Trump says won't unfreeze Iran assets before deal

US President Donald Trump said in an interview broadcast Sunday that he will not unfreeze Iranian assets before reaching an agreement with Tehran. Asked whether he would be willing, as part of a potential agreement, to unfreeze Iranian assets or lift certain sanctions against Iran, Trump replied: "No."

"(That) comes after. If they behave, if they do a good job, we start talking," he said in the interview with NBC, recorded Friday. Iran has demanded that billions in frozen assets be unblocked.

According to a source close to the matter, the US Treasury is considering the possibility that Iran's assets could be tapped to compensate Gulf states for damages caused by Iranian strikes.

Trump reiterated that he knows exactly where the enriched uranium is located in Iran and wants to recover it one way or another, while remaining vague about whether he would send in US troops to do so.

"If we make a deal, if we make a deal now we're friendly, we'll all go together" to recover this uranium, he said. "We'll take it out and destroy it." The fate of the enriched uranium is one of the most difficult points in reaching an agreement to end the war waged by the United States and Israel against Iran. Trump reiterates US will destroy Iran’s highly enriched uranium. President Donald Trump says the US will seize and destroy Iran’s highly enriched uranium, either with or without Tehran, Al Jazeera reports.

“We’ll take it out and destroy it, whether it’s on-site or whether we take it off-site,” he says in an interview on the NBC News programme ‘Meet the Press’. “He adds that he wants to keep US troops in the Middle East until “completion”, further stating he doesn’t “consider them in danger”. The two sides are “very close” to agreeing to a deal, Trump says.

“We have a couple of points. They don’t even seem like big points.”