US may hit Iran's Pickaxe mountain says Trump

US President Donald Trump on Friday said the United States could "hit" Iran's heavily fortified underground nuclear site known as Pickaxe Mountain "very soon", days after Washington targeted Iranian military targets.

Speaking to reporters at the Oval Office, Trump defended the months-long US military campaign against the Islamic Republic, saying its primary objective was to prevent Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

"We're in five months now. And you know what we did in five months? They're not going to have a nuclear weapon; that's what we did," Trump said.

"Iran will not have a nuclear weapon because if they did, you probably wouldn't be standing here very long," he added.
Trump then warned that Pickaxe Mountain could be targeted if the US detects activity there.

"We may hit Pickaxe very soon because if there was anything going on with Pickaxe," Trump said, adding that US intelligence was closely monitoring activity at the site.

"We know everybody that's moving at Pickaxe; we know everybody that's moving everywhere all over Iran. And if anything goes bad, we hit them; we hit them hard," Trump said.

Pickaxe Mountain is located near Iran's heavily damaged Natanz uranium-enrichment facility and is described as a heavily fortified underground complex containing two deeply buried tunnel systems.
The Wall Street Journal had earlier reported that Israeli intelligence believes Iran has relocated thousands of centrifuges to the deeply buried facility.

The underground construction of the site is believed to make it substantially more resistant to conventional aerial bombardment, making any potential US decision to strike it a significant escalation in the campaign against Iran's nuclear infrastructure.

Trump also argued that US military intervention had prevented a wider regional conflict, saying that without American action, Israel and the broader Middle East would have faced a potentially more serious threat.

"If we didn't go in there, you wouldn't have Israel right now, you wouldn't have the Middle East, and they probably would go at European cities and our cities next," Trump said.

"But we stopped them from having a nuclear weapon in five months," he added.

The remarks came days after the US Central Command said American forces had completed a wave of strikes against Iranian military targets.

According to CENTCOM, the operations targeted facilities associated with Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps last week, including air-defence installations, radar systems, maritime assets, mine-laying capabilities and communications sites.

CENTCOM said the strikes followed what it described as recent "attempted attacks" by the IRGC against commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and against US service members.
Trump also spoke about the recent US strikes on Iranian radar systems, claiming American forces had destroyed sophisticated radar installations on two occasions.

"There had been no shooting for days before the hit that we gave them the other night to wipe out the radar they had," Trump said.

"They had very sophisticated radar – they brought in radar because we knocked it out once, and now we knocked it out twice. Now we don't notice any activity," he added.

Trump suggested Iran had become reluctant to continue deploying radar systems because of repeated US attacks.

"I think they're tired of putting it in and getting blown up," he said.

Iran had strongly condemned the latest American strikes, accusing Washington of violating Iranian sovereignty and targeting non-military infrastructure and civilian sites across several provinces.

Iran's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Iranian armed forces had responded with what it described as "crushing defensive strikes" against US military bases in West Asia that Tehran said served as the origin, support and staging points for American attacks.

-NDTV