Asked about a U.S. senator’s letter to President Trump urging him to “support Iran’s request for $5 billion in emergency funds from the IMF”, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo noted that “we offered humanitarian assistance, real humanitarian assistance to the Iranian people, but we’re not about to send cash to the ayatollahs. In the first instance, it won’t get where we’d like it to go.... It’ll be funneled, siphoned off; it’ll be used for corrupt purposes”. Pompeo further underlined that “they have money. The ayatollah has got billions of dollars socked away. It is not the case that Iran doesn’t have the capacity, the financial resources, to take care of this problem itself. The U.S. and the world… ought not to be creating free cash for the Iranian regime which will be used to fund its proxy wars all across the world, including those in Iraq where American citizens’ lives, American soldiers’ lives, are at risk”.