US State Secretary Mike Pompeo said that Iran did not accept his offer to visit Tehran and talk directly to Iranian people.
“I recently offered to travel to Tehran and speak directly to the Iranian people. The regime hasn’t accepted my offer,” he tweeted.
He added that Washington was not afraid of Iranian officials coming to the United States.
“We aren’t afraid of @JZarif [Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif] coming to America where he enjoys the right to speak freely. Are the facts of the @khamenei_ir [Supreme leader of Iran Ali Khamenei] regime so bad he cannot let me do the same thing in Tehran? What if his people heard the truth, unfiltered, unabridged?” he added.
The US-Iran relation were spiraling down since the scrapping of the Iran Nuclear Deal by the Trump administration. Iran then declared that it would exceed the limits on enrichments set out in the agreement.
The US has also blamed Iran for an attack against tankers belonging to US-allied countries parked off the coast of Iran, for which Iran also denies responsibility.
Iran has since fallen into a tit-for-tat tanker war with the UK, a staunch US-ally, having one of its own tankers impounded in Gibraltar on accusations of breaching sanctions on Syria.
