Trump on lifting Iran sanctions: 'No thanks!'

By Betul Yuruk

NEW YORK (AA) - U.S. President Donald Trump rejected Iran's proposal to lift sanctions against Tehran Saturday.

"Iranian Foreign Minister says Iran wants to negotiate with The United States, but wants sanctions removed. No Thanks!," Trump wrote on Twitter.

Trump’s comments were in repose to an interview Friday, in which Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif told German magazine, Der Spiegel, that go get back to negotiations, the U.S. would need to eliminate the economic penalties.

"The Trump administration can correct its past, lift the sanctions and come back to the negotiating table. We’re still at the negotiating table. They’re the ones who left,” he said.

It is the latest salvos between the U.S. and Iran since Qasem Soleimani, the head of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps' (IRGC) elite Quds Force, was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad earlier this month.

His death marked a dramatic escalation in tensions between the U.S. and Iran, which have often been at a fever pitch since Trump chose, in 2018, to unilaterally withdraw Washington from a 2015 nuclear pact world powers struck with Tehran.

Iran's Supreme Leader, who bestowed the country's highest honor on Soleimani last year, vowed "severe retaliation" in response to his killing.

The IRGC launched more than a dozen ballistic missiles against U.S. military and coalition forces in Iraq in response.