On Sunday, Major General Amir Hatami, commander in chief of the Islamic regime’s army, stood at a ceremony honoring National Journalists’ Day and announced a bounty on American servicemembers. Anyone who kills or captures a US soldier and hands them over will receive 5 billion tomans, roughly 30,000 dollars. If the person who does it is a woman, the reward doubles to 60,000 dollars. Hatami called the scheme “financial jihad,” and added that whatever weapon is used to kill an American will be purchased by the army at double its market value, replaced with a new one, and put on permanent display in a museum.
A government under which the Iranian people cannot even afford to put food on the table is building a trophy case for the guns used to kill Americans.
Hatami is far from alone in this rhetoric. Member of parliament Mojtaba Zarei posted in both Farsi and Arabic calling on Jordanians to seize a US air base and take American soldiers captive the moment Iranian missiles hit it. Fellow MP Amirhossein Sabeti said the leaders of Arab countries hosting American bases should themselves be targets for retaliation alongside Israeli and American officials, and he called officials in his own government “idiots” for apologizing to those countries after the regime struck American bases on their soil.
