Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Monday said that the country will continue to export oil, despite recently imposed U.S. sanctions intended to stifle the country’s oil market.
“We will not yield to this pressure, which is part of the psychological war launched against Iran,” Rouhani said in a speech broadcast live on state television, according to Reuters.
He added that the U.S. has “failed to stop our exports.”
{mosads}”Your regional policies have failed and you blame Iran for that failure from Afghanistan to Yemen and Syria,” Rouhani said.
Reuters reported that chants of “Death to America” could be heard from the crowd in the background during parts of Rouhani’s speech.
The Trump administration reimposed the last set of oil and gas sanctions earlier this month that had previously been lifted under the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. In doing so, the U.S. granted waivers to eight buyers of Iranian oil, meaning those groups will not be punished in the interim.
Trump earlier this year announced plans to withdraw from the Iran nuclear pact, an Obama-era agreement that offered sanctions relief to Tehran if it stopped developing its nuclear program.
The president’s decision to pull out of the deal, despite international allies urging him not to, has reignited long-simmering tensions between Washington and Tehran.
France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the European Union, all of which remained in the deal, have sought to skirt U.S. sanctions reimposed after Trump’s withdrawal from the pact.