President Trump Offers to Help Iran Fight Coronavirus

US President Donald Trump has offered to send aid and medical specialists to Iran, where an outbreak of coronavirus appears to have spiraled out of control. “If we can help the Iranians with this problem, we are certainly willing to do so.… All they have to do is ask. We will have great professionals over there,” the US leader said this weekend. The State Department later confirmed that the message was officially conveyed to the Iranians via Switzerland, which represents American interests in the Islamic Republic. Tensions between Washington and Tehran have progressively increased since President Trump’s decision in May 2018 to withdraw the US from a 2015 multilateral nuclear accord aimed at barring Iran from producing nuclear weapons. The animosity boiled over in January, when a US drone strike eliminated Iranian Quds Force chief Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad. Tehran responded with coordinated ballistic missile attacks on two military bases in Iraq that were housing US soldiers. Meanwhile, Iran’s Health Ministry on Saturday reported nine new fatalities from COVID-19, the disease caused by coronavirus, upping the death toll to at least 43, including one lawmaker. However, many have accused the mullahs of being insufficiently forthcoming, and there have been unconfirmed reports of over 200 deaths in the country from the illness. Iran is at the center of the spread of the coronavirus in the Middle East, with a slew of infections confirmed in travelers who visited the Islamic Republic. Cases of coronavirus have been reported in over 60 nations, prompting the World Health Organization to raise its threat assessment to the highest level.