Six hundred Iranian Shihab-3 missiles are pointed at targets throughout Israel, and will be launched if either Iran or Syria are attacked, an Iranian website affiliated with the regime reported on Monday.

"Iran will shoot at Israel 600 missiles if it is attacked," the Iranian news website, Assar Iran, reported. "600 missiles will only be the first reaction."

According to the report, dozens of locations throughout Iraq, which are being used by the US Army, have also been targeted.

The Shihab missile has a range of 1,300 km, and can reach anywhere in Israel.

On Sunday, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said that the nuclear Iranian crisis forces the world "to prepare for the worst," and said that in this case it "is war."

Kouchner emphasized, however, that negotiations should still be the preferred course of action.

Kouchner, quoted by French daily Le Figaro, added that "Iran does whatever it pleases in Iraq ... one cannot find in the entire world a crisis greater than this one."...

Iran threatened to fire long-range missiles at American targets in the Middle East yesterday as the war of words between Teheran and the West continued to escalate.

A senior commander of the Revolutionary Guard, the largest component of the Islamic republic's armed forces, chose this moment to outline the capability of his country's ballistic missiles.

The Shahab-3 rocket has a range of 1,250 miles, allowing it to strike an array of Western targets across the Middle East.

"Today the Americans are around our country but this does not mean that they are encircling us. They are encircled themselves and are within our range," said Gen Mohammed Hassan Koussechi.

"If the United States is saying that they have identified 2,000 targets in Iran, then what is certain is that it is the Americans who are all around Iran and are equally our targets," he told the official IRNA news agency...