United States President Donald Trump says Washington had armed Iranian opposition groups and protesters during mass antigovernment demonstrations in December and January, in which thousands of people were killed during crackdowns by government forces.Speaking with Trey Yingst on Fox News in a Sunday morning phone interview, the president said the US had been directly involved in efforts to destabilise and overthrow the Iranian government weeks before strikes were launched on February 28 by the US and Israel across Iran and as American negotiators were engaging with senior Iranian officials in Europe.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of listAs the US-Israel war on Iran entered its 38th day, at least 2,076 people have been killed in Iran and 26,000 injured.“President Trump told me the United States sent guns to the Iranian protesters,” Yingst reported on Fox News channel.“He told me, ‘We sent them a lot of guns. We sent them to the Kurds.’ And the president says he thinks the Kurds kept them. He went on to say. ‘We sent guns to the protesters, a lot of them.’”Trump has often framed the decision to strike Iran alongside Israel as partly inspired by his wanting to “free” Iranians from the rule of the Islamic Republic after it cracked down on those protests in January.But his statements to Yingst could lend weight to Tehran’s own assertions that the protests were not organic and “foreign-backed terrorists” had instigated them. Still, analysts warned that Trump’s frequently shifting statements on Iran mean that it is hard to know with certainty the extent to which the US might have been involved in the protests. Advertisement Here’s what we kn …
