Iran army warns any new war with US could last longer and have no geographical limits, after Trump names Pickaxe Mountain
Iran’s army spokesman said on Sunday that a future war with the United States could last longer than the previous conflict and would not be confined to West Asia, as Tehran answered President Donald Trump’s warning that the US could still strike remaining Iranian targets, including the suspected Pickaxe Mountain site, in ten minutes.
Iran warned on Sunday that any renewed war with the United States could last longer than the previous round of fighting, and that Washington would not control how long it went on or how it ended. The warning came from army spokesman Brigadier General Mohammad Akraminia, speaking to Iranian state television, and it was the sharpest Iranian response yet to President Donald Trump’s weekend suggestion that the United States could still strike one or two remaining Iranian targets very quickly.
“A potential future war could last longer than previous conflict, and the American president would not be in a position to dictate the timing or the conditions of its conclusion,” Akraminia said, according to Iranian state television. The remark was aimed directly at Trump’s claim, made to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida on Saturday, that the United States had already knocked out much of Iran’s military and nuclear programme and could deal with what remained in a matter of minutes.
Akraminia went further than a warning about duration. He said that if a new war erupted, its geography would not be confined to the West Asia region, and that any new American attack would be met with an immediate and more extensive response than in the past. He also said Iran’s military doctrine had moved some time ago from a purely defensive stance towards an offensive approach — language that, coming from an army spokesman rather than a political commentator, is meant to be read in Washington and in Gulf capitals as a statement of intent, not just rhetoric.
Other Iranian officials echoed the message on Sunday, in what looked like a coordinated round of warnings. Defence Minister Mehrdad Akhlaghi warned of a “proportionate, decisive, and impactful response” to any attack on the country, according to state television. Revolutionary Guards spokesman Hossein Mohebbi repeated a warning issued a day earlier by Iran’s new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, that in a conflict with America there would be “no geographical limitations” and a vast theatre had been defined for inflicting damage on the enemy.
The trigger for the exchange was Trump’s Saturday night appearance at a Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago. “We’ve knocked out their nuclear. We still have to take care of, I would say one or two sites, but we can do that in 10 minutes,” he told reporters. He then named one site in particular: “You probably could look at Pickaxe Mountain, and you have to take care of that. We can do that all very quickly.” Pickaxe Mountain, a granite formation about a kilometre and a half south of the Natanz enrichment complex, is suspected by the United States and Israel of housing an underground nuclear facility that has not yet been struck.
Tehran has denied that any nuclear work takes place at Pickaxe Mountain. Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei has said the facility is intended to produce and assemble advanced centrifuges, and has accused Washington of fabricating a pretext for aggression. Western analysts note a practical complication for any strike: the site is thought to lie 80 to 100 metres underground in dense granite, deeper than even America’s most powerful bunker-buster, the GBU-57, is known to penetrate in concrete or earth — although some experts argue that hitting tunnel entrances, communications and access roads could still render such a facility unusable.
The timing matters because the war itself has not ended, even though its most intense phase — which began on 28 February with US and Israeli strikes on Iran, and in which Tehran retaliated with missile and drone attacks across the region — has given way to talks. Iranian negotiators have been in Doha for three days of Qatari-mediated discussions, with a Qatari seven-day trust-building proposal and a rival Iranian plan both on the table, and with a separate understanding, reported earlier on Sunday, under which the Strait of Hormuz could reopen within two days if Washington met Tehran’s conditions. The warnings and the negotiations are therefore running in parallel, each side signalling what it will do if the other track fails.
Washington’s own messaging has been mixed, and that mixture is part of the story. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Saturday that Trump had not yet made a decision about resuming strikes and preferred a diplomatic solution, while Trump himself said negotiations were “going fine but you know they’re not very reliable” and insisted Iran would never be allowed a nuclear weapon. Iran’s security chief Mohsen Rezaei, who received a peace proposal from Vice President JD Vance last weekend, said on Saturday that the tone of Vance’s letter had “changed completely”, without giving details — a hint, at least, that the diplomatic channel is still active.
For the Gulf states, the exchange is not abstract. Markets across the region fell on Sunday on fears of renewed conflict after Tuesday’s US midterm elections, with Saudi Arabia’s benchmark slipping and Qatar bucking the trend only on the back of long-term gas supply deals designed to protect revenues if Hormuz exports are disrupted. Saudi and Emirati officials have spent the weekend at the Manama Dialogue pressing for a collective approach to protecting shipping through Hormuz and Bab al-Mandeb, and for Tehran to engage seriously with diplomacy — a reminder that any new war would immediately become a regional economic crisis as well as a military one.
What happens next is likely to be decided in three places at once. In Doha, mediators will test whether the trust-building proposals can produce a pause that both sides can present as a win. In Washington, the midterm result on Tuesday may shape how much political room Trump feels he has for either a deal or a strike. And in Tehran, the army’s warning sets a public bar: having said a future war would be longer, wider and not dictated by Washington, Iran’s military leadership would face pressure to act on those words if strikes resume. None of those outcomes is certain, but Sunday’s statements have made the stakes of failure clearer than they were a day earlier.
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