DUBAI, Oct 14: President Donald Trump’s decision to not re-certify the Iranian nuclear deal marks yet another key moment in relations between Iran and America, which has seen decades of mistrust and mutual recriminations. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani mentioned many of them in his reaction to Trump’s decision Friday night.

Here are some of the key moments of that relationship:

1953 COUP

In the aftermath of World War II, Iran nationalized the British oil refinery at Abadan, at the time one of the world’s largest. America, fearful of Soviet influence, sided with the British in fomenting a coup against the elected government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh. Though initially a failure, street protests fanned by the CIA ultimately pushed Mosaddegh out of power and cemented the rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The U.S. role in the coup plays a large part in the mistrust of America that persists in Iran to this day.

1979 ISLAMIC REVOLUTION

By January 1979, the cancer-stricken shah’s grip on power had waned. Facing protests and strikes, he fled into exile, shocking his American backers who had no idea a revolution was in the making. The long-exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei, a charismatic hard-line Shiite cleric, returned to Tehran. Soon, he would become Iran’s first supreme leader in its clerically overseen government, having final say on all state matters. Khomenei later would turn against those who supported the revolution but opposed his absolute rule.

THE U.S. EMBASSY TAKEOVER AND HOSTAGE CRISIS

In November 1979, Iranian university students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking 52 Americans hostage. They demanded the return of the shah to Iran to face trial. President Jimmy Carter refused and launched a failed commando raid to free the captives. Six Americans who fled the initial takeover and found refuge with the Canadian ambassador later escaped Iran with the CIA’s help. Their escape was dramatized in the 2012 film “Argo.” Iran held the hostages for 444 days, releasing them only after the 1981 inauguration of President Ronald Reagan.

IRAN-CONTRA SCANDAL

Under the Reagan administration, the United States agreed to secretly send weapons to Iran, then under an arms embargo amid its 1980s war with Iraq. Money earned from those sales went to fund American-backed Contra rebels fighting in Nicaragua. The Americans also hoped the sales would encourage the Iranian government to use its sway to help free American hostages held by the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah. When George H.W. Bush became president, he told Iran that “good will begets good will” and while American hostages in Lebanon were freed, relations never went further.

NAVAL BATTLE AND JETLINER SHOOTDOWN

Iran and the U.S. fought a one-day naval battle on April 18, 1988, after the near-sinking of the missile frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts by an Iranian mine during the Iran-Iraq war. That day, U.S. forces attacked two Iranian oil rigs and sank or damaged six Iranian vessels. A few months later, in July 1988, the USS Vincennes in the Strait of Hormuz mistook an Iran Air flight heading to Dubai for an attacking fighter jet, shooting down the plane and killing all 290 people onboard.

‘AXIS OF EVIL’

Iran helped the U.S. immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks amid the American-led invasion of Afghanistan that toppled the Taliban. However, President George W. Bush would single out Iran in early 2002 along with North Korea and Iraq as belonging to what he described as the “axis of evil,” three countries he said that were actively “seeking weapons of mass destruction.” Iranian assistance immediately ended after that.

BATTLEFIELD RIVALRIES

After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, American forces said the expeditionary Quds Force of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard trained Iraqi militants to build dangerous roadside bombs. Iran denied it. Iranian forces and Hezbollah later would aid embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad in his country’s civil war, despite the U.S. opposing his rule. Iran also has offered support to Shiite rebels in Yemen, who have been fighting a U.S.-backed Saudi-led coalition seeking to restore Yemen’s internationally recognized government to power. But in present-day Iraq, Iranian-advised Shiite militias are among the strongest on the ground in the battle against the Islamic State group.

AHMADINEJAD’S ASCENT

Hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a Holocaust-questioning populist, became Iran’s president in 2005. Western fears about Iran’s nuclear program spiked under his government. The Stuxnet computer virus, suspected to be made by the U.S. and Israel, destroyed Iranian centrifuges. New economic sanctions squeezed Iran’s economy. In 2009, his contested re-election as president sparked the biggest demonstrations Iran has seen since the 1979 revolution. Authorities brutally put down the protests. The U.S., while criticizing the violence, avoided directly intervening in the turmoil.

