The report Friday said that Gen. Hossein Hamedani was killed in the suburbs of Aleppo in Syria while “carrying out an advisory mission”, but didn’t provide any further details.
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Iran is one of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s main allies.
The BBC’s Jim Muir in Beirut says that Russian air strikes seem to be mostly hitting other Syrian opposition forces which pose more of a threat to the Moscow-backed Syrian government.
Shiite-dominated Iran is a staunch ally of Assad, sending Guards forces and military advisers to aid him against Sunni rebels seeking his overthrow.
The aim, Mr. Cook said, is to work with these unspecified units “so that over time they can make a concerted push into territory still controlled by ISIL”, using an acronym for the Islamic State. The base is located around 10 miles (16 kilometers) northeast of Aleppo city and about one mile (1.6 kilometers) away from a government-held industrial zone on the northern edge of Aleppo. Hamedani was a veteran of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war and was made deputy chief commander of the elite forces in 2005. “IS has never been so close to the city of Aleppo, and this is its biggest advance towards” the country’s pre-war commercial capital, said Abdel Rahman, whose Britain-based group relies on a network of sources on the ground across Syria.
Makushev said the strikes killed 100 fighters and destroyed an ammunition dump near Aleppo.
Numerous rebel groups hit by the Russian airstrikes are also at war with ISIL.
France’s defense minister said, meanwhile, that French fighter jets had launched airstrikes in the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) stronghold of Raqqa, Syria, targeting foreign fighters plotting attacks in Europe.
“While most attention seems to have been focused on Russian intervention in the last week or so in Syria”, he continued, “actually it is combined with a giant Iranian offensive that was planned months ago with the Russians – and that is unfolding”.
Iranian officials say a senior commander in the country’s powerful Revolutionary Guard who was killed in Syria was a key figure in the fight against terrorism.
Other targets identified by the Russian ministry as having been struck in the past 24 hours included militants’ training sites in the Latakia and Idlib provinces.
Assad hails from Syria’s Alawite religious minority, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.
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Alongside the Russian air-and-sea campaign, regional officials have told Reuters that hundreds of Iranian troops have arrived in Syria since late September to support the Syrian army and Lebanese Hezbollah fighters.
