Iran calls United States Satan after strike on southern wedding kills four
Iran’s top negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf on Wednesday called the United States “Satan” after an attack on a wedding ceremony in the country’s south.
Iranian officials said at least four people were killed and dozens wounded in a late-night strike on the ceremony in Kuhestak. Ghalibaf said the attack left children killed with families and recalled other deadly incidents in Iran during the early stages of the Middle East war, including an attack on a school in Minab. “If a power acts like Satan, picks targets like Satan, and kills like Satan, it’s Satan. Shields a junior Satan that does the same? It’s THE Great Satan,” he wrote on X, referring to the United States and Israel.
The term was first used by Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic, in 1979 and has been applied to Washington by successive Iranian leaders. Iran responded by launching drone and missile attacks on US bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Iraq’s Kurdistan region.
The US military did not address the wedding strike directly. US Central Command (CENTCOM) spokesman Tim Hawkins said the US military never targets civilians, unlike Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.
The language is theological and political at once. By invoking “Great Satan,” Ghalibaf places the wedding deaths inside a 47-year narrative rather than treating them as an isolated incident. Washington’s reply is a denial of civilian targeting, not a detailed account of the Kuhestak strike. The two statements therefore talk past each other: one names victims at a celebration, the other restates a targeting doctrine.
Whether investigators or mediators can establish what was hit, and by whom, will matter more than the slogan. Until then the exchange adds another cycle of accusation and retaliation to a war that has already run six months.
