Iran says has capacity to enrich uranium to any percentage

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – Iran’s nuclear agency said on Saturday that the country can enrich uranium at any percentage, Reuters cited a report from the body as saying.

“At the moment, if (Iranian authorities) make the decision, the Atomic Energy Organization, as the executor, will be able to enrich uranium at any percentage,” the report quoted Ali Asghar Zarean, the deputy chief of the nuclear agency, as saying.

The firm statement comes after Tehran’s stepped reduction in its compliance with a 2015 nuclear deal between it and world powers in response to the US withdrawal from the agreement and successive punitive sanctions on Iran’s economy.

Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif said in early January, “As 5th & final REMEDIAL step under paragraph 36 of JCPOA, there will no longer be any restriction on the number of centrifuges” that enrich uranium. He asserted this was allowed under the nuclear deal – formally termed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – and all the five steps it has taken to reduce its commitments.

The European signatories of the deal – the United Kingdom, France, and Germany – activated a dispute mechanism in mid-January for Iran’s violations, a step that could lead to the re-imposition of UN sanctions on the country, Reuters reports.

Zarif has reportedly threatened that Tehran would abandon the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) should its nuclear file make it to the UN’s Security Council.

Iran-US tensions spiked in early January after the US killing of top Iranian general Qasim Soleimani—this was after repeated attacks on American and coalition forces, which Washington has accused Iran and its Iraqi proxies of having carried out. One such attack killed an Iraqi-American civilian contractor at an Iraqi airbase.

Iran retaliated to Soleimani’s assassination by launching over a dozen ballistic missiles at airbases in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region that house US and coalition forces. The attack has resulted in 34 traumatic brain injuries among US troops.

Hours after this, Iran’s missile defense systems mistakenly shot down a Ukrainian airliner killing all 176 people on board. This reignited anti-government protests in many cities across the country. In an earlier round of such demonstrations in late 2019, the security forces reportedly killed upward to 1,500 people.

Following Tehran’s Jan. 7 strikes, multiple rockets have also appeared to have targeted the US embassy in Baghdad, a facility attacked by mobs of Iran-backed militias of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) in late December.

Related Article: Multiple rockets hit Iraq's Balad airbase, 4 wounded: military

Editing by Karzan Sulaivany