US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday (11 March) that Iran’s leadership has been decimated and the country’s military is in disarray as a result of Operation Epic Fury, the ongoing US-led military campaign.
“Our military is the best. It’s the most powerful in the world and it hits them very hard,” Trump said, emphasizing the effectiveness of the strikes.
Asked what more needed to be done, Trump said: “More of the same,” signaling continued pressure on Iranian forces.
Iran’s military ‘effectively destroyed’, Trump claims
Trump detailed the scale of US operations, saying: “They’ve lost their navy. They’ve lost their air force. They have no anti-aircraft apparatus at all. They have no radar. Their leaders are gone and we could do a lot worse.”
He added that U.S. forces had deliberately left certain Iranian capabilities intact but could destroy them quickly if necessary: ”We’re leaving certain things that if we take them out or we could take them out by this afternoon, actually by the hour, they would literally never be able to rebuild this country.”
Trump also said, “We’ve hit them harder than virtually any country in history has been hit, and we’re not done yet.”
Conflict described as “war” and “excursion”
On whether the fighting should be considered a war, Trump said, “Well, it’s both. It’s an excursion to keep us out of war. And war will be — I think to them, it’s war.”
He described the campaign as “easier than we thought,” citing US strikes that destroyed thousands of Iranian missiles, drones and mine-laying vessels:
“They had thousands of missiles … 7 or 8,000 missiles. We got a lot of them before they could launch,” Trump said.
Trump said the US destroyed 28 Iranian minesweepers
Trump claimed that US forces have struck 28 Iranian ships laying mines as part of an ongoing military campaign against Iran.
“They’ve got drones everywhere — we’ve got a lot of them. Now we’re taking out drone races, you know, fast. They started talking about mines, so we’ve hit 28 mine ships at this point,” Trump told reporters before touring a scientific research and pharmaceutical facility in Ohio.
