TEHRAN - President Hassan Rouhani has admired the Iranian people for their fortitude and resistance against the cruel economic war imposed on the country by ill-wishers, saying the time has come for the lifting of the sanctions.

“It is now the time for the removal of the sanctions, one of whose main consequences is fluctuating prices,” he remarked, according to Tasnim.
 
The president noted the enemies had formulated cruel sanctions with the wrong assumption that the Islamic Republic could only resist for only a few months, but the Iranian nation’s maximum resistance foiled the comprehensive economic war.

Even during the coronavirus pandemic, Donald Trump refused to ease sanctions against Iran, an inhumane move that Foreign Minister Zarif said economic terrorism is being “supplanted by economic terrorism”. 

In remarks in November 2020, Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Ali Khamenei urged officials to concentrate efforts on nullifying the sanctions rather than seeking their removal, pointing to the unsuccessful outcome of years of negotiations for lifting the sanctions.

The United States, under former President Donald Trump, pulled out the 2015 nuclear deal, unraveling the signature foreign policy achievement of his predecessor Barack Obama, an illegal move that led to isolation of the United States even among its Western allies. Also, the United States reinstated all the sanctions that had been lifted under the nuclear accord and it imposed new harsh ones, including a total ban on Iran’s oil export.

Iran remained fully compliant to the deal for a complete year after the U.S. exit from the agreement. Ultimately, Iran said its “strategic patience” is over and decided to scale back some commitments under the JCPOA (officially known as Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) and it recently restarted enrichment of uranium at 20 percent purity and restricted the access of the UN watchdog inspectors to Iranian nuclear sites. 

EE/PA