13 elite Iranian fighters are killed in Syria

DAMASCUS, Syria — More than a dozen members of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards were killed this past week during an attack by militants in northern Syria in what shows Tehran’s deep involvement in the Syrian civil war.

Iran has been one of President Bashar Assad’s strongest backers and has, along with Lebanon’s Iran-backed militant Hezbollah group, sent fighters to battle on the government’s side.

Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency quoted Hossein Ali Rezaei, a spokesman for the Revolutionary Guard in the northern province of Mazandaran, as saying that 13 members were killed and 21 were wounded.

Rezaei did not say when or where the incident occurred, but another semi-official news agency, Tasnim, quoted a Revolutionary Guard spokesman in the same area as saying that they were killed when a coalition of insurgents, including al-Qaida’s branch in Syria known as the Nusra Front, seized the northern village of Khan Touman from pro-government forces.

Khan Touman was captured Friday after two days of intense clashes that also left dozens of Syrian militants dead, according to opposition activists.

The town was captured by a coalition known as Jaish alFatah, or Army of Conquest, an ultraconservative group led by the Nusra Front, and the jihadi militias Jund al-Aqsa and Ahrar al-Sham.

The announcement in Tehran came as a senior Iranian official met with Assad in Damascus and vowed continued support for his government in the country’s fiveyear-old civil war.

Ali Akbar Velayati was quoted by Syria’s state news agency SANA as saying that Tehran will always stand by Syria because it “knows that terrorism does not target Syria but the whole people of the region.”