DUBAI, July 4, (Agencies): Iran has threatened to destroy US military bases across the Middle East and target Israel within minutes of being attacked, Iranian media reported on Wednesday, as Revolutionary Guards extended test-firing of ballistic missiles into a third day.
Israel has hinted it may attack Iran if diplomacy fails to secure a halt to its disputed nuclear energy programme. The United States also has mooted military action as a last-resort option but has frequently nudged the Israelis to give time for intensified economic sanctions to work against Iran.
“These bases are all in range of our missiles, and the occupied lands (Israel) are also good targets for us,” Amir Ali Haji Zadeh, commander of the Revolutionary Guards aerospace division, was quoted by Fars news agency as saying.
Haji Zadeh said 35 US bases were within reach of Iran’s ballistic missiles, the most advanced of which commanders have said could hit targets 2,000 kms (1,300 miles) away.
“We have thought of measures to set up bases and deploy missiles to destroy all these bases in the early minutes after an attack,” he added.
It was not clear where Haji Zadeh got his figures on US bases in the region. US military facilities in the Middle East are located in Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Turkey, and it has around 10 bases further afield in Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan.

Defence
Defence analysts are often sceptical about what they describe as exaggerated military assertions by Iran and say the country’s military capability would be no match for sophisticated US defence systems.
Iranian media reported that this week’s three-day “Great Prophet 7” tests involved dozens of missiles and domestically-built drones that successfully destroyed simulated air bases.
Iran has upped its fiery anti-West rhetoric in response to the launch on Sunday of a total European Union embargo on buying Iranian crude oil — the latest calibrated increase in sanctions aimed at pushing Tehran into curbing nuclear activity.
Revolutionary Guards commanders have also threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz, through which more than a third of the world’s seaborne oil trade passes out of the Gulf, in response to the increasingly harsh sanctions.
Major powers have said they would tolerate no obstruction of commercial traffic through the Strait, and the United States maintains a formidable naval presence in the Gulf region.
Iran accused the West of disrupting global energy supplies and creating regional instability and says its forces can dominate the vital waterway to provide security.
“The policy of the Islamic Republic is based on maintaining security in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz for all ships and oil tankers,” Iranian English-language state Press TV quoted the chairman of parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, as saying.
The United States and its allies accuse Iran of using its nuclear programme to covertly develop all the components required to produce nuclear weapons, accusations the Iranian officials have repeatedly denied.
The world’s No. 5 oil exporter maintains that it is enriching uranium for nuclear fuel only to generate more energy for a rapidly growing population.
Nuclear
Iranian and international technical experts have exchanged details on proposals to end the standoff over Tehran’s controversial nuclear program and a new meeting will be set soon, the European Union said Wednesday.
A statement said the Istanbul-based talks lasted a full day and ended early Wednesday.
The talks followed three rounds of negotiations between Iran and six world powers that have failed to produce a breakthrough.
At the last meeting in Moscow in June it was agreed to set up the experts level meeting, and — if sufficient progress on bridging differences between the two sides was achieved — to then have Iran’s No. 2 nuclear negotiator Ali Bagheri meet with Helga Schmid, the EU official in charge of the talks.
It was agreed in Istanbul that the two officials would meet but no date has yet been set, said an official who could not be named under EU rules.
The meeting in Istanbul was led by nuclear expert Stephan Klement on behalf of EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton. The experts came from the six powers — Britain, the United States, the European Union, China, France, Germany and Russia — involved in the talks and collectively known as the E3+3.
The statement said the experts had met with the Iranian team, and “provided further detail of the E3+3 proposal given to Iran in Baghdad (while) Iran shared further detail of their proposal; and the experts explored positions on a number of technical subjects.”
The EU, US and other nations suspect Iran’s nuclear program is aimed at developing atomic weapons. Iran denies this, and says it is for peaceful purposes, such as producing energy and medical isotopes.
Iran is already under four sets of UN sanctions and measures levied by the US and tried unsuccessfully to use the Moscow talks to get the sanctions eased.
An EU ban on Iranian oil came into full effect July 1, and analysts expect the sanctions to cut the crude exports of Iran, OPEC’s second-largest producer.
The EU embargo, combined with the fresh measures that prohibit the world’s banks from completing oil transactions with Iranian banks, significantly ratchet up the pressure on an Iranian economy already squeezed by previous rounds of sanctions.
Russia on Wednesday said “certain progress” had been reached at expert-level talks on Iran’s nuclear programme despite the Islamic Republic’s tough terms for scaling back its enrichment activities.
Tuesday’s meeting in Istanbul was held after a fourth round of talks between top negotiators on the escalating crisis held in Moscow last month ended in stalemate.
The experts agreed in Istanbul to go ahead with a more senior meeting between EU and Iranian diplomats at a future but still unspecified date.
Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Moscow was satisfied with the outcome despite the broad disagreements that remained.
“I cannot say that we reached some sort of breakthrough or achieved decisive progress,” Russia’s chief negotiator on the standoff told Interfax.
“But we are not losing heart or think that the Istanbul meeting of experts was a failure,” Ryabkov added.
“On the contrary, there are grounds to speak of certain progress.”
A statement from EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton — head negotiator for the five permanent UN Security Council members and Germany who make up the so-called P5+1 group — said simply that talks focused on “technical subjects”.
Sanctions
The United States said on Wednesday it was reviewing a UN agency’s dealings with sanctioned countries such as Iran after documents showed the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) had supplied IT equipment to the Islamic Republic.
The Geneva-based WIPO, a 185-member body that includes Iran, sent IT equipment to Iranian authorities, according to correspondence between WIPO and the Iranian agency dealing with intellectual property, dated August 2010 and provided to Reuters by a source close to WIPO.
UN sanctions passed in 2008 to curb the development of Iran’s disputed nuclear programme prohibit the supply, sale or transfer of a range of materials and technology. Iran is also under much tougher US and European Union trade embargoes.
“We have made several inquiries to the WIPO Secretariat and requested any related documentation. We have received several project documents and are in the process of reviewing them,” said David Kennedy, spokesman for the US Mission in Geneva.
“We are also working with like-minded countries to urge (WIPO) Director General (Francis) Gurry to conduct an independent, external investigation into past WIPO projects in countries under UN Security Council sanctions,” he added.
WIPO’s staff association has also complained internally that the organisation’s assistance to North Korea may be violating two UN Security Council resolutions.
In a letter to the head of WIPO’s inspection unit, the staff association said WIPO’s help with a “controlled intranet system” for North Korea raised ethical concerns, since it would not be necessary if North Korea allowed its citizens to access the Internet.