The statement from Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi appears to contradict a comment made by Iran’s top leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a day earlier.
A top Iranian official conceded Thursday that U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, on the night of June 21 and into June 22, did significant damage. This comes after Iran’s top leader signaled otherwise earlier this week.
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told Iranian state television on Thursday that the country is still surveying damages and losses that were incurred in the U.S. strikes, which targeted three nuclear facilities that officials say were being used to enrich uranium. The facilities were Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.
“I must say that the damage is excessive and serious,” he said of the targeted Iranian nuclear facilities, according to an English translation. He did not provide specific details on what was damaged in the strikes.
Araghchi added that Iran had not yet decided whether to allow International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors to assess the damage, but they would be kept out of the facilities for now.
Earlier in the week, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei told Al Jazeera television that “our nuclear installations have been badly damaged, that’s for sure.” He did not go into detail about what kind of damage was incurred.
The statement from Araghchi appears to contradict a comment made by Iran’s top leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a day earlier, when he said on state-run media that the United States effectively failed in its mission to degrade Iran’s nuclear program.
“Anyone who heard his remarks could sense that behind those words lay a very different truth,” Khamenei said, referring to the American airstrikes. “They failed to achieve their objectives, and they inflated their claims to conceal the reality.”
Meanwhile, the White House on Wednesday released a statement from the Israel Atomic Energy Commission that found that the partially underground Fordow nuclear site was not operable due to the strikes, which were carried out by B-2 stealth bombers delivering GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOP).
“The devastating U.S. strike on Fordow destroyed the site’s critical infrastructure and rendered the enrichment facility inoperable,” the statement said. “We assess that the American strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, combined with Israeli strikes on other elements of Iran’s military nuclear program, have set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years.”
