TEHRAN, March 19. /TASS/. Iran did not want to attack oil and gas sites in the neighboring countries, but the US-Israeli attack on its energy infrastructure in the early hours of March 18 forced Iran to do so, Iran’s elite military force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), said.

"The Islamic Republic of Iran was not planning to spread the conflict to oil facilities, and did not want to harm the economy of its friends and neighbors, but the enemy’s act of aggression against energy infrastructure de-facto took us to a new phase of the war," the IRGC said. "The need to defend Iran’s infrastructure forced us to deliver strikes on power facilities tied to the US and US shareholders."

The Iranian armed forces attacked a "number of oil facilities linked to US interests in the region," the IRGC said.