{"id":16078,"date":"2018-09-23T19:23:43","date_gmt":"2018-09-23T19:23:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=16078"},"modified":"2018-09-23T19:23:43","modified_gmt":"2018-09-23T19:23:43","slug":"irans-revolutionary-guard-vows-to-avenge-ahvaz-attack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=16078","title":{"rendered":"Iran’s Revolutionary Guard vows to avenge Ahvaz attack"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has vowed to revenge the attack on a military parade<\/a> that killed 29 people, including the four attackers, and wounded 70 others.<\/p>\n

The Iranian elite force, in a statement on Sunday, said\u00a0that those behind Saturday’s attack will face a “deadly and unforgiving revenge in the near future”.<\/p>\n

Iranian officials blamed two Gulf states and the United States for the attack, accusing them of backing the Arab separatist al-Ahvaziya armed group which claimed responsibility for the attack.<\/p>\n

President\u00a0Hassan Rouhani<\/a>\u00a0vowed to deliver a\u00a0“crushing response<\/a>“, while Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei linked the attack with the US and its\u00a0“allies in the region”.<\/p>\n

The country’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, said “regional terror sponsors” were responsible for the attack, adding he held “their US masters accountable”.<\/p>\n

While Iranian officials have not directly named the Gulf states, their comments are believed to be directed at\u00a0Saudi Arabia<\/a>, the UAE and Israel<\/a>, which all have hostile relations with\u00a0Iran<\/a>\u00a0and have promised to counter its influence in the region, including inside the country.<\/p>\n

“These terrorists … were trained and organised by two … Gulf countries,”\u00a0Iranian military spokesperson Abolfazl Shekarchi told the official news agency IRNA.<\/p>\n

“They are not from Daesh (an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) or other groups fighting [Iran’s] Islamic system … but are linked to America and [Israel’s intelligence agency] Mossad.”<\/p>\n

The UAE<\/a> has denied Iranian allegations alluding to its involvement in training troops that claimed the attack in southwestern Iran.<\/p>\n

“The formal incitement against the UAE from within Iran is unfortunate, and has escalated after the Ahvaz attack,” UAE’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash said in a tweet.<\/p>\n

“The UAE’s historical position against terrorism and violence is clear and Tehran’s allegations are baseless.”<\/p>\n

The US condemned the attack, with its UN envoy saying it took place because Rouhani has “oppressed his people for a long time”.<\/p>\n

The attack in Ahvaz came as the country marked the anniversary of the start of its 1980-1988 war with Iraq. Four gunmen dressed in military uniform\u00a0sprayed bullets into a crowd of marching soldiers, bystanders and government officials watching from a nearby stand.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Al Jazeera’s Zein Basravi, reporting from the capital Tehran, said the “attack for many Iranian communities was very personal”.<\/p>\n

“What we are hearing from the revolutionary guards is that they will carry out a swift and violent response, and that is something unique,” he said.<\/p>\n

Little is known about the al-Ahvaziya\u00a0<\/span>group, but Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) spokesperson Ramezan Sharif told ISNA it was “funded by Saudi Arabia”.<\/p>\n

‘Fight inside Iran’<\/span>
\n<\/h2>\n

Mostafa Koshcheshm, a Tehran-based political commentator and journalist, told Al Jazeera that the al-Ahvaziya movement had been “nurtured, supported, and trained by Saudi Arabia”.<\/p>\n

“It’s been operating for the past several years. They are looking to cut off and separate Iran’s energy-rich province of Khuzestan from Iran, which is exactly what Saddam Hussein wanted to do,” said Koshcheshm.<\/p>\n

“They call themselves Arab nationalists but we know they have very intimate ties to the\u00a0Mujahedin-e-Khalq<\/a>,” he said referring to an Iranian exiled dissident group accused of killing thousands of Iranian civilians and officials.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ahvazi Arabs are a small minority in mainly ethnic Persian Iran but sit on top of the bulk of the country’s 137 billion barrels of oil.<\/p>\n

They are divided over whether they want independence or devolution of power within a democratic, federal Iran, but at their most ambitious, some Ahvazi groups\u00a0<\/span>want an independent state stretching beyond the borders of Khuzestan, which sits at the head of the strategic Gulf waterway and shares a border with Iraq<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In an interview<\/a> with Saudi-owned TV channel MBC last year, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman<\/a> said that the kingdom would take the fight “inside Iran”.<\/p>\n

“We won’t wait for the battle to be in Saudi Arabia,” he said. “Instead, we will work so that the battle is for them in Iran.”<\/p>\n

Iran summons ambassadors<\/h2>\n

Within hours of Saturday’s attack, Iran summoned diplomats from Denmark, the Netherlands, and the UK, with\u00a0IRNA reporting they were\u00a0<\/span>“informed of Iran’s strong protests over their respective countries’ hosting of some members of the terrorist group”.<\/p>\n

Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Bahram Qasemi called on\u00a0<\/span>Denmark and the Netherlands to extradite the “perpetrators and their accomplices” to stand trial, IRNA reported.<\/p>\n

“It is not acceptable that the European Union does not blacklist members of these terrorist groups as long as they do not perpetrate a crime on … European soil,” Qasemi was quoted as saying.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has vowed to revenge the attack on a military parade that killed 29 people, including the four attackers, and wounded 70 others. The Iranian elite force, in a statement on Sunday, said\u00a0that those behind Saturday’s attack will face a “deadly and unforgiving revenge in the near future”. Iranian officials blamed two Gulf…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":16079,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16078\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/16079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}