan was the mediator link to the IRGC backchannel. Here's what Axios said in a Sunday report on these prior, secretive diplomatic efforts:
In mid-May, U.S. negotiators trying to reach a deal with Iran to end the war ran into a problem: They couldn't tell if the people across the table actually spoke for the country's powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
So Trump administration officials did something unconventional — they went around Iran's negotiators and reached out directly to IRGC leadership. The person they tapped for the backchannel was Nechirvan Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan region in Iraq, who had something very few others do: the trust of both U.S. and IRGC leaders.
Trump Threatens to Bomb Oman if it Gets in Way
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