TEHERAN: Twenty-nine people, including women and children, were killed and 57 wounded by militants who opened fire on a military parade in southwestern Iran on Saturday, local media reported.
It was not immediately known who was responsible for the assault in Ahvaz, where gunfire sprayed into a crowd of marching Revolutionary Guards, bystanders and government officials watching from a nearby reviewing stand. However, Iran faced a bloody assault last year from the Islamic State group, and Arab separatists in the region have attacked oil pipelines there in the past.
Islamic State jihadists said via their propaganda mouthpiece Amaq that “Islamic State fighters attacked a gathering of Iranian forces” in Ahvaz, but the claim could not be verified and many recent IS claims have proved false.
President Hassan Rouhani vowed a “crushing response” to the attack. “Those who give intelligence and propaganda support to these terrorists must answer for it,” he said on his website.
Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif immediately blamed the attack on regional countries and their “US masters”, further raising regional tensions as Teheran's nuclear deal with world powers is in jeopardy after President Donald Trump withdrew America from the accord.
“Iran will respond swiftly and decisively in defence of Iranian lives,” he wrote on Twitter.
The attack took place on a day when military parades were being staged across the country to mark the anniversary of Iran’s eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s.
Members of the Revolutionary Guards and civilians, including one journalist, were among those killed, the semi-official Iranian Students News Agency (Isna) reported, citing deputy governor of Khuzestan province, Hossein Hosseinzadeh.
Two gunmen were killed and two others were arrested, reports quoted the governor as saying.
Ahvaz is the capital of the oil-rich province in Iran’s southwest. Bordering Iraq and the Persian Gulf, it is home to a significant Sunni Arab population.
Semi-official news outlets with reporters at the scene said the attackers were dressed in military fatigues and had approached the parade from a park, behind a temporary reviewing stand from where officials had been watching the ceremony.
Ramazan Sharif, a spokesman for the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps, blamed the Al-Ahvazieh group and accused Saudi Arabia of fomenting the incident, according to Isna.
Protests against the government and its handling of the economy that erupted across many provinces late last year also took place in some cities in Khuzestan, which reported some of the most violent protests.
Earlier reports described the assailants as “Takfiri”, a term previously used to describe the Islamic State group.
State television showed images of the immediate aftermath of the attack in Ahvaz. Paramedics could be seen helping someone in military fatigues lying on the ground. Other armed security personnel shouted at each other in front of what appeared to be a viewing stand.
Saturday’s attack comes after a coordinated Islamic State assault on parliament and the shrine of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Teheran in June last year. At that point it marked the only attack by the Sunni extremists inside of Shia Iran, which has been deeply involved in the wars in Iraq and Syria, where the militants once held vast territory.
At least 18 people were killed and more than 50 wounded in the 2017 operation in gunmen carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles and explosives stormed the parliament complex where a legislative session had been in progress, starting an hours-long siege.
Gunmen and suicide bombers also struck outside Khomeini’s mausoleum on Tehran’s southern outskirts on the same day. Khomeini led the 1979 Islamic Revolution that toppled the Western-backed shah to become Iran’s first supreme leader until his death in 1989. The assault shocked Tehran, which has seen few militant attacks in the decades after the tumult surrounding the Islamic Revolution.
Oil-rich Khuzestan in the past has seen attacks oil pipelines by Arab separatists.