Iran's Supreme Leader warns of 'regional war' as US threat looms

Arsalan Shahla, Bloomberg News on Feb 1, 2026

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Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned of a “regional war” as tensions continued to mount over potential U.S. strikes on Tehran.

“We don’t want to attack any country,” Khamenei said in a public speech broadcast on state television on Sunday. “But in response to anyone who harbors ambitions, wants to attack, and seeks to cause harm, the Iranian people will strike back forcefully.”

The remarks come after weeks of escalating tensions that have pushed Iran and the U.S. to the brink of conflict, following threats by President Donald Trump in January to attack over Tehran’s deadly crackdown on protests that erupted over poor economic and living conditions.

Trump since then has ordered a U.S. aircraft carrier strike group to the Middle East, and continued to deploy additional military assets to the region, even as he said Iranian leaders had assured him the killings had stopped and that no executions would take place.

The move has helped Trump sustain pressure on Iran to negotiate a new nuclear deal, despite having said that U.S. strikes on the country’s nuclear facilities in June obliterated its atomic program. On Saturday, Trump said without elaborating that Tehran was engaged in talks with Washington, adding, “I hope they negotiate something that is acceptable.”

Iran has declared that Israel would be a target in the event of a U.S. strike, along with U.S. military bases in the region. Tehran has acted on such threats in the past by striking facilities hosting American forces in Qatar and Iraq.

Protests erupted in Tehran in late December over a currency crisis, but quickly spread to other cities and intensified before being met with a forceful crackdown. The official death toll from the demonstrations stands at 3,117, yet activists say they’ve confirmed more than 6,700 fatalities so far. They also say that thousands more may have gone unrecorded as authorities sought to conceal the scale of the crackdown with a weeks-long communications blackout.

Diplomatic activity has intensified amid the saber rattling. Iran’s foreign ministry confirmed that Qatar’s Foreign Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani paid an unannounced visit to Tehran on Saturday, holding talks on “safeguarding regional peace and stability” with Iranian counterpart Abbas Araghchi and the secretary of its Supreme National Security Council. Last week, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey was ready to take on a facilitating role between Iran and the U.S.

Khamenei on Sunday described popular unrest in Iran as “a coup that was suppressed,” and reiterated claims that the U.S. was behind the protests. He also said that the Iranian people, who posed the most serious challenge to his authority in the history of the Islamic Republic, are ready for another war.

“In my view, the Iranian people shouldn’t be frightened by these things. The Iranian people aren’t influenced by this kind of talk. They don’t fear a just confrontation,” the 86-year-old leader said.

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