Trump warns Iran: The ‘big one’ is coming

Donald Trump said America is “knocking the c--p” out of Iran, warning that a “big wave” of strikes is still to come.

The United States president suggested the missiles that killed Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei and other high-ranking officials in the early hours of Saturday in Tehran were just the start of his military campaign.

“We haven’t even started hitting them hard. The big wave hasn’t even happened. The big one is coming soon,” Mr Trump told CNN.

He refused to rule out American boots on the ground in Iran during a separate interview with the New York Post.

“I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground – like every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground’. I don’t say it. “I say ‘probably don’t need them’, [or] ‘if they were necessary’.”

Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, said that while the country was not preparing ground forces to enter Iran at this time, Mr Trump had the option on the table.

He added that the Trump administration believed it could achieve its objectives without using ground forces.

Mr Trump made the comments after an exclusive interview with The Telegraph, in which he criticised Sir Keir Starmer’s initial refusal to let US forces use Diego Garcia during the operation.

The US president said he was “very disappointed” in Sir Keir for blocking him from using the Chagos Islands air base, adding he “took far too long” to change his mind. He said the move was unlike anything that had “happened between our countries before”.

Earlier on Monday, Mr Trump’s top general said that the US military was sending more troops to the Middle East as it continued to attack Iran.

More “tactical aviation” would be sent to the region after three days of air strikes, Gen Dan Caine, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, told a Pentagon press conference.

In a warning to America’s adversaries, Gen Caine said: “We can reach you, we can sustain the fight and we will scale the fight.”

Six US soldiers have been killed so far, and Mr Trump and Pete Hegseth, the US secretary of defence, have told Americans to prepare for more casualties.

Three US fighter jets were downed in Kuwait by friendly fire.

The F-15 jets were “mistakenly shot down by Kuwaiti air defences” with all six crew on board safely ejected and unharmed.

Mr Trump’s Operation Epic Fury entered its third day on Monday. At least 555 people in the region have been killed.

The United States has also urged its citizens to leave more than a dozen countries in the Middle East, including Dubai and the United Arab Emirates. 

Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz on Monday night in a move set to drive oil prices even higher. 

The country’s Revolutionary Guard said it would set fire to any ship trying to pass through the narrow waterway, through which approximately 21 million barrels of oil pass each day. 

Consumers have already been warned they will have to pay more for petrol, and possibly food, because the conflict is driving oil prices.

The price of Brent crude, the international benchmark, rose 9 per cent on Monday to $79.33 (£59.19) a barrel.

The US president told CNN that the war could last a month. He said: “I don’t want to see it go on too long. I always thought it would be four weeks. And we’re a little ahead of schedule.”

Mr Hegseth, an Iraq war veteran, insisted that the conflict would not be “endless”.

But he cheered the death of a regime that “chanted death to America” and instead was “gifted death by America”.

“This is not a so-called regime change war but the regime sure did change and the world is better off for it,” Mr Hegseth said.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll published on Sunday found just 27 per cent of Americans approved of the strikes, while 43 per cent disapproved and 29 per cent were unsure.

Gen Caine said that the “sky surged to life” on Saturday when the operation began with strikes on more than 1,000 targets within the first 24 hours.

He described the operation as a “massive overwhelming attack across all domains of warfare” that was given the go-ahead by Mr Trump with the words: “Operation Epic Fury is approved. No Aborts. Good luck.”

Mr Trump said: “We’re knocking the c--p out of them. I think it’s going very well.”

Mr Trump admitted that the “biggest surprise” was Iran’s attacks on other Arab countries in the region.

They include the strikes on the Jeremiah Palm hotel in Dubai and the attacks on airports that have left hundreds of thousands of travellers stranded.

Mr Trump said: “We were surprised. We told them [the other Arab nations] ‘We’ve got this’ and now they want to fight. And they’re aggressively fighting. They were going to be very little involved and now they insist on being involved.”

Mr Hegseth sought to cast the offensive against Iran as a response to 47 years of aggression since the Islamic revolution in 1979.

He claimed that Iran was building “powerful missiles and drones to create a conventional shield for their nuclear blackmail ambitions”.

Ultimately, it was Iran’s nuclear ambitions that “had to be addressed”, Mr Hegseth said.

He also appeared to criticise the UK and other Western allies for failing to back the strikes immediately.

Sir Keir, the Prime Minister, initially turned down a US request to use British bases for its campaign against Iran but changed his mind late on Sunday.

Mr Hegseth said that Israel, which has been at the forefront of the bombardment, was a “capable partner, unlike so many of our traditional allies”.

“Allies who wring their hands and clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force,” he said.

Israel began a fresh wave of strikes on Tehran on Monday night. Explosions were heard near the headquarters of state broadcaster IRIB.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]