Several senior Iranian Guards officers have been killed in Syria since the start of the civil war, which erupted after protests in 2011 against President Bashar al-Assad were put down with force.
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Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps said that Brigadier General Hossein Hamedani was killed by Isis militants on the outskirts of Aleppo city on Thursday night.
The agency said the general rose to prominence in Iran’s military during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.
The Anadolu Agency said Mr Leyla, 27, died in the attack in the town of Hreitan, in northern Aleppo province.
Gen. Hossein Hamedani cause of death was not provided in the statement released, on the Guard’s website.
“Militants are sustaining substantial losses under the Russian airstrikes and are having to change their tactics, to scatter their forces, to carefully disguise themselves and hide in settlement”, he said.
Russian jets and warships have been bombarding targets across Syria for 10 days in a campaign which Moscow says is aimed at the Islamic State fighters who control large parts of north and east Syria, as well as swathes of neighbouring Iraq.
He said the Russians have not carried out attacks against IS in Aleppo, which is split between government forces and various insurgent groups.
Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said the latest push by the extremist militia is “one of the biggest advances the Islamic State has scored in months”.
He is one of the most senior Guard commanders to be killed in Syria, and the second this year. A number of sources told the Guardian that funeral processions for returning Iranian forces from Syria held in Tehran and other major cities have been conspicuous in recent months.
France’s Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said French warplanes bombed a training camp in Raqqa. This group is known to fight against ISIS.
A few opposition activists said the Islamic State group took advantage of Russian airstrikes and the rebels’ preoccupation with fighting Syrian troops on other fronts in central Syria.
In January, Brig. Gen. Mohammad Ali Allahdadi was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Syria that also killed six Lebanese Hezbollah fighters.
An anonymous senior Defence Department official confirmed the news to the New York TImes.
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The offensive has focused around the Ghab Plain, next to Syria’s western mountain range which forms the heartland of Assad’s Alawite minority, and the main north-south highway between the cities of Hama and Idlib.
