Iranian President Hassan Rouhani castigated Iran’s friends on Saturday for not standing up to the United States and ignoring US sanctions during the coronavirus pandemic. Iran with over 3,80,000 registered Covid cases is one of the countries worst hit by the pandemic in the Middle East.
“Over the past months since the coronavirus arrived in our country... no one came to our help,” President Rouhani said in remarks broadcast live on state television. If the US “had a bit of humanity and brain”, he said, it would have offered to “lift the sanctions for a year because of the coronavirus”.
But the US “is far more heartless and evil than those things,” he added. Instead, it “imposed new sanctions and pressures on us over these past 7 months of coronavirus”. At the same time, “Not a single friendly country told us that in this time of coronavirus and hardship and for the sake of humanity ‘we will stand up to America’” and do business with Iran despite threats of US retaliation, President Rouhani said.