Iran’s Revolutionary Guards yesterday said that they launched a missile strike against a “terrorist” headquarters in Syria in retaliation for an attack that killed 24 people in the Iranian city of Ahvaz.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani had vowed a “crushing” response to last month’s assault — claimed by the Islamic State (IS) group — on a military parade commemorating the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.
“The headquarters of those responsible for the terrorist crime in Ahvaz was attacked a few minutes ago east of the Euphrates [River] by several ballistic missiles fired by the aerospace branch of the Revolutionary Guards,” it said on its Web site.
Photo: AFP / Iran’s Revolutionary Guard via SEPAH News
“Based on preliminary reports, many takfiri terrorists and the leaders responsible for the terrorist crime in Ahvaz have been killed or wounded in this missile attack,” it said, using a term referring to Sunni Muslim militants.
The Revolutionary Guards released photographs of what appeared to be missiles lighting up the night sky, leaving trails of smoke as they soared above a desert region with a mountain in the background.
Iran’s Fars news agency said the Revolutionary Guards fired “a number of medium-range” Zolfaghar and Qiam missiles, with a range of 750km and 800km respectively.
The agency said the missiles hit the Syrian desert border town of Albu Kamal on the west of the Euphrates River in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor.
“On at least one of the missiles was written ‘death to America,’ ‘death to Israel’ and ‘death to Al Saud,’” it said, a reference to the ruling family in Saudi Arabia, Iran’s regional rival.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, “heavy explosions took place at dawn [yesterday] in the last pocket under IS control near Albu Kamal.”
Albu Kamal itself, on the border with Iraq, is held by regime forces and allied regional militiamen who seized it from the Islamic State in 2007.
Twenty-four people were shot dead in the attack by five gunmen on a military parade in the mainly ethnic Arab city of Ahvaz in southwestern Iran on Sept. 22.
Ahvaz is the provincial capital of Khuzestan, a border region that was a major battleground of the Iran-Iraq war, and which also saw ethnic unrest in 2005 and 2011.
Iranian officials initially blamed Arab separatists backed by Gulf Arab allies of the US for the attack.
However, Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei yesterday appeared to link the perpetrators to militants operating in Iraq and Syria, where the Islamic State once had major strongholds.
“This cowardly act was the work of those very individuals who are rescued by the Americans whenever they are in trouble in Iraq and Syria and who are funded by the Saudis and the [United] Arab Emirates,” Khamenei was quoted by his official Web site as saying.
The next day Iran’s intelligence ministry published photos of five men it said carried out the Ahvaz assault, identifying them as “jihadist separatists.”
The Islamic State, a Sunni Muslim group that Iran and its Damascus allies are fighting in Syria, has claimed responsibility for the attack.
It said that all five assailants were Iranian, including four from Ahvaz.
It also threatened to carry out new attacks in Iran.
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