Saudi Arabia welcomes US decision designating IRGC as terrorist group

Saudi Arabia welcomed Tuesday Washington’s blacklisting of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization, state media reported.

“The US decision (follows) the kingdom’s repeated demands to the international community to address the issue of Iranian-backed terrorism,” the official Saudi Press Agency quoted a foreign ministry source as saying.

The source welcomed the US move as a “practical and serious step” in curbing what the kingdom describes as Iranian meddling in the region. Washington’s decision on Monday marks the first time that the US has branded an arm of a foreign government a terrorist group.

It effectively means that anyone who deals with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) could face prison in the United States.

President Donald Trump called the corps – which has some 125,000 troops and vast interests across the Iranian economy – Tehran’s “primary means of directing and implementing its global terrorist campaign.”

Tehran swiftly retaliated by blacklisting US Central Command as a terrorist organization, affecting US troops serving in the wider Middle East from the Horn of Africa to Afghanistan.