Iran is fuming over new U.S. sanctions it claims violate nuke deal

Add Iran to the list of countries that aren’t happy with Washington’s latest round of sanctions.

The Middle East power accused the U.S. Tuesday of breaching the 2015 nuclear accord with July’s round of sanctions, lodging a complaint through the international body overseeing the historic deal, according to Iran’s Tasnim news agency.

Under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action Deal (JCPOA), Iran agreed to halt its nuclear program in exchange for economic sanctions relief. But Iran’s speaker of parliament Ali Larijani said Tuesday that Washington’s latest sanctions violated those terms with punishing actions that weren’t stipulated in the landmark deal.

Larijani was quoted in a Tasnim story saying that Iran had “complained to the (Joint) Commission (of the JCPOA) for the breach of the deal by America.” The JCPOA is the leading international body overseeing the implementation of the U.S.-Iran accord.

The new measures, imposed by the U.S. Treasury, specifically target six subsidiaries of an Iranian industrial company “central” to the country’s intercontinental ballistic missile program.

A JCPOA spokesperson declined to comment on any formal complaint but noted that sanctions against Iran were “extensively discussed” in the commission’s most recent meeting.

The U.S. Treasury’s latest sanctions were announced Friday, a day after Iran successfully sent a rocket into space capable of carrying a satellite into orbit. In a statement, the Treasury said its new sanctions were a response to Iran’s “provocative actions,” and called the country’s latest rocket test a “threatening step.”

Those retaliatory measures were taken the same day the U.S. Senate passed additional sanctions targeting Russia, Iran, and North Korea.