Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei may be attempting to activate terrorist “sleeper cells” across the West as he continues to make inflammatory statements rejecting Donald Trump’s calls for surrender, Middle Eastern experts have said.

According to Henry Jackson Society research fellow Barak Seener, Khamenei may be turning to terrorist Iranian sympathisers across the world as he runs out of traditional resources.

Iran has lost far more than Israel has in the war that has plagued the region for the last week.

“The very fact now that the Iranian regime is volatile, it’s targeted, and it’s highly vulnerable — that’s what actually makes it increasingly dangerous to the West, in that it has nothing to lose it has this about this sense of nihilism, and it affects the rational calculus,” Mr Seener explained.