Saudi Arabia and Bahrain said Tuesday that they have added Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps and senior officers from the Quds Force, the IRGC's black-ops arm, to their terrorism watch lists.
Saudi state news agency SPA quoted a statement from the country's security services saying the directive includes Quds Force Commander Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani and senior IRGC officials Hamed Abdollahi and Abdul Reza Shahlai.
A Revolutionary Guards officer said that the move by Riyadh and Manama intended to "distract the world and the region from the killing of Jamal Khashoggi," an exiled Saudi journalist whose disappearance after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul has sparked international outrage.
"Saudi Arabia is in a quagmire it cannot easily come out of … Saudi rulers are trying to distract the world and the region from the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist, in their consulate in Turkey," Brig. Gen. Esmail Kowsari told the Mehr news agency.
"Saudi leaders should be held accountable for their actions," he said.
The U.S. Treasury Department alleged in 2011 that Soleimani, Abdollahi and Shahlai were linked to a plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia's former ambassador to the United States, Adel Al-Jubeir, and imposed sanctions on them.
Iran at the time dismissed the accusations as false and demanded an apology from Washington.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday dismissed Saudi Arabia's explanations of Khashoggi's death and demanded it punish those responsible, no matter how highly placed.
Also on Tuesday, the U.S. Treasury targeted Afghanistan's Taliban insurgency with sanctions against eight individuals who were designated global terrorists, including two linked to the Quds Force named as Mohammad Ebrahim Owhadi and Esma'il Razavi.
The Taliban-related sanctions were also imposed by the seven members of the Terrorist Financing Targeting Center, a U.S.-Gulf initiative to stem finance to militant groups.
The Trump administration aims to create a security and political alliance with the Sunni Gulf Arab states to counter Iran's influence in the region, especially in Syria and Iraq.
Saudi Arabia welcomed Trump's decision and said it would work with the United States to address Iran's support of militant groups in the region and its ballistic missile program, which is run by the Revolutionary Guards.
