29 killed in Iran attack
ISLAMIC STATE CLAIMS STRIKE President Rouhani vows crushing response
TEHRAN: Gunmen disguised as soldiers shot dead at least 29 people including women and children and injured up to 60 others on Saturday in an attack on an Iranian military parade.
The Islamic State claimed to have carried out the rare assault in the southwestern city of Ahvaz, while Iranian officials accused “a foreign regime” backed by the US of being behind it. “The response of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the smallest threat will be crushing”, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said on his official website, after addressing a similar military parade in Tehran to commemorate the start of the 1980-1988 war with Iraq.
Foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said the attack near the Iraqi border was carried out by “terrorists recruited, trained, armed & paid by a foreign regime”. Ahvaz lies in Khuzestan, a province bordering Iraq that has a large ethnic Arab community and has seen separatist violence in the past that Iran has blamed on its regional rivals.
Behrad Ghasemi, a local journalist who witnessed the attack, said shots rang out for 10 to 15 minutes and that at least one of the assailants, armed with a Kalashnikov assault rifle, wore the uniform of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards force.
“First we thought it’s part of the parade, but after about 10 seconds we realised it was a terrorist attack as bodyguards (of officials) started shooting,” he said.
“Everything went haywire and soldiers started running,” Ghasemi said. “The terrorists had no particular target and didn’t really seem to care as they shot anyone they could with rapid gunfire.”
IS jihadists said via their propaganda mouthpiece Amaq that “Islamic State fighters attacked a gathering of Iranian forces.”
The official news agency IRNA said those killed included women and children who were spectators at the rally. Many of the wounded were in critical condition. Zarif did not specify which regional government he held responsible for the shooting, but the Revolutionary Guards accused Shia-dominated Iran’s Sunni arch-rival Saudi Arabia of funding the attackers.