“This shows that they are sending soldiers to fight in Syria”.
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Two senior officers from the Iranian regime’s Revolutionary Guards have been killed this week in Syria, Tehran’s state-run Tasnim news agency reported.
Another senior Revolutionary Guards commander, Hossein Hamedani, was killed last week while advising the Syrian army near Aleppo. Several have died in recent years, a few of them allegedly killed by Israel.
Mukhtarband, whose rank was not given, was formerly a brigade commander in the southern Iranian city of Ahvaz. Gen. Farshad Hassounizadeh marked the third major blow to IRGC’s command structure in less than a week.
“It is no coincidence that three Iranian generals have been killed in just a week”, said Hokayem of the IISS. He was serving in Syria as both an adviser to the Syrian government and as an overseer for operations of the pro-Syrian army forces.
Since 2013, Iran has lost senior commanders in Syria’s Damascus, Aleppo, Qunaitera and Hama provinces, according to Iranian media.
Lebanon’s Shiite militia Hezbollah has done much of the fighting to prop up the Syrian army. The Syrian conflict has cost the lives of more senior Iranian guards than any other conflict apart from the eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s. He said that during the Iran-Iraq War Syria had provided Iran with considerable support and that Iran was now fighting in Syria to support Syrian national interests (Fars; Tasnim News, May 4, 2014).
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Russian Federation says the objective of its military campaign is to weaken the extremist group Islamic State (IS). The objectives of the “enemy camp”, he said, were to restrict Iran’s regional influence, and to weaken Hezbollah, turning it from a military into a political organization.
