JUST IN: 🇺🇸🇮🇷 President Trump says “I’m not putting troops” in Iran but “if I were, I certainly wouldn’t tell you.”

President Trump told The Post Monday that he’s not ruling out sending US ground troops into Iran “if they were necessary” — adding that Operation Epic Fury was “way ahead of schedule” after taking out dozens of Tehran’s top officials.

“I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground — like every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground.’ I don’t say it,” Trump said after launching strikes Saturday to decapitate Iran’s military and political leadership. “I say, ‘probably don’t need them’ [or] ‘if they were necessary.’”

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said at a Monday morning Pentagon press conference that no American troops are currently inside Iran, though he also did not rule out the possibility.

“President Trump ensures our enemies understand we’ll go as far as we need to go to advance American interests. But we’re not dumb about it,” Hegseth told reporters. “You don’t have to roll 200,000 people in there and stay for 20 years.”

“It’s going to go pretty quickly,” he said. “We’re right on schedule, way ahead of schedule in terms of leadership — 49 killed — and that was, you know, going to take, we figured, at least four weeks, and we did it in one day.”

Trump said he wasn’t concerned about Iran using terrorism to repay America.

The president said that he made the final decision to strike, in partnership with Israel, “after the final talks” Thursday in Geneva — in part because of intelligence that Iran was surreptitiously resuming work on nuclear projects at a “totally different site.”

“We had very serious negotiations, and they were there, and then they pulled back. It would always pull back,” he said.

“And you know, you never make a deal like that, because ultimately they’ll pull back after the deal is made, which is what they do, typically. But it was just — they just couldn’t get there. They wanted to make a nuclear weapon, so we destroyed them completely,” Trump said.

“We found they were in a totally different site — totally different — because the sites that we took out were [destroyed]. They tried to use them, but they were totally, as I said correctly before, obliterated, right? So then we found them working on a totally different area, a totally different site, in order to make a nuclear weapon through enrichment — so it was just time.”

“I said, ‘Let’s go.’”

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