The Iranian ambassador in London has warned the UK to be “very careful” about becoming further involved in the war.
Seyed Ali Mousavi told Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg his country would have a “right to self-defence” if the UK directly joined US-Israeli attacks on Iran.
He warned that Iran expected the British government, and others, “to be very delicate, very careful” in their actions.
The UK has given permission for the US to use British bases for what ministers describe as defensive strikes on Iranian facilities, but has not taken part in any direct attacks itself.
The ambassador said it was “good” that the UK was not “involved with this aggression”, adding he believed the British government had learnt lessons from the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Despite the Iranian president’s apology to its Gulf neighbours on Saturday, Mousavi made clear Iran would continue to attack US bases if strikes on Iran continued.
Days of strikes across the Middle East have caused enormous disruption and damage in many different countries.
Mousavi said that “if facilities or properties or bases are used against the Iranian nation”, they would be considered “legitimate targets”.
In the last few hours, Gulf countries including Qatar and the UAE have been hit by Iran, while the US and Israel have continued their attacks as the war enters a second week.
In an exclusive interview with the BBC to be broadcast on Sunday, Mousavi was asked if Iran would stop its attacks on military bases outside Israel in other parts of the Middle East.
He said there is “willingness from the Iranian side not to strike, not to attack our neighbours”.
But he maintained that Iran had the right to continue striking targets across the whole region where there were military bases.
Mousavi said Iran’s response “depends on the activities of the Americans and the Israeli regime”.
“If the aggression… continues there is no doubt we will defend ourselves,” he said. “And if they want to use these military bases – although we don’t want to do that – there is no doubt we will defend ourselves accordingly.”
It has been more than seven days since the US and Israel began strikes on Iran, which led Tehran to retaliate with its own attacks across the region.
Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman and Iraq have all been hit, as has an RAF base in Cyprus.
In spite of President Masoud Pezeshkian’s apology, reports from the region suggest Iranian strikes have not stopped. Qatar and the UAE both said on Saturday afternoon they had intercepted missiles targeting them.
Pezeshkian’s message has not been universally welcomed inside Iran, with some hardliners criticising the tone as weak.
It is rare for the leadership of a country like Iran to apologise, let alone in public.
And it is rare for a representative of Iran to agree to be interviewed.
But in the wake of the president’s apology, Iran’s ambassador to the UK agreed to our request to speak to him, and even more unusually, invited us to speak to him in Iran’s embassy in London, a building that tells the story of the fraught and troubled history between Iran and the West.
The building, on the edge of London’s Hyde Park, is where five Iranian gunmen were killed after a dramatic siege that was brought to an end by SAS commandos in 1980.
Nineteen hostages were set free, but one died and two were injured in the crossfire.
The gunmen belonged to a dissident Iranian group opposed to Ayatollah Khomeini, the religious leader.
Like his president in Tehran, the ambassador plainly wanted to make the case that Iran was only responding to aggression from Israel and the United States, and that it was not trying to put other citizens in the Middle East in danger, or to prolong the war unnecessarily.
But the way in which Iran has responded by attacking so many different countries across the region, in a way that Western officials see as indiscriminate lashing out, tells a different story.
