Iran has threatened to target American campuses in the Middle East in retaliation for US-Israeli strikes on its schools.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard set a deadline for noon on Monday for the Trump administration to ‘condemn the bombing of the universities’ or else it would retaliate against US students studying abroad in the Middle East.
Regime officials warned that employees, professors, and students affiliated with US schools in the region should stay at least one kilometer from their campuses.
Iran claims strikes hit the Tehran University of Science and Technology over the weekend, damaging nearby buildings but not resulting in any casualties.
‘If the US government wants its universities in the region to be free from retaliation… it must condemn the bombing of the universities in an official statement by 12 noon on Monday, March 30, Tehran time,’ the regime told Iranian media.
Multiple American universities operate campuses abroad, where thousands of students often study with financial support from host governments.
New York University has a campus in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, while Georgetown, Carnegie Mellon, Northwestern and Texas A&M each have satellite campuses in Qatar’s Education City, a research hub based in Doha.
Texas A&M said it closed its Qatar campus, moving to remote learning and with most international staff returning home amid the war.
Around 5,000 Americans studied in the Middle East and North Africa in the last academic year, with around half in Israel and roughly 1,000 in the UAE, according to the State Department.
Since the start of the war, deadly missile strikes have hit Iranian education facilities, including an elementary school attack on February 28 in the city of Minab that killed 175 people, most of them children.
The attack sparked a US military investigation whose preliminary findings concluded that American forces were likely responsible due to outdated intelligence. The building was once part of a regime naval base.
Hellbound and Down 