2015 NUCLEAR DEAL

Secret talks in Oman with the U.S. under the administration of President Barack Obama led to Iran sitting down to negotiate over its nuclear program with world powers. In 2015, it agreed to an accord that saw it limit its enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. Western powers struck the deal in order to deny Iran the ability to quickly develop nuclear weapons. Iran insists it has never sought nuclear arms. The deal saw Iran make billions of dollars in deals for airplanes and start widely selling its oil, though the average Iranians say they still haven’t seen the benefits of the agreement. AP

WASHINGTON, May 2: After dropping a monster bomb on its fighters, then targeting its leader, the US military is looking to destroy the Islamic State group’s Afghan branch before battle-hardened reinforcements arrive from Syria and Iraq.

While US and Kabul government forces have mainly been combatting Taliban fighters since 2001, IS’s local offshoot — also known as Islamic State-Khorasan, or ISIS-K — has a stronghold in eastern Afghanistan.

First emerging in 2015, ISIS-K overran large parts of Nangarhar and Kunar provinces, near the Pakistan border, but their part in the Afghan conflict had been largely overshadowed by the operations against the Taliban.

Many Americans first heard of ISIS-K last month when the US dropped the “Mother Of All Bombs” on its Nangarhar bastion — an aerial munition that the Pentagon said was the biggest non-nuclear weapon it had ever used in combat.

US and Afghan forces then raided a compound last week close to the site of the bombing, with the Pentagon saying it believed it had killed ISIS-K’s leader Abdul Hasib during the operation.

Captain Bill Salvin, spokesman for US Forces-Afghanistan, said the local IS presence peaked at between 2,500 to 3,000 but that defections and recent battlefield losses had reduced their number to a maximum of 800.

“We have a very good chance of destroying them in 2017, making it very clear that when the ISIS fighters are destroyed elsewhere around the globe that this is not the place for you to come to plot your attacks,” Salvin told AFP.

US-backed fighters also appear to have IS on the ropes in Syria and Iraq, where an operation to wrest back control of the major northern city of Mosul has been ongoing since October.

But both the military and analysts acknowledge there is a danger of IS fighters heading to Afghanistan if they are forced out of Iraq and Syria.

Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, said that while IS should ultimately be defeated in Afghanistan, the Pentagon’s timeline may be overly optimistic.

A definitive victory could take “a long time due, partly (due) to the proximity of Pakistan as well as the possible flow of fighters” from the Middle East as the “group loses sanctuaries there,” O’Hanlon told AFP.

The Taliban, which first emerged in the mid-1990s in southern Afghanistan, managed to conquer most of the country before its 2001 ouster with the help of a range of foreign jihadists, including Pakistanis, Saudis and Chechens.

Analysts say that as well as Afghans, ISIS-K includes disaffected Pakistani and Uzbek Islamists among its ranks who used to fight for the Taliban.

It first emerged as a significant player in Afghanistan in early 2015 when its fighters overran the Taliban in parts of the east and has subsequently claimed responsibility for a string of bomb attacks.

ISIS-K’s defeat would be an important victory for the US, which has struggled to boast of clear wins after forcing the Taliban out of Kabul in 2001 in the initial aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Bill Roggio, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and editor of the Long War Journal, said ISIS-K had “withstood multiple US-backed offensives over the past two years.”

But while their defeat would be a boost to the US, Roggio said the Taliban and their long-time Al-Qaeda allies were still a much bigger challenge.

“It’s not that they don’t pose a threat, but I would argue that the Taliban pose a far greater threat to the stability of Afghanistan,” Roggio told AFP.

“It would be basically winning a battle, but we are still losing the war, which is basically the story of Afghanistan since we’ve been involved there.”

America has about 8,400 troops in Afghanistan. Most belong to a NATO mission to train and advise Afghan partner forces fighting the Taliban.AFP