Implementing a law that designates Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist group would violate the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, an IRGC general said Sunday.

Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, the top commander of the IRGC issued a veiled threat saying that enforcing the law that passed both houses of the United States legislature with overwhelming bipartisan majorities would prompt Iran to “consider the American military all over the world, especially the Middle East, as equal to Daesh,” referring to ISIS, the semi-official Iranian news agency, PressTV reported.

“As we have announced in the past, if America’s new law for sanctions is enforced, this country will have to move its regional bases outside the 2,000 km radius of the Iranian missiles’ range,” Jafari added.

Iran, according to Jafari, considers implementation of Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, “equal to America’s unilateral withdrawal from the JCPOA,”as the nuclear deal is known. This would prompt Iran to greatly improve the capability of its missiles. United Nations Security Council resolution 2231, which implements the nuclear deal, calls on Iran not to develop ballistic missiles.

Jafari’s claim that targeting the IRGC would violate the nuclear deal contradicts a common claim made by supporters of the nuclear deal as well as Iran that the deal was meant only to address Iran’s nuclear program. For example, Gholamali Khoshroo, Iran’s ambassador to the UN wrote in an op-ed published Sunday in The New York Times, “It was always clear that the path to reaching a nuclear deal meant setting aside other geopolitical concerns.”

The IRGC has helped organize Shiite militias in Iraq, armed and trained Houthi rebels in Yemen, and boosted the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. It has been implicated in war crimes and other violations of human rights in relation to these foreign activities.

[Photo: PressTV]