The commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said the United States has “fled” Afghanistan and is currently counting its “last months” in Iraq as well. Underlining Washington’s regional “defeats,” Hossein Salami added that US “plots” in Lebanon and Syria have also failed.

The Iranian general, known for his ferocious anti-West rhetoric, was speaking at a “martyrs' graveyard” in the southeastern city of Kerman, where his former colleague, slain commander Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani,i s also buried. Soleimani was killed in a US airstrike in January 2020 outside Baghdad’s international airport. The attack almost brought Tehran and Washington to the brink of a full-scale war. Iran retaliated for the general’s killing with over a dozen missiles that landed on a US air base in neighboring Iraq. American officials have denied Iranian reports that the strike left a number of US soldiers dead.

In his speech, Salami also highlighted what he called the American defeat in its “economic siege” on Iran, one of the various terms Iranian officials have used in reference to US sanctions against the Islamic Republic.

To get those sanctions lifted, Tehran has been seeking to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, engaging in multiple stages of negotiations with world powers. The United States, which withdrew from the deal under former President Donald Trump in 2018, is now seeking re-entry. In exchange for any sanctions removal, the United States demands Tehran keep its nuclear program under the caps set by the accord. The Islamic Republic, however, is pursuing its uranium enrichment at a 60% level, which to the Western side is a sign that a weapons program could be just around the corner.