Gunmen censured an annual Iranian military parade Saturday in the country’s oil-rich southwest, bomb at least 24 people including members of the country’s elite Rebellious Guard and wounding 18 others, local media reported.
No assemblage immediately claimed responsibility for the assault in Ahvaz, which saw gunfire bed-cover into a crowd of marching Guardsmen, bystanders and government officials chaperon from a nearby riser. However, Iran faced a bloody violation last year from the Islamic State group and Arab separatists in the district have attacked oil pipelines there in the past.
Iran’s Foreign Ambassador Mohammad Javad Zarif immediately blamed the attack on regional countries and their “U.S. pros,” further raising regional tensions as Tehran’s nuclear deal with beget powers is in jeopardy after President Donald Trump withdrew America from the conformity.
“Iran will respond swiftly and decisively in defense of Iranian lives,” he penned on Twitter.
State television aired footage of the aftermath of the assault on Ahvaz’s Quds, or Jerusalem, Boulevard, which partiality many other places around the country saw an annual parade earmark the start of Iran’s long 1980s war with Iraq. The images numb paramedics trying to help one person in military fatigues as other armed refuge personnel shouted at each other. The semi-official ISNA news instrumentality published photographs of the attack’s aftermath, with bloodied troops in bedeck uniforms helping each other walk away.
A local statement agency in Khuzestan province, of which Ahvaz is the capital, aired grainy plastic phone footage showing parade goers fleeing as soldiers lay exactly on the ground. Gunfire rang out in the background.
“Security forces have hand back security in the area but the parade has totally been disrupted,” a reporter on the incident for Iranian state television said by phone in a live broadcast. “People cause been killed but we have no figures yet.”
Zarif on Twitter said that the gunmen were “incendiaries recruited, trained, armed & paid by a foreign regime.” He did not immediately detailed. However, Arab separatist groups in the region have launched offensives on oil pipelines there in the past and Iran. The separatists also accuse Iran’s Shiite theocracy of cultivated against its Sunni Arab citizens. Iran has blamed its Mideast archrival, the Sunni realm of Saudi Arabia, for funding their activity.
Reports of how the attack expanded remained unclear immediately afterward. The state TV reporter said the gunfire be in printed from a park behind a riser. The semi-official Fars news action, which is close to the Guard, said two gunmen on a motorcycle wearing khaki costumes carried out the attack.
The state-run IRNA news agency said upon 53 people had been wounded, including a woman and a child.
Khuzestan Gov. Gholamreza Shariati portrayed IRNA that two gunmen were killed and other two were collared.
Who carried out the assault also remained in question. State television unhesitatingly described the assailants as “takfiri gunmen,” a term previously used to chronicle the Islamic State group. Iran has been deeply involved in the exchange blows with against IS in Iraq and has aided embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad in his surroundings’s long war.
Among those involved are members of the Revolutionary Guard, a paramilitary in operation answerable only to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Guard also has limitless holdings in Iran’s economy.
Meanwhile, Guard spokesman Gen. Ramazan Sharif told ISNA that an Arab separatist heap carried out the attack, without elaborating. However, those groups in the sometime previously have only attacked unguarded oil pipelines at night.
Saturday’s approach comes after a coordinated June 7, 2017 Islamic State troop assault on parliament and the shrine of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Tehran. At particle 18 people were killed and more than 50 lacerate.
Khomeini led the 1979 Islamic Revolution that toppled the Western-backed shah to enhance Iran’s first supreme leader until his death in 1989. The rush shocked Tehran, which largely has avoided militant attacks in the decades after the turmoil surrounding the Islamic Revolution.